🌾 Common wheat

Common wheat (Triticum aestivum), also called bread wheat, is the most widely grown wheat in the world: its grain is milled into fine flour for bread, baking and fresh and egg pasta. It is hexaploid, with 42 chromosomes (A, B and D genomes), and accounts for the great majority of the world's wheat harvest; durum wheat (Triticum durum) is only a small share.

It is grown in temperate climates on almost every continent: across Europe, including Ukraine, France and Germany, and in China, India, North America and Australia. Winter varieties are sown in autumn and harvested the following summer; spring varieties are sown in spring.

The grain is floury rather than glassy, so it breaks down easily into fine white flour. Its protein content is usually 10–13 % depending on variety and growing conditions, and that protein forms gluten that is extensible and elastic. This is why common wheat dough rises well in bread and can be rolled very thin for pasta.

In pasta, common wheat is used as wheat flour. It makes fresh pasta and home-made egg pasta such as tagliatelle, tagliolini and lasagne sheets, the batter for spätzle in Gnocchi and spätzle, and the flour that binds potato gnocchi. In Italy dry pasta may not be made from it: DPR 187/2001 allows only durum wheat semolina. In other countries dry noodles from soft wheat flour are common, but they overcook more easily.

Beyond pasta, common wheat gives bread, rolls, biscuits, cakes, pancakes and soft-wheat semolina for porridge.

It contains gluten, so it is unsuitable for people with coeliac disease, and in the EU wheat is an allergen that must be emphasised on labels. Whole wheat flour, milled from the whole grain, contains more fibre than white flour.