00 Flour (Tipo 00)

Tipo 00 is Italy's finest grade of milled soft-wheat flour — a talc-smooth, bright-white powder prized for Neapolitan pizza and fresh pasta. The "00" is not a measure of strength or protein but of grind: on Italy's official scale of milling fineness — tipo 2, 1, 0 and 00 — the double-zero is the most finely sifted, with the least bran left in, so it feels almost like face powder and hydrates fast and evenly. Milled from common bread wheat (Triticum aestivum), it can be soft and low-protein for tender pasta or, in the special "00 pizza" grades, strong and high in protein for the elastic, extensible dough that puffs into a leopard-spotted Neapolitan cornicione. On its own it is bland and faintly sweet, smelling only of clean, dry cereal; its worth is textural and chemical, not aromatic.