Is Italian flour really better for you?
The short answer: yes.
To understand the fundamental differences between American and European flour, see this previous post.
As you already know from my previous post, European flour typically allows bakers to be more precise in exactly what kind of texture and density they aim to achieve in their final product. This is because the varieties of flour in Europe allow bakers to choose both the level of refinement and the protein content.
But precision aside, is European flour really higher quality? Is it better for your health?
These are the questions my American friends always ask. Actually, what they usually say is something like…
I get what you’re saying about precision or whatever, but I just want to make some chocolate chip cookies before binging Netflix in my underwear. Can’t I just use a bag of All-Purpose ?
I get it. Normal people don’t spend their Saturday nights fantasizing about moisture retention and gluten structures. But even if you don’t care about the taste or the texture or the aesthetics of your baking, even if you have no intention of rolling pasta by hand or making light-as-air puff pastries, even if you just want to mix some sugar and flour together in hopes of temporarily filling the void in your socially distanced life, the flour you use matters. It matters wherever you live, but it especially matters if you live in America. Because most American flour is the stuff of nightmares.
At first, when my best friend in the USA called me and cried that she “can’t digest gluten” anymore, I just thought she’d made the mistake of following Gwyneth Paltrow on Instagram. Then, when she visited me in Bologna and promptly finished two plates of pasta before ordering a tray of cakey desserts, miraculously cured, I took it as confirmation of my theory: her gluten intolerance was just the latest food anxiety packaged and marketed by the diet industry.
But a month later, when I returned to visit my family in the USA, we cooked a plate of pasta for dinner. A few hours later, I could’ve sworn someone had force-fed glass shards into my stomach. Along with the sharp pain, I was uncomfortably bloated. Then began the pounding headaches. Suddenly I found myself with all those made-up symptoms my American friend had whined about on the phone. Maybe it wasn’t all in her head.
After a bit of research, I started to understand better why an innocent spaghetti with tomato sauce left me feeling like a heatwave dumpster. I told my “gluten intolerant” friend that the problem might be American flour.
In general, most American foods can’t be legally exported to Europe because food regulation is much stricter in Europe than in the USA. This is why American products that do end up in EU supermarkets often have to change their ingredient list. European M&Ms and Smarties, for example, are made with vegetable dyes because foods with synthetic colorings like Red #40, Yellow #6, Yellow #5, and Blue #1 must carry scary warning labels that make it so no one wants to buy them.
While you can find excellent flour anywhere in the world, only in America can you find truly terrible flour.
As for flour, the European laws are ridiculously simple. 100% grain and nothing else. You cannot add any other organic or inorganic substance of any kind, nor treat the flour with any physical or chemical agent.
In the USA, on the other hand, flour can be treated with a long list of bleaching and aging agents: oxides of nitrogen, chlorine, nitrosyl chloride, chlorine dioxide, azodicarbonamide (the same chemical used to make yoga mats and shoe soles), and various benzoyl peroxide solutions. (You can also toss in some a-amylase to extend the shelf-life and some ascorbic acid as a dough conditioner.)
And, if you were wondering, flour does “age,” meaning that its characteristics change as it gets exposed to oxygen. More aged (i.e. oxidized) flours are usually whiter and their gluten proteins restructure in a way that allows them to form stronger bonds and therefore makes the dough more elastic. In Europe, flour ages naturally, with time. In the USA, however, time is too expensive and naturally aged flour is too difficult to standardize into a homogenous commercial product. Much easier to throw in a handful of chlorine.
This is when my American friends chime back in:
C’mon, this is ridiculous. Are you really saying that every time I want to Netflix-and-chip, I need to buy the fancy imported stuff?
No, of course not. You don’t need to go to the fancy imported goods store every time you want to eat some cookies in your underwear. But you can’t just blindly grab whatever flour is closest in your supermarket, USA, either, or else there’s a good chance you’re setting yourself up for some new digestive agonies. Thankfully, you can absolutely find top-notch American flour, milled from organic, glyphosate-free wheat. You can. You just have to do your research. Because while you can find excellent flour anywhere in the world, only in America can you find truly terrible flour.
Just because flour is imported from Europe doesn’t guarantee that the grains processed to make the flour were grown and harvested in Europe.
However, this is not to say that all European flour is superior just because it’s European. In fact, the wheat used to make European flour might not be from Europe at all. In Italy, we mill much more flour than we have land or resources to grow grain, which is why 30–40% of the grain used to produce “Italian flour” comes from imported, non-Italian wheat.
About two-thirds of imported grain used in Italian flour come from other European countries — particularly France, Germany, and Austria — but another 13% come from Canada, 11% from the USA, and 10% from Kazakhstan,** all countries where agriculture might have less regulation and oversight. So just because flour is imported from Europe doesn’t guarantee that the grains processed to make the flour were grown and harvested in Europe.
Nor is the wheat grown within Italy always pure and problem-free. Italian investigators found traces of glyphosate — a category 2A carcinogenic in Monsanto’s Round Up herbicide — in some fancy-schmancy 100% Italian pasta brands that only use 100% Italian flour. (Currently, glyphosate is legal in both the USA and Italy at maximum levels of 5 ppm. However, it is significantly less prevalent in European grain and banned by some EU nations. Also, it’s worth noting that, when Italian importers discovered that Canadian grains had notable levels of glyphosate, they immediately cut back imports by almost 60%.)
As for me, even though the average flour in Italy is slightly better than the average flour in the USA, I still buy mine directly from a farmer who grows, harvests, and mills the grain “in-house.” Sure, it costs more than the generic supermarket stuff, but we’re still talking about 2 euros/kilo, which is expensive for flour (for comparison, a kilo of flour at Aldi, a low-cost supermarket chain, is 35 cents), but objectively not a luxury expense. Flour is not beef sirloin or white truffle — even the fanciest stoneground, organic grain isn’t going to be the cause of your financial ruin.
With my fancy flour for 2 euros, about the price of a cappuccino at the bar, I can make 13 servings of the most delicious fresh pasta possible or 3 gorgeous loaves of bread. I can also sleep better at night because, for 2 euros, I can guarantee that my pasta didn’t come with a sprinkling of cancer on top.
*unless specified otherwise, “flour” as discussed in this article refers solely to production from the common wheat plant, T. aestivum, which comprises about 95% of worldwide flour.
**data from 2019 (the most recent I could find)
