How Stuff Works: How Gluten Works

In many different food products today you will find the label "Gluten Free". On the other hand, if you look in the flour aisle, you can find bags of flour that are fortified with extra gluten — frequently referred to as bread flour or bread machine flour or high gluten flour. It brings up the obvious question: What is gluten? And why should you care how much gluten that a food contains?

If you look at a slice of white bread, what you see looks a lot like a white sponge. If you pull out a magnifying glass, you can see that the slice is made up of millions of air bubbles. Surrounding the bubbles is a flexible web of "bread". The bubbles formed inside of the flour-and-water mixture that bread is made from. Then when the bread was baked, the flour-and-water mixture plus the bubbles turned into bread.

What is it that allows these bubbles to form in the bread when the bread rises?

It actually is something that is special about wheat flour. If you make barley bread, for example, it doesn't rise nearly as much. Bread made from rice flour or corn meal does not rise as much either. Bread made from wheat flour is the lightest and fluffiest.

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