How Its Made: Flour?

Flour is made by turning grains into tiny powdery pieces, just like how you crush cookies into crumbs.

Imagine you have a bag of wheat, which is a type of grain. To make flour, the wheat goes through a process called milling. It's like when you put your cereal in a blender and press blend, it turns from big chunks into small pieces.

In a mill, the wheat is crushed between big stones or machines, breaking the hard outside part (called the bran) and the middle part (endosperm) apart. The bran is rough and brown, while the endosperm is soft and white. Most of the time, we take the soft, white part for white flour, but if we leave in some of the bran, it becomes whole wheat flour.

After crushing, the pieces are sifted, like when you shake a sieve over your sandbox to get rid of big rocks, so only the tiny, powdery bits remain. That’s flour! Now you can use it to bake cookies, cakes, or even bread.