Gluten, Intolerances, Strength Flours

Bakery quality is a hotly debated topic due to the increase in people who are intolerant to gluten.
Many studies have attributed this growth to the fact that modern varieties have very strong gluten capable of withstanding the stresses of very fast baking processes and, in the case of pasta, drying processes at high temperatures and for short periods of time.

On the one hand, this suggests using so-called ancient varieties, or in any case varieties that give very weak flours, to constitute evolutionary mixtures that give easily digestible products.
On the other hand, it has also aroused criticism of mixtures, starting from the fact that, as they evolve, they make it problematic to predict how the qualitative characteristics and in particular the strength of gluten will change.

Faced with these criticisms, it must be remembered that some qualitative parameters, for example protein content, are very influenced by the environment and therefore very subject to change from one year to the next, even in uniform varieties and in those known as ancient grains. For example, it is known that protein content increases in dry years and decreases in rainy years.

However, as mentioned before, if the components of a mixture give weak flours, the strength of the flour may vary depending on soil fertility, crop precession and climate, but it will always remain weak.