Italian flour
Hi,
I have been outside this country 3 times, 2 to Canada and Once to Italy, Roma and North, so food was edible, but not as good as I had hoped. I also hate fish, so evey one of my long dead relative rolled over in their graves. But I did eat pizza 3 times in Roma and it was as expected, MEH . I would rather the pie offered in NYC when I was growing up.
But I have always wondered about the mystique of Italian 00 (or whatever) flour.
Now my understanding is, their flour is near 9% gluten,, and very fine. Like the myth that breads from Florida are terrible and both Pizza and Bagels can not be made there due to the water, I just do not see that in fact. I have made Foccaccia for relatives on a visit, as well as "Pie" and they tasted just like it was made either in NYC or Long Tax Island.
As far as the flour granularity, it is all powder and if you let a dough sit for an hour to autolase , then give it a good knead, then size it by weight and put in a fridge, it should be same. And dough used after a 12-24 hour cold rise, is amazingly good.
And one could scale off say 12 ounces AP flour then add 4 ounces of corn starch, or maybe 13 ounces AP and 3 Ounces corn starch. We did that in a class once to make pastry dough. and the starch induced pastry flour worked out as good as the lower gluten soft, pastry flour. Not perfect, but the average consumer, eating a very sweet cake with fats and maybe dairy cheeses. Never could pick up on it.
any thoughts??
thanks
if I understand correctly. Type 00 is more finely milled. I can sometimes get an Italian imported Type 00 flour (brand Anna) in my supermarket. It does feel finer to my fingers.
One day I realized that White Lily flour, so famous for biscuits, is also finer than the usual AP flour, and maybe that fineness has something to do with its ability to make better biscuits. It also has a lower gluten content (around 8% supposedly) and is bleached. But there is no denying that it makes for better biscuits than standard all purpose flour, even when the AP flour has been cut with some no-gluten flour like masa harina. So I wondered if Type 00's fineness would make for better biscuits.
So I made a batch of biscuits and yes! they were better. I've repeated this a few times and now I think that the extra fineness of the flour can actually make a difference, at least for some kinds of baked products.
The main differentiator between "types" 00, 0, 1, 2 and Integrale in the Italian legislation is ashes.
Some other requisites are defined, regarding protein content and humidity. No provision is made for fineness of milling.
The last legislative intervention was in 2001, that's the DPR February 9th, 2001 n.187.
The relevant table for soft wheat is published in art. 1, comma 3. To access it, click on the text near the PDF icon, immediately under the title.
The table for durum wheat (grano duro) is published in art. 2, comma 5.
It should be noticed that grano duro, that translates as "hard wheat", is actually "durum" in Italy. What Americans call "hard wheat", it's grano tenero in the Italian legislation, albeit with a high protein content. This might create some confusion to people reading the Italian legislation, and to Italian blokes reading English-speaking forums ;-)
https://www.politicheagricole.it/flex/cm/pages/ServeBLOB.php/L/IT/IDPagina/2772
It occurs to me that perhaps as a practical matter of milling, if you want to produce a very low ash content you will have to mill the flour particles very fine. To take an extreme example, if you milled to a coarse cracked wheat, no amount of sifting would collect very much low-ash flour.
Perhaps this is the origin of the common (at least in the US) statement that Type 00 flour is very fine.
It's not perfectly true that milling finely is necessary to extract a low-ash white flour although your point obviously stands. Roller milling technology does make it more possible however. Granularity of the endosperm fraction is very much tied to wheat kernel hardness and kernel hardness is very much tied to protein content but also kernel moisture and then milling choices.
Common wheat (Triticum aestivum) grown in North American can be very hard and high in protein (classified as Hard wheat (US) and then milled to bread flour), yet high protein wheat grown in Europe may not achieve the same level of kernel hardness, due to climate, soil and cultivars grown.
I think the perpetual misunderstanding of 00 flour is very much the result of an observed point of difference compared to NA flour, which then became internet folklore for the western world. The highest protein wheat grown in the UK isn't anywhere near the level of NA wheat and respectively the wheat kernels only reach a level of hardness defined as semi-hard. Lower protein flour naturally fractionates into smaller particles during milling, while harder wheat fractionates into larger particles.
00 flour is derived from the very centre of the kernel where the protein content is lowest (protein content increases from the centre outwards - note the lower protein minimum in the Italian regulations for Tipo 00). This means the central endosperm is softer and mills finer by default.
Unfortunately the internet is full of misinformation, even asking the AI machine for a definition of 00 flour, it gave me the same incorrect answer! :(
EDIT: To add..
NA flour is generally higher in ash for an equivalent extraction.
Exactly as you say. Tipo "Doppio zero" is a flour that in Italy is considered good for cakes, crackers, shortbread and other preparations where the rising happens in the oven. It is supposed to be a relatively low-gluten, but high carbohydrates flour.
"Tipo 0" on the other hand is supposed to be a relatively high-gluten flour, and is the flour that would probably be sold in the US as "all-purpose".
The chemical composition of Tipo 0 and Tipo 00 is very similar, but a little more gluten here, a little less gluten there makes them suitable for different applications.
I say this not from personal experience, though: as far as I am concerned, flour exists from "Tipo 1" upward to "Tipo integrale", and all the rest is only for people needing to put on some belly :-)
From The Artisan.net:
The data in Table IV was obtained from Boriani, Guido, Fabrizio Ostani (7). Italian law 4.7. 1967. n. 580 establishes that common wheat flours destined for commercial use can only be produced in the following types and with the following characteristics:
Table IV
but perhaps "fineness" is not a well defined concept. However, the minimum gluten content does not tell the whole story. My bag of Anna "Tipi 00 extra fine flour" is labeled as having 4 g protein for 30 g of flour, which is 13%. Allowing for the fact that the protein is only reported to the nearest whole gram, the minimum protein would be 3.5/30 = 11.7%, well above the listed minimum for protein of 7%.
So far as the protein is concerned, this bag of flour is right in the US "all purpose" range. But it produced biscuits similar to a much lower-gluten (and finer) flour (namely White Lily). I attribute this to the "extra fine" property.
my understanding (from this forum) is that the italian flour “types” = 0, 00, etc., are different primarily in ash content (as that chart that charbono posted shows). 00 is the most heavily refined, i.e. lowest ash. the french system also goes by ash content (“type 80” is 0.80% ash, etc.).
there does seem to be a wide misunderstanding in the US that flour being type 00 has something to do with fineness of the grind (which i do believe can be quantified, and is well-defined, it just isn’t relevant here).
-c
The current norm for flour classification is the DPR of the year 2001 which I linked in this discussion. The 1967 norms are not any more in force.
The current norms define max humidity, ashes, and minimum total proteins.