Japan's Wheat & Flour Culture

About this book

Every Japanese kitchen holds a substance that has crossed an ocean to get there — and almost nobody asks it any questions. This guide asks them all, in 200 entries devoted not to noodles, not to bread, but to the material itself: wheat and flour. It begins with the grain — the wheat plant and its kernel's anatomy, the varieties Japan bred for its own fields, from Norin 61, the standard that fed a century, to the strong wheats that finally let Japan bake with its own harvest, and the plain fact that only a small fraction of the wheat ground in Japan is grown in Japan. It walks the growing map from Hokkaido's wheat sea to Kyushu's winter paddies; enters the mill from the hand-turned stone to the forty-stage roller plant; reads the whole shelf of classes and grades — strong, all-purpose and weak flours, the ash-ranked udon grades, cake, tempura, wrapper and coating flours, whole-grain and vital gluten; follows the sack through the government import system, the port silos, the wholesaler's warehouse and the pantry's rules; walks back fourteen centuries from temple sweets and Tang cakes to the school-lunch specification and the 1958 invention that taught flour to wait; studies how the powder actually behaves — gluten, water, ash, enzymes, spoilage — and ends with the people of the powder and the futures already standing in the breeding fields. Every entry follows the same four fields — the grain and its ground, making, milling and keeping, character, behaviour and use, and where you meet it, closing with the one official check to make — so any two flours can be compared in seconds. This book claims no health effects, ranks no miller, brand or region, and repeats no origin legend as fact. Written and produced in Japan by a Japanese author and publisher.