Flour can be made from many kinds of cereal and vegetables and used to different kinds of food.
The best example are asian noodles that are being used in different kinds of instant soups and also sold as an ingredient of asian food. They are made out of wheat flour with a relatively big amount of water what makes them soft in comparison to normal hard pasta that have to be boiled for at least some minutes. The instant soup with asian noodles needs only to be poured over by hot water to be ready. You can also soften the noodles on a frying pan with other ingredients of the meal to spare time.There also rice noodles and soya noodles (that are accually made of mung beans flour). They have the same property – being easy to prepare just putting them into boiling water for a few minutes.
Similar idea was developed in snack industry. There are companies that sell dry snack forms to the snack companies – snack pellets. So called snack pellets can be turned into ready to eat snacks that we can find in a local supermarket. The process of changing a snackpellet into a ready snack is frying or baking. Baking is more healthy beacuse the snack contains in effect less fat, is lighter and contains less calories. The flour used in snacks is mostly made of corn, potatoes, rice, wheat or mixes of some of them.
Flour is also used as a thickening agent in ready sauces, sandwich sauces, dips and salat dressings (like ketchup, garlic sauce, barbecue sauce, vinaigrette etc.). The flour used to thicken the sauce or soup is not a new idea. In traditional recipes it was often used, mostly the potato flour and starch. Potato starch is often called potato flour but it is not precisely the same.The difference between flour and starch is how they are being made – the flour is made of boiled potatoes, the starch from raw ones – read more about snackpellets.
As we see, the flour is present in most of the ready meals that we prepare everyday. Also industry uses its advantage – it is easy to keep fresh for a long time when it is dry and it is also fast to prepare. Unfortunately it can be also a danger for our health because eating too much flour can cause obesity. So it is important to have a choice between fast and slow food and take time to cook for ourselves at least once a week.