Making "regular" (i.e. US) flour finer

[john_k]

I am beginning to look into noodle making, and the issue of hydrating flour is coming up.

'00' Italian flour is recommended (for making traditional Chinese noodles) since it is available around the world. Apparently the flour used in China for noodles also has a very fine grind.

Anyway, is there any way to process US flour (as with a food processor) to increase the fine-ness of the grind?

I know this is kind of a long shot, but I wondered if anybody has already looked into this. I can sift the flour, and mix it by hand extremely slowly to ensure proper absorption (or buy imported flour), but I wonder if it is possible to use the flour that is more readily available.

[TXCraig1]

'00' isn't necessarily a finer grind than similar American flours. '00' refers to the extraction (ash content %), not the grind size.

[TXCraig1]

I don't know if it matters to noodlemaking; '00' flour typically isn't malted (which means it doesn't enzymes added to help break down the starch into sugar). It's fairly easy to find AP flour that isn't malted. Bread flour (if you want a higher protein %) is a bit harder to find unmalted. The best bet is to look at organic BF for unmalted. If the flour has "malted barley" or "enzymes" listed in the ingredient statement, it's malted.

[Bill/SFNM]

For legit Asian noodles, alkaline type/amount and hydration levels influence the final product more than flour type. I use bread flour.

[john_k]

Good to know. I'll just start doing it then, once I bake up the baking soda :-).

Thanks, your posts about noodles have been very helpful in my exploring here on this.

I feel like I have some sense of how to make pizza of various styles, but noodles is a whole 'nother rabbit hole now for me.

The whole ramen thing seems almost ridiculous (in number of cookbooks, detail of the 'theory', and commercial restaurants out there), compared to Chinese noodles at least, which itself is a whole cuisine, but we'll see how things look in 6 months or so, when I have some experience under my belt.

So far Lao Ga Ma chili sauce with other ingredients on rice noodles is about as far as I've gotten and cooked and tasted, and that really whet my appetite for more and deeper. Dan dan, then biang biang, then ramen; that's my plan anyway.

I had alkaline noodles with basic sauce at a little hole in the wall chinese place last week, and that lit some kind of fuse in me.