The story of Sharbati wheat
Wheat is one of the oldest crops on earth. It was first farmed in the Fertile Crescent roughly ten thousand years ago, and it was growing on the Indian subcontinent by the time of the Mehrgarh settlements, thousands of years before the first cities of the Indus valley. Today India is among the world's biggest wheat producers, and the grain sits at the centre of the Indian meal, from the daily phulka to the festival puri.
Not all wheat is the same, and Sharbati is the one farmers and cooks single out. It comes from Sehore district in Madhya Pradesh, where it has become so tied to the place that it carries its own Geographical Indication listing. NABARD's GI database says Sehore is the country's largest producer of Sharbati, and that the grain holds slightly more simple sugars, such as sucrose and glucose, than other wheat varieties. That is where the name comes from: sharbat, the sweet drink.
Sharbati is the backbone. It lets everything else roll.
You can see the difference in the grain before it is ever milled. Sharbati kernels are bigger and heavier in the hand than ordinary wheat, with a warm golden colour. In the kitchen that shows up as a flour that takes water well, makes a smooth, soft dough, and gives rotis that stay tender after they cool.
At The Farm Flour, Sharbati is the base we build on. Its strong, stretchy gluten gives other grains something to lean on: ragi, jowar, barley and oats have little or no gluten of their own, so a good share of Sharbati is what lets a multigrain dough roll and puff the way a family expects.
