Guide to Italian Flours — Nina's Pasta Project (2024)

FAQs

What is the best flour for Italian pasta? ›

Semolina: Coarse Durum Wheat Flour

One of the most popular flours for making pasta is semolina flour, which is a coarsely ground flour made from a particularly hard variety of wheat called durum.

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.

00 flour, or doppio zero is what most Italian households use to make fresh egg pasta. The white Italian flour is finely-milled, resulting in grains which are finer than semolina, but larger than cornflour. Mix with eggs for fresh pasta and water for pizza doughs.

For cookies, bars, cakes/cupcakes, biscuits, scones, or anything that needs a tender crumb, use Farina di grano tenero, 00. This is your “cake flour.” Nobody wants a chewy cake. For bread, I recommend starting off with Farina di Manitoba, grano tenero, 0; this is similar to standard American bread flour.

The semolina flour adds a bit more structure to the dough, which is helpful for shapes like garganelli or farfalle where you want the pasta to “stand up.” You could replace the semolina flour with equal parts 00 flour for a more tender and soft dough, which could be good for something like tagliatelle.

Italian flour, like other European flours, is categorized differently, on a numerical scale: 2, 1, 0 or 00. This number does not refer to the percentage of gluten or protein in the flour, but rather, to how finely ground it is (2 being the coarsest and 00 being the finest).

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.

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.

Semola is key to the production of dried pasta because of its unique qualities. This flour has a high protein content of around 12-15% which, when kneaded, produces gluten. It is this gluten that creates the structure to hold the shape of the pasta (the word gluten actually derives from the Latin word for glue).

Made in Italy

Taking a bite of something made with our flour is like taking a bite of Naples.

Is there a difference between 00 pizza flour and 00 pasta flour? ›

There are different types of 00 flour, depending on whether you want to use it for making pasta or pizza dough. The main difference between these flours is gluten content, as pasta-making requires a slightly lower gluten flour than pizza. They will usually be clearly labelled as '00 pasta flour' or '00 pizza flour'.

Also called doppio zero flour, this finely ground Italian flour is essential to recipes like pizza dough and fresh pasta. Most home cooks don't keep this speciality flour on hand, noting its slightly higher price and the inability to find it in stores.

In baking, we refer to the gluten in flour as its “strength.” Flours with more gluten are considered “stronger,” while flours with less gluten are considered “weaker.” Flour strength is measured by a W-value. A weak flour usually has only 8–9% protein, which corresponds to a W-value between 90 and 180.

Semolina flour is good for pasta because it's a hard variety of wheat and has a high protein content. Both of these properties give more structure to pasta which provides that elusive 'al dente' quality to fresh pastas.

According to Eva, the answer is that they use a different type of flour – Italian bread and pasta are made of durum wheat flour which doesn't spike your blood sugar levels as much and therefore it doesn't significantly contribute to weight gain as much as regular refined white flour would, for example.

The best flour for making Neapolitan Pizza Dough is 00 Pizza Flour. This type of pizza dough is thin and crispy with a slightly chewy texture. 00 Pizza Flour is an Italian-milled, finely ground wheat flour. It is perfect for Neapolitan Pizza Dough because it produces a light and airy crust with a slightly chewy centre.

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).

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.