flour

Formsflours, flouring, floured

1. 1
   noununcountable

   A powder made by grinding cereal grains, especially wheat, or other foods such as soybeans and potatoes, used to bake bread, cakes, and pastries.

   Most bread recipes start with flour, water, yeast, and salt.

   The bakery grinds its own wheat into flour each morning.

   Note

   Behind the baker's word is a flower: the finest portion of ground grain, as French still says with fleur de farine. Until about 1830 the powder was commonly spelled flower, and the two words were really one. It also partly displaced the native English word meal. It is usually a mass noun. The plural, flours, names different kinds of it.

2. 2
   verbtransitive

   To cover or coat something with flour.

   Lightly flour the work surface before kneading the dough.

   He floured each fillet and laid it in the hot oil.

   Similardust, dredge

3. 3
   noununcountable

   Fine powder produced from a material other than cereal grain.

   Jewelers polish gemstones with a flour of fine abrasive grit.

   The mineral was ground to a flour before being mixed into the glaze.

   Similarpowder, dust

   Note

   Here the word is borrowed for anything milled as fine as grain. It usually takes the material as a modifier in front, as in mustard flour, which is no cereal at all. In these compounds the word tells you how fine the powder is, and the word before it tells you what it is made of.

4. 4
   noununcountable

   The food produced by grinding and sifting cleaned wheat (not durum) to set standards of fineness and dryness, with bran and germ removed and certain enzymes, ascorbic acid, and bleaching agents permitted.

   The label lists enriched flour treated with ascorbic acid and a bleaching agent.

   Commercial bakers buy flour milled to consistent fineness from cleaned, bran-free wheat.

   Similarwheatmeal

   Note

   A legal definition rather than a kitchen one. A US standard of identity, set out in 21 CFR 137.105, fixes what may be sold simply as flour. In practice it is the ordinary white wheat product that a recipe calls plain flour, wheat flour or white flour. On a US label, the unqualified word means exactly this.

5. 5
   verbtransitive

   To grind or crush a material into flour.

   Traditional millers flour wheat slowly to avoid scorching it.

   The machine flours dried roots into a powder fine enough for baking.

   Similargrind, mill, pulverize

6. 6
   verbintransitive

   Of mercury, to break up into fine globules during the amalgamation process used to extract metals.

   Contaminated mercury tends to flour, scattering into globules too small to gather the precious metal.

   When the mercury flours, recovery rates drop sharply.

   Note

   Here the mercury does the action, not the miller. The verb is intransitive, so mercury flours, and nobody ever flours the mercury. That sets it apart from the grinding verb, where someone reduces a material to powder. What links them is the image of fineness: the metal scattering into globules as small as grains of flour.

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