Farina 00 or semolina? Choosing the right flour for fresh pasta

Sooner or later everyone stops in front of the flour shelf. White bags, yellow bags, numbers, letters and percentages, and the question we are asked at every course: for the sfoglia, the sheet of fresh egg pasta, should I buy farina 00 or semolina? The short answer is that a Romagna egg pasta sheet is made with farina 00, and semolina is there for other jobs. The long answer is worth reading, because knowing what is inside the bag changes the way the dough behaves under your hands.

What 00, 0, 1, 2 and wholemeal actually mean

The numbers on Italian soft wheat flours say nothing about quality or strength. They describe how refined the flour is, meaning how much of the grain is left in the bag. Italian law defines them by ash content, the minerals left behind when a sample is burned: more ash means more bran and germ, and the number goes up. Farina 00 is the whitest and most finely sifted, close to a plain white flour; farina 0 keeps a little more of the outer grain, roughly a strong-ish plain flour; tipo 1 and tipo 2 are progressively darker and tastier; wholemeal keeps the whole grain.

For a pasta sheet this translates into colour, flavour and behaviour. Farina 00 gives a yellow, smooth pasta that rolls out thin without a fight. Farina 0 gives a slightly darker, more rustic pasta. Tipo 1 or tipo 2 give flavour, but also small particles of bran that cut through the gluten network: excellent for maltagliati and country pastas, less so for delicate cappelletti.

Soft wheat and durum wheat

This is the real dividing line. Flour, the white kind, comes from soft wheat. Semolina, yellow and slightly gritty, comes from durum wheat. They are two different plants with different proteins. Soft wheat gluten is more extensible: the dough lets itself be spread, rolled thin and folded. Durum wheat gluten is tougher: the dough resists, holds its shape and stands up well to boiling, but it does not love a rolling pin.

That is why industrial dried pasta and the eggless southern shapes, orecchiette and cavatelli, are made with semolina, while the egg pasta of the north is made with soft wheat. It is not a matter of taste but of what the pasta has to do. A Romagna sfoglia has to become a thin sheet and stay soft in the mouth, and for that it wants soft wheat.

Semola rimacinata is simply semolina milled a second time, finer and easier to work than the coarse kind. Whenever we say semolina in this article, that is what we mean.

W strength and protein

The more informative bags give you the strength, marked with the letter W, and the protein percentage. They are two ways of saying how much gluten the flour can develop. A pasta sheet does not need a strong flour, quite the opposite: a bread or pizza flour, with a W above 300 and protein at 13 or 14 per cent, gives a hard dough that shrinks back as you roll it and stays rubbery once cooked.

A sfoglia wants a medium to low strength flour, with a W of roughly 150 to 220 and protein between 9 and 11 per cent. That is the ordinary farina 00 you find everywhere, the one whose bag says nothing special. The eggs already bring protein and structure; the flour only has to provide a soft body. The proportions are in our guide to the basic pasta dough.

What to use for egg pasta

For tagliatelle, cappelletti, tagliolini, lasagne and every filled shape: medium strength farina 00, one egg per 100 grams, nothing else. If you like a rougher pasta that holds the ragù better, you can replace 10 per cent of the farina 00 with semola rimacinata. The sheet still rolls out and gains a little grip. Beyond that proportion it starts to fight the rolling pin.

Anyone using a machine can push the semolina a little further, because the rollers do the work instead of your arms. Even so, past a third of the total the sheet begins to fray at the edges.

What to use for strozzapreti and water doughs

While all the water doughs typical of southern Italy are made with durum wheat semolina, strozzapreti are another story. They began as poor man’s pasta, mixed with water and salt. They are delicious just like that, simple and delicate, and they suit every kind of sauce. Their one flaw: they should be made and cooked within a short time. If you want to keep them in the fridge before using them (no more than a day), be generous with the dusting: the semolina absorbs the excess moisture and stops them sticking together.

For piadina, the Romagna flatbread, which is not pasta but lives on the same board, the classic choice is farina 0: it carries the lard well and cooks on the testo, the flat earthenware or iron griddle, without turning to cardboard.

Dusting: here semolina wins

There is one job where semolina beats flour without argument, and that is dusting. When you cut tagliatelle, when you line cappelletti up on a tray, when you leave the nests to rest before cooking, farina 00 takes up moisture, is absorbed by the pasta and ends up gluing rather than separating. Semola rimacinata, coarser and drier, sits on the surface like fine sand and falls away in the cooking water. Always keep a jar of it next to the board.

A flour by flour comparison

The figures change from one mill to the next: take them as a guide and always read the label.

In practice

If you can only buy one bag, buy an ordinary farina 00 for your pasta sheets and a bag of semola rimacinata for dusting. With those two you can make everything a Romagna kitchen makes. Speciality flours, stone ground, ancient grain or tipo 1, are an added pleasure, but try them once your hands already know how a normal sfoglia behaves. One more thing worth knowing: farina 00 has a very low level of impurities, and your dough will stay a fine egg yellow even after a day in the fridge, while a dough made with “speciality” flours starts turning greyish or greenish within a few hours. To sum up, our advice is one: technique first, experiments after.