A question: Why can rice be eaten directly, but wheat has to be ground into flour before it can be eaten?

Rice is eaten in the south and noodles are eaten in the north. There are two main staple foods in China, one is rice and the other is pasta. Compared with the two, the variety of pasta is much more than that of rice. Steamed buns, flower rolls, steamed buns, and noodles can all be called pasta, and the familiar rice is steamed rice.

Looking back at their "raw materials", rice comes from rice, and pasta comes from wheat. The main nutrients of the two crops are starch, but they are eaten in different ways: after the rice is hulled, the white rice is peeled off and cooked directly into rice; Wheat has to be ground into flour and further processed into pasta such as noodles and bread.

Why is the processing step of wheat more troublesome, can't you just remove the wheat husk and cook it into wheat rice? The answer is yes, but the taste of wheat rice is extremely poor, far inferior to that of rice. Wheat grains have a layer of seed coat, which is difficult to remove. If you force it to cook and eat it, you will only feel that this bowl of rice is throaty and tastes really bad.

If the wheat is cooked directly, people will not be able to eat it. If the surface is ground, the layer of seed coat will be ground off, and the taste is relatively good. The so-called "whole wheat" is to retain this layer of seed coat as much as possible, and the whole wheat bread and whole wheat noodles made of it are more fragrant and taste rougher, so this layer of seed coat is also called "bran".

Wouldn't it be nice to forcibly remove the bran from the wheat and leave the edible part inside to make porridge? In fact, this kind of wheat kernel is very common to us. It appears in the eight-treasure porridge and is one of the eight ingredients. It tastes smooth and chewy. The disadvantage is that it is very difficult to cook, it needs to be boiled slowly, and it is not suitable for daily family cooking.

From a historical point of view, wheat entered China from the Mediterranean Sea 4,500 years ago and was introduced into the Central Plains via Xinjiang. During the Warring States Period, China invented the stone turntable, which was specially used to grind wheat into flour. In the Han Dynasty, wheat was planted on a large scale, and the stone turntable was also promoted to the whole country. The harvested wheat has a very long history of making flour.

Later, noodles not only flourished in China, but also spread to Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, and even our noodle practice was passed back to the birthplace of wheat, the Mediterranean Sea, and to Italy, Spain and other countries. To make bread, it can also be made into noodles.

In terms of texture, wheat has the advantage that rice lacks - gluten protein. This makes the wheat have strong toughness and pulling properties after being ground into powder, and it can also show a fluffy and elastic taste when made into bread, steamed buns, and steamed buns. This is something that rice can't do, so you've never seen food that uses rice to make buns and steamed buns.

Fortunately, rice also has its own refined rice noodles, which can also be made into a variety of delicacies, such as Cantonese kueh, which is made from rice. Those who are naturally allergic to gluten protein and cannot eat bread, noodles and enjoy pasta made of wheat can eat food made of rice and rice flour.

To sum up, the reason why wheat needs to be turned into flour instead of being cooked into rice like rice is that the outer layer of bran is too difficult to remove, which affects the taste; It's too long for a fast-paced society.