Calories in Flour, amaranth

What makes flour so powerful?

Amaranth was so sacred to the Aztecs that they shaped its seeds into ritual figures of gods and consumed them during ceremonies—a practice so central to their religion that Spanish conquistadors banned the crop upon conquering Tenochtitlan in 1521, burning amaranth fields to enforce conversion to Christianity. The plant survived in small plots and wild patches, largely forgotten outside of Mexico and the Andes until the 1970s, when researchers rediscovered its nutritional profile. Unlike true cereal grains such as wheat, rice, and corn, amaranth is a pseudocereal—a member of the Amaranthaceae family, botanically unrelated to grasses. Its protein is unusually complete for a plant source because it contains lysine, an essential amino acid that most true grains lack in meaningful quantities. When the seeds are milled into flour, this lysine-rich protein carries through, making amaranth flour a rare plant-based ingredient that supplies all nine essential amino acids in nutritionally significant amounts. The flour also retains squalene, a lipid compound more commonly associated with shark liver oil and olive oil, which contributes to amaranth's relatively high fat content compared to wheat flour.