Farro is the Italian name for several ancient hulled wheats — above all emmer (Triticum dicoccum), and in Italy strictly so — eaten as a whole, plump, chewy grain rather than milled to flour. It is one of the founding grains of the Mediterranean and the Near East and a backbone of Roman and Tuscan country cooking, where it thickens the bean soup farro e fagioli, fills grain salads and bowls and stands in for rice. Nutty, faintly sweet and pleasantly toothy, it keeps a satisfying bite even when fully cooked. It is sold whole (longest to cook), semi-pearled or fully pearled, the polishing trading fibre for speed. Crucially, farro is an ancient wheat and so contains gluten — it is emphatically not gluten-free.