Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Bakers in the USA looking to use durum wheat flour for bread or pasta are somewhat limited in their choices. I have compared Bob's Red Mill Semolina Pasta flour and Golden Temple Atta flour (both made from Canadian durum wheat I believe)to Caputo Rimacinata. By the way,"rimacinata" simply means, "re-milled" and indicates that the hard, granular semolina has been milled to a much finer consistency for use in pasta and baked products. I mixed 10 g. of each flour with 7 g. of water for a 70% hydration, a level I often use in my hearth breads. Bob's is a high quality product. Refined durum, pure endosperm, milled a little finer than ordinary semolina but still fairly granular. It has a nice yellow color. At 70% hydration it's quite sticky, almost unworkable. It needs less water or the admixture of bread or all purpose flour. Pasta made with it has a noticeably rough texture, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Golden Temple Atta flour is a whole wheat durum flour, milled a bit finer than Bob's, and is slightly grey in color compared to a more refined durum flour. At 70% hydration, it's not quite as slack and sticky as Bob's, but still hard to work with. It's intended primarily for certain types of Indian breads such as chapati, but works well in leavened breads but lacks strength and so is best combined with bread flour. Caputo Rimacinata is, like most Italian flours, milled to a much finer consistency than either of these two domestic flours. It has a pale golden color and absorbs more water. At 70% hydration, it produces a beautiful, smooth dough, easy to knead and with a nice balance of extensibility and elasticity. It's what is used to make authentic Altamura bread in Puglia. Its fine texture and extensibility make it indispensable for certain homemade pastas such as orecchiette and cavatelli. Nothing else works quite as well. As for bread, if it were less expensive and I could buy it at the supermarket, I might use nothing else. It's that good. But for now, I'll confine myself to using it for pasta. I recommend you buy a kilo and try it.