every miller should understand.

The two essential qualities of a good marketable flour are color and
strength. It should be sharply granular and not feel flat and soft to
the touch. A wheat which has an abundance of starch, but is poor in
gluten, cannot make a strong flour. This is the trouble with all soft
wheats, both winter and spring. A wheat which is rich in gluten is hard,
and in the case of our hard Minnesota wheat has a very tender bran.
It is comparatively easy to make a strong flour, but it requires very
careful milling to make a flour of good color from it. Probably the
wheat which combines the most desirable qualities for flour-making
purposes is the red Mediterranean, which has plenty of gluten and a
tough bran, though claimed by some to have a little too much coloring
matter, while the body of the berry is white. By poor milling a good
wheat can be made into flour deficient both in strength and color, and
by careful milling a wheat naturally deficient in strength may be made
into flour having all the strength there was in the wheat originally and
of good color. Good milling is indispensable, no matter what the quality
of the wheat may be.

The idea of gradual reduction milling was borrowed by our millers from
the Hungarian mills. There is, however, this difference between the
Hungarian system and gradual reduction, as applied in this country, that
in the former, when fully carried out, the products of the different
breaks are kept separate to the end, and a large number of different
grades of flour made, while in the system, as applied in this country,
the separations are combined at different stages and usually only three
different grades of flour made, viz.: patent, baker's, or as it is
termed in Minnesota, clear flour, and low grade or red dog. In the
largest mills the patent is often subdivided into first and second, and