Questions About Wheat?

Types of Wheat:
• Hard or soft: Hard wheat varieties have higher gluten (protein) and are better for making breads. Soft varieties have lower protein and nutrients but are better for pastries, pastas, and breakfast cereals.
• Red or white: Red wheat tends to have a stronger wheat flavor than white wheat. Most red wheat varieties are hard, and most white wheat varieties are soft, but you can find soft red and hard white if you really prefer one over the other. Hard white wheat is our favorite all-purpose wheat to store.
• Spring or winter: Winter red wheat tends to have a slightly higher protein content and is a bit harder than spring red wheat. Winter red is better for baking bread than spring. There is not a significant difference in winter or spring varieties of white wheat.

Remember, don’t confuse fresh ground whole grain white flour with store-bought white flour. Whole white wheat is slightly lighter in color than red wheat, but has almost the same nutritional value. Store-bought white flour has had all the nutrients stripped from it in the refining process and therefore adds no nutritional value to the products you use it in. Whole grain white wheat ground into flour and store-bought white flour are not even close to the same thing!

Storage:
• If unopened, the optimum shelf life of wheat is 12 years or more. It is edible for a lot longer than that, but won’t necessarily keep the same flavor or nutrient levels.
• If opened, wheat will stay good for about 3 years.
• Once it is ground into flour, wheat can go rancid within a few days unless you store it in the freezer.
• You can add oxygen absorbers, bay leaves, or dry ice to help keep critters out of your wheat.

We should constantly be using our food storage foods. The best way I've found to
do this with wheat is to have several buckets of wheat well-sealed with oxygen absorbers. Then open one bucket at a time and “work” out of that bucket.

*from FoodStorageMadeEasy