Which one is the best flour?

[Bärentill]

Which plants give the best flour? The nutrition of barley is slightly higher than the nutrition of rye, but I guess that the nutrition value refers to the plant and that's why I am not sure which flour is the best. Each barley plant yields three fistful of grains while each rye plant yields only two fistful of grains. Thus, if the nutrition value refers to the plant then one fistful of rye grains has a higher nutrition than one fistful of barley grains which means rye flour is better than barley flour. But I am really not sure if this is true.

[koteko]

The nutrition applies to the whole plant (by weight), as well as to the grains (again, by weight). The nutrition you find on the wiki is either for 1 gram or 1 lb, I don't remember. So rye (plants or grains) is worse than barley.

I don't have the stats in front of me but I didn't remember that rye also produced less grains. If that is so, than it's even worse.

[caethan]

I'm the one who just went and updated the flour page on the wiki.  I did some testing with an object inspector to look at nutrition and such.  Grinding flour from grains, seeds, or roots keeps the same nutrition values as the original, as well as the same weight.  The carb, fat, and protein values given are percentages of the weight that is each nutrient (i.e., grams of nutrient per 100g weight). 

Barley gives the most nutritious flour, at ~1370 calories per pound.  Rye, clayweed, and lake reed flours are all above 1,000 calories per pound, while hemp (seed), marsh calla, and bogbean flours are all just below 1,000 calories per pound.  You can make flour from nettle, turnip, sorrel, and yarrow seeds, but it's much much less nutritious than the other kinds of flour. 

If you want to figure out what to plant for the most calories, then you need to account for the number of plants that can grow in each tile and the total number of calories produced by each plant.  Note too that you've got it backwards:  rye produces three fistfuls of grains, and barley produces two, not the other way around.  On a per-plant basis:

• Rye produces 412 calories per plant (~1/3 pound of grains)
• Broad beans produce 378 calories per plant (~3/4 pound of beans)
• Barley produces 302 calories per plant (~1/5 pound of grains)
• Hemp produces 218 calories per plant (~1/5 pound of seeds, ~1/7 pound of leaves)
• Clayweed produces 143 calories per plant (~1/7 pound of seeds, ~1/13 pound of leaves)
• Turnips produce 97 calories per plant (~2/3 pound root, negligible size seeds)
• Peas produce 57 calories per plant (~1/7 pound of peas)
• Nettle produces 23 calories per plant (~1/10 pound of leaves, negligible size seeds)
• Sorrel and yarrow produce negligible calories per plant
  

But for planting, this ordering gets shifted again because you can plant many more turnips and grains in a single tile than beans:

• Rye produces at most 10,288 calories per tile
• Barley 7,560
• Hemp 2,529
• Turnip 1,944
• Broad bean 1,892
• Clayweed 711
• Pea 284
• Nettle 227
• Sorrel and yarrow negligible

So:  grow barley if you want the best flour (most nutritious breads, porridges, and stews).  Grow rye if you want the most total calories of flour. 

[caethan]

As an aside, because there's a bug in lake reed size (see https://www.unrealworld.fi/forums/index.php?topic=899.0) a single lake reed plant produces nearly a pound of roots once threshed, making it by far the most calories per harvested and processed plant, at well over 1,000 per. 

[Bärentill]

Thank you very much. I'm sorry for my mistake.

[Dungeon Smash]

very interesting analysis here, thank you.