What are flour proteins?

Flour proteins are like the strong glue that holds your bread and cookies together.

Imagine you're playing with playdough. When you squish it into a ball or stretch it out, it changes shape but still stays connected. Flour proteins work kind of like that, they help dough keep its structure when you bake it.

Flour proteins are mostly gluten, which is like the special team in the playdough group. Gluten helps dough become elastic and stretchy, just like how a rubber band can stretch and snap back.

When you mix flour with water or milk, these proteins start to link up, it's like they're holding hands in a big chain. This makes the dough strong enough to trap air bubbles when you bake it, giving your bread its soft, fluffy inside.

If there were no proteins in flour, your cookies might be flat and crumbly, and your bread would be dense and tough, like trying to eat a brick! But with gluten working hard behind the scenes, everything turns out just right.