January 31, 2016 - 11:09am
Tipo 00 flour...grinding at home?
i have done a little bit of searching on the internet about 00 flour....and wondering if it is possible with a super fine sieve like a #100 or??? When grinding fresh flour from wheat berries, can you sift it to get to the Italian tipo 00 fineness? I haven't been able to find an answer from my searches...thanks!
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I'm not an expert, but I'm pretty sure they use a certain type of wheat as well as a fine grind to achieve the 00 flour. I'd be surprised if you could achieve this at home, but if you find out how I would love to try it myself.
It is possible to get Tipo 00 style flour at home, however I have a more difficult time telling you that the juice will be worth the squeeze, as they say. For flours of that style, a roller mill is required to get the full separation of the endosperm (the most farinaceous part) from the bran and the germ. The action of the roller mill permits a level of specialized extraction not possible with stone mills. A stone mill will, due to its fashion of producing flour, by necessity "crush" and incrust some of the very fine bran particles and a good amount of the germ into the more farinaceous endosperm. It is of course possible to pass stone-ground flour through a very fine sieve, but by this method you will have a hard time getting the same results ; and unless you have an industrial sifter, you are going to work your butt off for not that much flour. It would normally take me upwards of 40 minutes to grind and sift for 1 kilogram of flour, and that was closer to 85% extraction.
I agree with the other comments. I've been trying some sifting with 30 and 50 sieves to generate some 1st Clear Flour and it takes hours to get 1300 gms. Doing a 100 sieve might be possible but likely not worth the results.
Just a couple of comments. Italian flour is generally classified by ash, not by granulation. Also, while it may not be intuitive, sieving goes faster by using the finest sieve first.