Flour

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A jute bag filled with flour.

Flour is an ingredient in cooking, made by milling one of the many available grains at a millstone or quern. Milling involves grinding the grains beneath the wheel, rendering it from an inedible plant to an edible powder suitable for cooking. Milling plants needs one bag for every job, and one plant will be processed to make one bag of flour. Flour in bags or mill barrels do not wither like crops, and possess an indefinite shelf-life if kept free of vermin. It is also a very efficient use of space, since a single barrel can store up to ten bags of flour. Given these attributes, flour serves as an excellent foodstuff. A relatively small stockpile can sustain a number of dwarves during a siege or the first few months of a new outpost.

Flour that is stored in a bag is not recognized by the manager's work order conditions, unless it's given the trait 'cookable'. If the trait is not added to the item specification, the item count will always show as 0.

Value

Flour will be used in the kitchen when 'prepare meal' tasks are queued if it is enabled in the Kitchen tab in the Status screen. Flour is more valuable than the raw crop and prepared meals made with flour have a higher value. Bags and barrels of flour are often quite valuable and suitable for export or import with caravans; a single barrel of flour can easily be worth more than 200☼. A stack of plants size n produces a bag with n flour and n seeds. Barrels of prepared meals made with valuable flour products can be worth thousands, if made by a skilled cook.

Flour Varieties

The following crops can be made into flour:

Crop name		Crop value	Flour	Flour value
Cave wheat	τ	4☼	Dwarven wheat flour	20☼
Longland grass	τ	4☼	Longland flour	20☼
Whip vine	§	1☼	Whip vine flour	25☼
Single-grain wheat	t	2☼	Single-grain wheat flour	20☼
Two-grain wheat	t	2☼	Two-grain wheat flour	20☼
Soft wheat	t	2☼	Soft wheat flour	20☼
Hard wheat	t	2☼	Hard wheat flour	20☼
Spelt	t	2☼	Spelt flour	20☼
Barley	t	2☼	Barley flour	20☼
Buckwheat	t	2☼	Buckwheat flour	20☼
Oats	t	2☼	Oat flour	20☼
Rye	t	2☼	Rye flour	20☼
Sorghum	t	2☼	Sorghum flour	20☼
Rice	t	2☼	Rice flour	20☼
Maize	t	2☼	Maize flour	20☼
Quinoa	t	2☼	Quinoa flour	20☼
Kaniwa	t	2☼	Kaniwa flour	20☼
Pendant amaranth	t	2☼	Pendant amaranth flour	20☼
Blood amaranth	t	2☼	Blood amaranth flour	20☼
Purple amaranth	t	2☼	Purple amaranth flour	20☼
Pearl millet	t	2☼	Pearl millet flour	20☼
White millet	t	2☼	White millet flour	20☼
Finger millet	t	2☼	Finger millet flour	20☼
Foxtail millet	t	2☼	Foxtail millet flour	20☼
Fonio	t	2☼	Fonio flour	20☼
Teff	t	2☼	Teff flour	20☼
Flax	t	2☼	Flax flour	20☼
Hemp	t	2☼	Hemp flour	20☼

Flax and hemp are unique among flour-producing plants in that they also produce plant fiber; that is, it is possible to make both the flour and the containers that hold it from one plant.

Associated Technology

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Dwarven science continues to research improvements in the milling process. Dwarven histories give many examples of new and innovative quern and millstone designs, few of which are reproducible on an industrial scale, as well as elaborate mechanical schemes. Research dwarves continue to predict that the next major advance in flour technology will be a new, advanced foodstuff known as "bread" - some sort of solid beer - but they have been promising to produce this miracle substance for years and have not yet shown any progress.

No self-respecting dwarf (even when motivated by starvation) will lower themselves to eating what promised to be perfectly good beer. Many cunning chefs in the mountainhomes have, however, been known to serve a meal made entirely of the stuff to both haulers and nobles alike, claiming it to be 'masterfully ground' cave wheat. Elven and human traders are similarly duped much to the pleasure of the kitchen staff.

The few human traders to make any comparison between cave wheat flour biscuits and the nigh-legendary solid beer found themselves suffering from terrible, sudden misfortune.