History of wheat flour

Over 17,000 years ago, humans gathered and ate plant seeds. At this time, they discovered the berry of the wheat plant was edible. Around 8,000 years ago, Swiss lake dwellers ground and mixed early wheat with water, then baked it to make unleavened cakes or bread.

Emmer is the oldest cultivated variety of wheat, grown as early as 8700 B.C.E. in ancient Turkey, and quickly spreading to Mesopotamia, Egypt, Rome and Greece. During these prehistoric times, the cultivation of wheat increased rapidly, extending to North Africa, and the Indus valley of northern India by 4000 B.C.E. northern China by 3000 B.C.E. and western Europe by 2000 B.C.E.

Ground grain was one of civilized man’s first foods. Flour milling can trace it origins back to prehistory, but the modem systems known as gradual reduction flour mills have only been developed over the last 200-300 years. Ancient methods of grinding can be traced to the Far East, Egypt and Rome. As early as 6,700 B.C., man ground grains with rocks.

In the Neolithic period (between 5000 and 3000 BC) people already used mortars or quern, made up of wood or stone, to reduce cereals into flour. From the evolution of quern technology, during Greek-Roman era, the millstones manhandle was born. Later, this technology was improved, the grinders increased in size and rotation was made not only utilizing the human power but also animals or water movement.

In Pharaonic Egypt, the cereal grinding quern was a more or less flat or somewhat curved stone, longer than wide, and with a roughened surface, on which a handstone was rubbed back and forth over the long axis to pulverize the grains, and is also known as saddle quern.

Prior to the invention of the rotary quern, in north-eastern Spain about the fifth century BC, all grinding was undertaken by rubbing a hand-held handstone  against a larger base stone

Water mills did not appear until 85 B.C. in Asia Minor. Windmills appeared between 1180 and 1190 A.D. in Syria, France and England.

In the nineteenth century this technology reached excellent performance with high yields of flour.

The consumption of white flour and bread have historically been associated with prosperity and the development of sophisticated roller mills in Austro-Hungary during the second part of the 19th century allowed the production of higher volumes of whiter flour than it was possible to produce by traditional milling based on grinding between stones and sieving.
History of wheat flour