Flour and sugar in cooking

Making the most of staple dry larder ingredients like flour and sugar is essential for any chef as you can make a meal easily with only a few extra ingredients at times when fresh produce may be difficult to come by. Army chefs are sometimes limited to fresh ingredients and rations so they are taught to make the most of dry ingredients.

Flour is ground wheat, which is the most common cereal produced in the western world. Many varieties of our comes from wheat that is home-grown, but the majority are imported from other countries (such as strong flour, which is mainly imported from Canada). Flour is one of the most common commodities used in catering, as it forms the foundation of bread, pastry and cakes and is used in soups, sauces and batters, among other dishes.

There are two main types of flour and these are;

Plain flour - This is a culinary our, and is primarily used in making cakes and pastries.

Strong flour - Used in making breads and in some pastes.

The property that differentiates these two types of flour is a substance called gluten. Strong flour contains gluten, plain flour doesn’t. When water is added to strong our it becomes “elastic” (after kneading); when water is added to plain flour it doesn’t change. As a result, strong flour will trap air when its kneaded, causing it to rise when heated (producing loaves and buns, for example), whilst plain flour will not rise when heated (producing small cakes and flans, for example).

Sugar

Sugar is made from sugar cane, a crop grown primarily in the West Indies and Australia, and from sugar beet, grown in the UK and Canada. You will use three basic varieties of sugar during your training. These most widely used sugars are;

• Granulated sugar

• Castor sugar

• Icing sugar

All sugars are extracted from the sugar cane or sugar beet in a raw “juicy” condition. It is then crystallised (by applying heat), re ned and sieved. The largest holed sieve produces granulated sugar, the next size down

produces castor sugar and the smallest produces icing sugar.