What would be the closest approximation of '00' flour?

[youonlylivetwice]

Would it be some combination of AP and cake flour?  Pastry flour?   For all the options at my local co-op, I have to think I can get to some approximation of the characteristics.   I continue to experiment, but sometimes a quick question can make a large leap forward.... please feel free to redirect to old threads, there is so much on 00 flour I am not sure where to find this piece of info.



 Thanks for the ideas!

[Pete-zza]

youonlylivetwice,

I don't want to discourage you from trying combinations of cake/pastry flour and all-purpose flour to try to come close to the 00 flour. That is what I did in the early days when 00 flours were very hard to come by. But now there are several 00 flours available to us, with the Caputo 00 being the best overall choice in my opinion. You can even buy it in small quantities from pennmac.com. You might even discover that it is more expensive to make your own combinations than it is to just buy the 00 flour. For example, I couldn't find "white" pastry flour anywhere. I could find the "whole grain" version (e.g., from Arrowhead Mills) but not white pastry flour. I ended up getting it from King Arthur and paying the shipping charges.

But if you want to stick with cake and pastry flours and all-purpose flours and they are available at your co-op, there are many recipes available to you, including one from Pamela Sheldon Johns from her book on Neapolitan pizzas (Pizza Napoletana!). You will not find unanimity on the ratios of flours to use, however. I have seen recipes from Ms. Johns that use 3 parts all-purpose flour to 1 part cake flour, and 6 parts all-purpose flour to one part white pastry flour. Julia Childs has a recipe that uses 2 parts all-purpose flour to 1 part white pastry flour. I came up with a bread flour version (which I personally prefer over the others) that uses 2 parts bread flour to 1 part white pastry flour. According to one of our members, Aaron, Mario Batali recommends in one of his cookbooks that one use 4 parts cake/pastry flour to one part all-purpose flour, which is in the opposite direction of the other recipes. With all these possibilities, you can spend a lifetime of experimentation trying to get close to the real thing.

You might find the following links useful for their recipes (including many of those mentioned above) and information on the subject you have raised:

http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,1566.msg14299.html#msg14299
http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,1278.msg11474.html#msg11474
http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,1104.msg9835.html#msg9835
http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,1291.msg11624.html#msg11624
http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,897.msg8117.html#msg8117

Peter

[youonlylivetwice]

Thanks Peter,
I really appreciate all your help, and everyone else here as well.  I simply have just about enough time to dedicate to reading the incredible breadth of knowledge here as to thoroughly confuse myself.  I thought I read recently that 00 flour has characteristics that differentiate it from the Johns recipe enough to really make a difference.  I thought maybe cake flour with some gluten added might help?  I just plain get confused trying to absorb all the info, and prefer to spend what time I have at home cooking and experimenting.
I will look at the pennmac site, I really should have tried that option rather than sticking to the need to improvise.  as always, thanks!

[Pete-zza]

youonlylivetwice,

Italian grains and our domestic grains are different and are milled differently. They can even have the same or similar protein contents and yet be different. That can easily confuse one. There are even wide differences between different brands of 00 flour, to add even more confusion.

It is technically possible to combine cake flour and vital wheat gluten and come up with an edible pizza. I actually tried this once just to see what would happen. The crust and pizza actually weren't bad and taught me that you can take a flour like cake flour, which will not itself produce a pizza dough (it is very low in protein), and make it into a pizza flour by just adding vital wheat gluten. But now, with the Caputo and other 00 flours available, I don't see any reason to try any other combinations.

What I always thought was interesting is that Pamela Sheldon Johns, who lives in Italy and knows all about 00 flours, did not include any 00 dough recipes in her book. She undoubtedly knew at the time that Americans would have a hard time finding 00 flours or wouldn't bother trying to locate them. Or they wouldn't have the high-temperature ovens to make true Neapolitan pizzas. So, she stuck with flours that she felt Americans could readily find in their local supermarkets and be able to use to make pizzas in their home ovens. Even Peter Reinhart, in his book American Pie, doesn't have a Neapolitan dough recipe using 00 flour. I suspect it is for the same reason that Ms. Johns didn't include such a recipe in her book. A good part of what you will read on this forum is the efforts of many members to make decent 00 pizzas in their home ovens. That information will be more useful to you than just about anything you will find in the pizza cookbooks currently on the market. 

Peter

[David]

Caputo is now available at the Forno Bravo website also.

$17.50 (5) 2.2lb bags Caputo pizza flour
$42.00 55lb bag Capputo pizza flour

http://fornobravo.com/pizza-ingredients/index.html

Shipping is extra.See website for more info.

[piroshok]

Farina di Grano Duro or 00 type flour sometimes referred as W class somwhere closer to W400 is appreciated by Italians,Turkish and Japanese are the main export markets(bread & noodle making) for grain producing nations
Farina 00 is appreciated for its whiteness, basically it is a low extract flour around 73% to 75% with low ash content  (hence its purity) and still retains relative high gluten.
I know of few mills in Australia producing this type of blend for commercial use but it is not available in stores I have a 25kg bag to play with soon.
Argentina is also a large producer of this type of flour but farina or harina 00 is widely available (little surprise since its diet is also Italian) and so is USA though you may have a hard time finding it in small packages or bags.

[pizzanapoletana]

Piroshok,

Farina di grano duro (semola or semola rimacinata) and 00 type are two different thing. What is more, the gluten of Hard wheat is different from regular wheat and hence not ideal to use in pizzamaking.

Ciao

[piroshok]

@ pizzanapoletana
It is also called semola
You right but I was merely responding to the question above
of course pizzaiolos favour high ash content which is not found in semola

[Pete-zza]

In an earlier post, David mentioned that Forno Bravo is now selling the Caputo 00 flour in small (1 kilo) bags and also in the big bag (25 kilo, or 55 lbs.).

Since I was not aware that the Caputo 00 pizzeria flour was being sold in small bags in the U.S., I decided to investigate. My memory from having previously spoken with the importer on this subject was that the small bags that were being considered for U.S. distribution would be a different flour more similar to an Italian all-purpose flour. Today, through an exchange of emails with the importer, I was told that the Caputo flour now being sold in the small bags is called Caputo 00 Extra and is indeed more like an all-purpose flour, with a protein content of about 1% lower than the Caputo 00 pizzeria flour. The blend is also different from the Caputo 00 pizzeria flour although it too can be used to make pizza dough. However, I was told the the crust is more likely to have a breadlike characteristic.

To the best of my knowledge, the Caputo 00 pizzeria flour is still being sold only in the 25 kilo bags, and in 5-lb. repackaged bags at pennmac.com (look under the Pizza Makers tab).

Peter