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Guide: Italian Flour

Source:

https://jennyblogs.com/blog/2019/5/14/navigating-the-italian-flour-section-farina

Farina in Italia

You’ve recently moved to Italy, still walking around completely starry-eyed from the beauty of the country, and are about to go grocery shopping because you realize, unfortunately, you can’t order pizza every night.  So you decide to make it at home, crust and all.  (Sneaky, aren’t you?)  When you arrive in the flour section, you realize that it’s going to be a touch more than just translating “flour” to “farina” and trying to figure out which ones are all-purpose, cake flour, and bread flour.  Instead, you find not only types of flour, but numbers to boot.  What does it all mean?  How are you supposed to use flour in Italy?  

Or maybe you’ve lived in Italy for awhile and have been experimenting with the different flours with results ranging from baked goods turning out great, turning out awful, or turning out…different.  This was me the first year of my life in Italy.  Add on top of that ovens that don’t have temperature gauges, are strange sizes, or only cook from the bottom, you get some interesting results.  Can’t I just buy a dang bag of all-purpose flour without having to figure out all the factors in this Italy baking equation?!?  No, Jenny.  No you cannot.  

After talking to people (is there therapy for bakers? Can that be a thing?) and other expats here, reading many articles online, and of course my own many trials and error, hopefully this post will help demystify the flour section a bit for you!  Reading this blog post, which is part 2, on the six categories of wheat will also help you, as some of that will then be helpful to understand (or translate) in Italian.  Let’s start with a quick Italian flour cheat sheet, then keep reading to understand the properties of the Italian flour better.  

Italian Flour Baking Cheat Sheet

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.  As you progress, you can start to add in Farina di grano duro, or Semola Rimacinata di grano duro.  These flours will have a different feel and look to them as you knead your bread and in the final product, which is why I recommend starting out with just a small portion, around 25% of the total flour, in your recipes until you know how they act.  

For every day needs you can buy one bag of Farina di grano tenero, 00 and one bag of Farina di Manitoba, grano tenero, 0 or Farina di grano duro and mix them together to make your own homemade all-purpose flour.  

Farina Explained

Grano Duro and Grano Tenero

Hard wheat and soft wheat, or as they are known here in Italy,  grano duro and grano tenero, will be written on just about every bag of standard flour.  

Breads and pastas usually use grano duro, or hard wheat, because of the higher gluten content.  Most sweets and cakes use soft flour or grano tenero.  Keep in mind however that there are some breads made with soft flour, as you will find in the bakery section at your local grocery store, or a combo of both soft and hard flour.  

Flour Grinds: 00, 0, 1, 2

This is pretty straightforward: The smaller the number, the finer the flour.  And in your local grocery store, 00 and 0 will be the most common by far.  They don’t have every variety of flour in every grind, so the work is mostly already done for you.  If you know you want a soft/grano tenero, you’ll probably find only 0 and 00.  You won’t have to decide between a soft/grano tenero 00, 0, 1, or 2.  

Semola and Semola Rimacinata

Semola, also know as pasta flour or sometimes semolina in the States, comes from durum wheat and has a yellowish hue.  It is usually grown in the spring and is the hardest of all wheat, which makes it ideal for pasta and bread making.  In Italy it comes in two primary forms: Semola and Semola Rimacinata (reground, or twice ground, making it finer).  Semola is used for eggless pasta and Semola Rimacinata is used for egg pasta.  

Farina di Manitoba

Named after the Canadian province of Manitoba, this is the “bread flour” of Italy.  This one always threw me for a loop, because it is a grano tenero, yet has a high gluten content.  Because of its unusual characteristics, it is often categorized as a “special” flour.  It is often used in the fine grind of 0 and is great for breads that require long-leavening periods, such as French Baguettes, pizza, and breads that use natural yeast or madre lievito.  Read more about Manitoba Flour here.

Farina per Pizza, Pasta, etc.

Because Italy is the land of pizza, pasta, and bread, you will find plenty of bags of pre-mixed wheat varieties that are supposed to be perfect for rustic breads, or focaccia, or pizza, or pasta.  I’ve never bought any of these because I’ve been preoccupied with figuring out how to use all the other flours, but I’m sure they’re great for their specific purposes!

Farina e Lievito

This would be the equivalent of the self-raising flour in the States.  I don’t use this in the States nor in Italy, but I’ve read that it works well here!  You could also make your own, adding 1 1/2 tsp of baking powder and 1/2 tsp salt per cup (120g) of flour.  (I recommend using baking powder from the States as I’ve heard that the Italian baking powder/lievito in polvere does strange things.)  I would use farina di grano tenero 00 if you’re planning on making biscuits or cookies.  

Specialty Flours

There are also many specialty flours here to inspire your baking or aid your gluten-free needs.  Some worth noting are saraceno (buckwheat), farina di riso (rice flour), farina di mais (cornmeal), farina d’avena (oat flour), teff, farina di ceci (chickpea/garbanzo bean flour), among others.  

Happy baking and good luck with the farina Italiana and finicky ovens!  

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All About that Wheat Flour - FARINA part 2

If you’re reading this, you have probably have some form of wheat flour in your home.  Even the person nearest to you, who is most likely not reading this, probably has some kind of wheat flour in their home.  It almost sounds funny to say wheat flour because it is universally known as just flour.  Flour refers to wheat flour, and only the other types of flour need to differentiate themselves.  Rice flour is no less a flour, but we need to say “rice” in front of “flour” otherwise it will be assumed we are talking about flour; that is, wheat flour.

All-purpose, bread, cake, pastry, self-raising, strong, durum, semolina, whole wheat, whole wheat pastry, and graham are just some of the names for wheat flour types…what do you always have on hand?  Besides maybe the price and brand of your flour, what else do you know about the substance that goes into so many hundreds of recipes?  Should you care?  It may not make a life or death difference, but if you enjoy cooking and baking, or generally like learning, then learning to understand wheat flour varieties and how best to use them can take the food you make to a whole new level!  

If you’d like to read Part 1 and learn how flour is used in Italy, click here.

The Six Categories of Wheat

In your American pantry you probably have an all-purpose flour, a bread flour, maybe a cake flour, maybe a self-raising, possibly a few others.  If you know when and how to use these flours (or just follow a recipe), you might not need to know where or what kind of wheat is actually grown and ground to make these.  But once you become familiar with the types of wheat, their properties and best uses, you can make more educated choices about your baking and end up with a superior result.  Even the most nominal baker will eventually come across recipes that call for cake flour or bread flour, and knowing more about the wheat characteristics and which kinds are used to make these flours will help you understand if you can substitute say, all-purpose flour, and the results if you do so.  

The first thing to know is that wheat can be defined by these six characteristics: 

Soft wheat has a higher moisture content and less gluten, suitable for making cake and cookies and more delicate baked goods

Hard wheat has a lower moisture content and higher protein/gluten* content, usually between 12-14%, suitable for bread making

Red wheat has a slightly higher protein than white and a bolder taste

White wheat is milder in taste even if the color is not so different from red once milled into flour

Winter wheat is usually planted in the fall and harvested in the summer, with the exception of countries that have too harsh of winters, such as Canada where it is planted in the spring

Spring wheat is usually planted in the spring and harvested in the fall, with the exception of countries that have too hot and dry of summers, such as California in which case it is planted in the fall.  You can read more about winter and spring wheat here.

L TO R: DURUM WHEAT (SEMOLA), SOFT WHEAT FOR SWEETS, SOFT WHEAT (MANITOBA) FOR BREAD

*Many use the terms protein and gluten in wheat flour interchangeably.  This is because gluten is a type of protein found in wheat, the kind that is “developed” when you knead bread and gives it the elastic/chewy quality.  In most cases, the higher the protein content, the higher the gluten.  It is important to note that all gluten is protein, but not all protein is gluten, as your celiac friends should be able to tell you.  Also, all wheat contains gluten, but not all gluten comes from wheat.  Make sense?  You can read more here or here for better understanding gluten in the light of gluten allergies, or here for a good explanation of gluten.  For my purposes today, and baking in general, if someone says a flour is high in protein, and someone else says a flour has a high gluten content, they mean the same thing.  And they both mean the flour is good for bread making.  

There are thousands of varieties of wheat grown around the world, but chaos can be brought to order with the following six principle categories, using the characteristics we reviewed above:

Hard Red Winter Wheat (HRW)

Hard Red Spring Wheat (HRS)

Soft Red Winter Wheat (SRW)

Hard White Wheat (HW)

Soft White Wheat (SW)

Durum Wheat (DW) is the hardest of all wheat, used for pasta making

The flour you buy from the store will most likely fall into one of these six categories.  The bread flour in your pantry is most likely a hard red or white spring wheat; your cake flour is probably milled from a soft white wheat; all-purpose is usually a mixture of hard and soft wheat.  You’d know now, for example, that baking a loaf of bread with all-purpose or cake flour will not yield a wonderfully chewy loaf like using bread flour would; they don’t have the gluten required to achieve the chewiness.  

If you’d like to start experimenting with flour varieties, check your area for a local mill.  If you live in the States and are not fortunate enough to have a mill near you, check out Bob’s Red Mill, in store or online.  They have some clearly labeled high-quality flours.  You could buy some of their whole-wheat hard red flour and whole-wheat hard white flour and make some simple bread loaves, trying the two wheat varieties side by side.  

Happy baking!