Explanation of Gluten, Bleach, and Such Things

The healthiest flour for you is freshly ground whole grain flour.  Therefore, cooking with whole wheat flour would be pretty healthy.  The problem is that freshly ground flours that we typically use for breads (wheat, oats, and barley to name a couple) are good because they have gluten in them.  Gluten (I have no allergies or intolerance to gluten) is a protein that provides bread with its essential elasticity.  Gluten, however, does not occur in large amounts in freshly ground whole grain flours.  Gluten is a byproduct of aging.  As flour ages, it gains more of this essential gluten, but it also loses many of the nutrients that make it so healthy.  This is why many wheat flours are enriched.  Because these flours have been aged, they now have gluten, but lack the nutrients that the wheat once contained.  These flours also become more pale as they age, turning whitish or grayish yellow.  Well, this process can be sped up through a chemical process.  Like aging, this process strips the flour of nutrients to give it great gluten content.  This is bleaching the flour.  It also makes the flour unnaturally white. 

Sugar becomes whiter as they take molasses out of it.  Brown sugar is light or dark depending on how much molasses is in it.  However, this sugar does not become as white as it is when we buy it until it goes through a chemical process to remove any stray bits of color.  Sugar crystals are naturally white, but there are other impurities that make it have bits of color.

I think we bleach rice because we're weird and like pale food.  Fun fact: if you rinse enriched white rice, you're rinsing off all the nutrients it gets coating with after they chemically strip the nutrients away in the first place.

(Sorry about sounding obviously biased... I guess it's the allergies.)  On an important note: gluten is great (if you're not allergic or intolerant as some people are).  It does great things for my breads and baking!  So, some of my recipes will call for gluten flour to make the bread dough stretchy.  Think cold sticky tack as opposed to cold sticky tack.  Cold sticky tack snaps while the warm stuff stretches really well.  It is also expensive and food can taste great without it, so feel free to add more regular flour instead.