Wheat is the grain of Triticum, the world's most widely grown cereal and the foundation of bread, pasta, noodles and countless staple foods. Chiefly bread wheat (Triticum aestivum) and hard durum (Triticum durum), it is a grass domesticated some ten thousand years ago in the Fertile Crescent, and its golden kernel — bran, germ and starchy endosperm — is milled into flour, semolina and bulgur or cooked whole as wheat berries. What sets wheat apart from every other grain is gluten: the elastic protein network its glutenin and gliadin form when flour is wetted and kneaded, which traps gas and gives raised bread and springy pasta their structure. Mild, starchy and faintly sweet with a nutty, malty, cereal warmth, wheat is the archetypal staff of life.