July 23, 2011 - 3:08am
Help me make my Italian flours wishlist!
i might be lucky enough to get some flour or other baking ingredients from Italy, esp from Parma :) What should i ask for?? I've heard that Type 00 flour and durum wheat can differ in strength so how to tell?? I guess i would like an equivalent of
- an APF
- a stronger 'bread' flour
- semolina durum wheat which is unbelievably expensive in my part of the world
- a WW one
What should my kind buyer look out for (in italian, if possible)?? Also are there any regional specialities from parma? and where to look? I usually make SD breads, but straight, yeasted breads are good too.
Your advice much valued, esp the 'Italianists'. Nico?
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Hi ww,
flours sold by Bar... (the only flour producer that I know of that is based in Parma) are generally incredibly weak, so weak as to be the weakest on the market! Don't even consider them as bread flours. Their 00 is surely perfectly fit for making biscuits or cakes.
I never tried their whole wheat and their durum wheat flours, but generally I keep clear of all their products. I simply don't like them.
Hi Nico,
hmmm... looks like it's more complicated than it appears huh. But surely there must be flour to be had. What's available at supermarkets? markets??? out of curiosity, why does Italian flour differ so widely from region to region?
If i were there personally, i would explore bakeries, markets etc. Alas, it's perhaps too much to ask a non-bread enthusiast to do so on my behalf.
what's Big blue B? i tried googling but couldnt turn up anything.
Thanks veyr much!
ww, I wish I knew why flours differ so much from region to region. First you have to know that italian wheat is simply junk. A very serious industrial miller wrote me that they have to import wheat from Austria, Germany, Hungary, Canada and North America because italian wheat doesn't have nearly the gluten content and quality to produce even only acceptable flours fit for leavened products.
As for why flours differ so much from region to region the only possible explanations are:
-stores and millers sell whatever they get, whatever the nature of their flour (and indeed it is: most of the times flours from the same producer vary hugely from bag to bag)
-people have so little knowledge of flours requisites and characteristics that they buy whatever they see first on shelves, infact in a cuisine forum that I regularly attend to most of the questions sound like "why didn't my sweet dough come together? it looks like a cream" ... of course! you took a flour for biscuits!
in short: unscrupolous sellers and ignorant buyers walk along arm in arm! They deserve each other. There are exceptions of course, but really few.
As for what you could get... near Parma is located Molino Agugiaro (www.molinoagugiaro.com). Their high gluten flour is a very good quality product that I use for all my sweet doughs with a lot of fats and sugar because the dough always comes together very well (even though after long kneading times) and the flour can really bear at least 24 hours of fermentation. Being so near Parma it's possible that some store chain (such has Cash and Carry also known as C+C) sells their stuff. The flour is this:
http://www.le5stagioni.it/le5stagioniITA/prodotti-manitoba.html
but it sells in 10k bags. I can't tell you more because I live in Bologna that is 90km far from Parma (where I never went). Maybe you can find some Favero bread flour in Despar stores, but don't hope too much in it! This latter flour is very very strong, even more than the one I use. I guess it's real american bread flour imported in italy.
Durum wheat flours in the north? Bad luck... Generally they are all quite low quality flours. I buy almost whatever I get because they all so low quality.. I use it to feed my starter. Someone told me that "le 3 grazie" (currently 83 cents in Coop stores) is a bit better, but to say the truth I don't find it so appealing.
WW? more bad luck. The only ww flour I like is produced from Rieper (my preferred producer, all excellent flours), but it's unlikely you'll find it in Parma. I order their ww and rye flours whenever I finish my stock.
As for the B: google "the italian food company" :-)
Good luck!
ww, one more thing. Lately I've been using "Farchioni for pizza" for making bread with decent percentages of rye flour. It's not a high gluten flour, but it's perfectly fit for bread.. maybe the one that gave me the best results. Even the high gluten flour of the same brand is very good. Those flours sell in Dico stores and they are very cheap (69 cents for kg).
http://www.dico.it/Apps/WebObjects/Dico.woa/wa/viewNegozi?id=11®ionID=8&stateCode=PR&idDCReseller=WONoSelectionString
wow, i would never had guessed. i've learnt something from you today. I didnt know Italian flour is so unreliable or that industry standards are so lax... you mean italians don't bake much bread? How much does the average Italian care about the bread he/she eats? i suppose they still mostly buy from bakeries???
Ok will ask him to look out for these flours, but not eveyrone is similarly obsessed :) maybe i'm better off sticking to ham and cheese huh.
Thank you very much for all that info and links. very helpful and most of all, now i know!
there are simply no industry stardands regarding flours in italy. Very few companies follow a self-establish set of requisites on the products they sell, whatever they write in their web pages. In practice you can't expect any consistency in their product range, unlike what companies like K.A. do (with several exceptions, of course).
Italians buy their bread mostly in supermarkets, I guess this says everything about their stringent requisites. Not even bakeries, just store bread. The consumptions of pre-cooked food is growing very very fast. People generally don't even want to cook, let alone make bread.
Home bakers are very rare beasts down here and even among those few specimen the obsession to duplicate store bread is predominant. I guess that it doesn't make any sense making bread at home trying to replicate exactly what you can already buy, does it? The obsession for large holes in the crumb and for a crackly crust is what drives them. Sad but true.
If you are looking for cheeses don't forget a piece of well-seasoned parmigiano! :-)
Ooooh, well-matured Parmigiano.....!! There's an Itaian guy at Borough Market (London) with a tiny stall who sells nothing but just one kind of Parmigiano, and his one is organic and 27-months matured! It totally changed my conception of parmigiano from 'something to sprinkle or scatter on' to 'slice it and savour deeply.' It's very expensive, naturally, and I only go to Borough once every few months or so, so other times I make do with Waitrose's 21-months matured, which is very good, but nothing compared his 27-months one. Absolute heaven....
Hi nico,
dont knw if you saw this post someone put up on the forum today:
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/24420/italian-village-bets-039best-bread-world039-newspaper-article
ww,
you may not believe it due to the massive hype surrounding italian bread, but ... after almost 40 years on this side of the planet I can say with absolute certainty that italian bread really s...s 99% of the times.
If italian breads were acceptable (even more if I had "the best bread of the world" few km far from home) I wouldn't have any need to bake my own bread at home. No taste, bad consistence, dries immediately... I should really call it "my precious"!!
indeed i'm very surprised. I don't know if you're a baker by profession, but if you sell yours you'll do a roaring trade :))
no, I'm not a baker but a computer programmer. I bake bread only for myself, and given the bread I bake (almost always 100% rye) I seriously doubt that many people would like it :-)
yes, i've seen your posts on rye breads and breads in general, seasoned baker that you are.
will keep you posted if i do get any flours and what i make with it. In the meantime i got some leftover proscuitto from his last trip already :)