How to choose the right Italian flour!
So you’re ready to try your hand at making fresh pasta. Or maybe you’re going to tackle focaccia, or try Giada’s internet-famous orange olive oil cake, and you go to reach for some Italian flour to make your creation all the more authentic. Immediately, you’re faced with a wall of options, labeled with strings of numbers. Where to begin?
For those of us used to the straightforward flour labeling common in the U.S., where your options are all-purpose, cake, or bread, the Italian numerical system can be overwhelming at first. But once you’ve cracked the code, you’ll find that Italian flours are super easy to understand—and will help you make the best baked goods of your life!
The first thing to know is that there are two kinds of wheat grown in Italy: grano duro (“hard wheat”), often called semola or semolina and sometimes known here as durum wheat; and grano tenero (“soft wheat”), also known as common wheat, the variety we known . (For the scientifically minded, these are two different species in the wheat family, triticum turgidum durum and triticum aestivum—this family also includes farro, einkorn, and spelt.)
If you are an avid bread baker, you might know that our bread flours are made from “hard” wheat. Don’t be confused! This is not grano duro, just a variety of grano tenero that has been bred to have a higher protein content, creating that satisfyingly stretchy dough.
So what is grano duro used for? Semola and semolina flour are mainly used for making pasta, couscous, and some rustic cakes. Semolina has a coarse texture similar to polenta, while semola is flour. You might use semolina to make a breakfast porridge or sweet pudding, or under your pizza dough to keep it from sticking. If you’re making fresh pasta, you’d reach for semola flour, usually in combination with a grano tenero flour to make it easier to work with. True to its name, it makes a very stiff dough!
For most baking projects, you’ll turn to a grano tenero flour. These are organized using a numbered system to describe how finely milled the wheat is, which in turn tells you how it should be used. When it’s first harvested, the wheat grain is encased in a hard outer shell (the bran) alongside the germ, the part that fuels the plant’s growth. Milling wheat consists of removing the bran and germ from the pure starchy inner part of the grain; the more finely milled a flour is, the more powdery and white it will appear.
Here’s how each of the varieties is used:
The finest of all, this is even more delicate than American cake flour. It’s made from a high-protein variant, which is why it’s used for fresh pasta, where you want to be able to stretch the dough to its limits.
This is the Italian equivalent to our cake flour. It’s a very fine, low-protein blend that creates tender baked goods like cakes and pastries, where chewiness is not the goal!
Type 1
Similar in texture to all-purpose flour, this contains small bits of bran and germ. It’s just as versatile as AP flour and can be used for cookies, cakes, and quick breads like focaccia.
Integrale
Meaning “complete,” integrale is what we would call whole-wheat flour. Here, the bran and germ are not sorted out at all, but are ground together with the starch. It’s hearty and nutritious, perfect for breads and crackers where you’re looking for a rustic whole-wheat texture. It’s best to store this flour in the fridge or freezer, as the oils in the wheat germ can cause it to spoil more quickly.
While the texture of semolina flour might have people thinking it's cornmeal, it's actually just flour made from durum wheat - also known as "pasta wheat"! It is known as a "hard" wheat, making it perfect for applications with a chewier texture... like, you guessed it, pasta!
FAQs
In Italy, flour is categorized based on the ash content - basically how refined the flour is. The higher the ash content, the more germ and bran left in a flour, and the less refined it is. Flour is also categorized as grano duro (also listed as semola flour) and grano tenero (a softer type of wheat).
What do the numbers on flour mean? ›
Standard wheat flours range from type 405 for normal white wheat flour for baking, to strong bread flour types 550, 812, and the darker types 1050 and 1700 for wholegrain breads. There is also a type 1600 which fits between white wheat flour and whole wheat flour, it will give you a darker white bread.
What is the grading system for Italian flour? ›
Italian flour is graded on a scale from 00 (the finest) through to 2 (a coarser flour), with integrale being the coarsest flour. Both grano duro (hard wheat) and grano tenero (soft wheat) are used to produce flours of different grades.
What is the numbering system for European flour? ›
European Flou r Types
There is no universal rating system for European wheat flour, however, from my experience, these numbers correlate to flours found in Poland and Germany. These include: Universal (type 480), Stronger White (type 550), Spelt (630), Bread (type 750), Ancient Grain (Einkorn), and Rye (type 720).
What is Type 2 Italian flour? ›
Type 2 flour: also known as "semi-wholemeal" flour, it is a flour characterized by large granules and a greater quantity of fibrous components and seed germ compared to the previous ones. It is a flour that has excellent nutritional characteristics and is easier to process than whole wheat flour.
What is 00 Italian flour? ›
Instead, they use numbers such as 0 and 00. So, what is 00 flour? 00 flour is the most finely sifted type of Italian flour, made only from the endosperm.
What is the difference between 0 and 00 flour in Italy? ›
In Italy and some other European countries, flour is graded according to how finely it is milled, beginning at 00, the finest grade of all, through 0, 1 and finally 2, the coarsest grade available.
What is Type 1 Italian flour? ›
Type 1. Similar in texture to all-purpose flour, this contains small bits of bran and germ. It's just as versatile as AP flour and can be used for cookies, cakes, and quick breads like focaccia.
What does tipo 00 mean? ›
The fact is, the label Tipo "00" has nothing to do with protein content. Rather, it refers to the fineness of the milling. Tipo "00" is the finest grade of flour milled in Italy, and it has a consistency similar to baby powder.
What is the best flour from Italy? ›
As one of the heavy hitter flours of Italy, you'll find that many recipes – from pasta to desserts and beyond – call for this grano tenero, or soft wheat flour, also known as “Doppio Zero.” Super soft and white, this extra-refined flour contains none of the wheat bran, is the lowest in protein on this list, and does ...
T65 flour is equivalent to Type 1 Italian flour, Euro 650 flour type and high gluten bread flour.
Why is Italian flour different? ›
No matter how the flour gets processed, the Italian kind is already softer, slightly sweeter, and lower in protein (i.e. gluten), while American wheat is already harder, slightly more bitter, and high in protein (i.e. gluten).
How do you read European numbers? ›
Written Numbers
Don't use "#" for "number" — it's not common in Europe. On the Continent, commas are decimal points and decimals are commas, so a euro and a half is €1,50 and there are 5.280 feet in a mile. (Britain and Ireland use commas and decimal points like North America.)
What is the difference between American and Italian flour? ›
To sum up, Italian flours allow the cook to choose both the composition (gluten or protein content) and how finely ground the flour is. Italian flour grades are simply more specialized, thereby providing the cook with more choice!
What are the different grades of flour in Europe? ›
Types of Flour: Naming Conventions in Different Countries
| U. K | France |
|---|
| Wheat | Soft / Patent | 45 |
| Plain / White / Strong Wheat Flour | 55 |
| Hard / Lightbrown | 80 |
| Very hard / Brown | 110 |
16 more rowsNo matter how the flour gets processed, the Italian kind is already softer, slightly sweeter, and lower in protein (i.e. gluten), while American wheat is already harder, slightly more bitter, and high in protein (i.e. gluten).
Which Italian flour is all-purpose? ›
In the American flour classification system, type 0 Italian flour would correspond the closest to all-purpose flour. Despite type 00 popularity, high-quality type 0 flour is by no means a niche product, with most flour manufacturers offering options.
Is Italian 00 flour the same as all-purpose flour? ›
Another difference is that 00 flour is made from durum wheat, while all-purpose flour is not. This means that all-purpose flour creates stretchier gluten strands and will tend towards producing a chewy pizza base, rather than a crispy one.
