Torrified Wheat reaches the same basic goal as Flaked Wheat — pre-gelatinised, unmalted wheat that mashes in without a separate cereal cook — by a different physical process: rapid heating under pressure that causes the grain to puff, similar in principle to how puffed breakfast cereal is made, rather than the steam-and-roller process that produces a flaked product.
The functional result in a mash is close enough to Flaked Wheat that most brewers treat the two as interchangeable: same husk-free lautering caution, same complete dependence on the base malt's enzyme margin for conversion, since Torrified Wheat carries zero diastatic power of its own. At 1.5-2.5 °Lovibond, its colour contribution is negligible even at a real percentage of the grist. Traditional English cask ale brewing has historically favoured Torrified Wheat specifically for head retention and body in a way that predates the more recent hazy-IPA-driven popularity of flaked wheat and flaked oats — a real distinction in brewing culture even where the grain's physical function overlaps closely with its steam-rolled cousin. Flaked Wheat is the direct substitute wherever Torrified Wheat specifically isn't stocked, since the two behave almost identically in a mash despite arriving there by different processing routes. Torrified Wheat has become somewhat harder to find at ordinary homebrew suppliers as flaked products have become the more commonly stocked default, which is part of why the two are treated as interchangeable in most modern recipe writing.