Friday 21 August 2009

The name is plain flour, 00 plain flour; license to float.

Believe it or not, I have only just woken up to 00 flour, milled finer than normal plain flour. It is quite a revelation trust me. Baked treats are lighter, fluffier and have an airy deliciousness that means if you weren’t sitting down to eat your scone, you might float away yourself. Who ever knew that it would make such a difference (apart from hundreds of years of professional bakers of course, pah)

Now, the way this flour is made is very special. A school girl brief awareness of how flour is made is that a grain is ground between two mill stones till it is fine and separated into its separate constituents. Some of those lumps are added back to make wholemeal and the such.

But, with 00 flour, I have done some research and found that instead of two giant heavy stones being used (or whatever the shiny modern version is) the grain firstly is grown on heavenly trampolines, made from cherubian whispers, sewn together. It is harvested by a gentle breeze wafting across the crop, breathing the suggestion that perhaps , maybe if it didn’t mind, it might like to float away from the plant. From this gentle harvesting, it is then transported by angel’s rollers skates to where it is ground by pure white star clouds, a process that takes a thousand years, but since it is happening outside our solar system, time travel being what it is, it actually is over in a jiffy. The finely ground flour then tumbles across the milky way falling through the vast inkiness of space, sifting it and adding more lightness (this is why space is a vacuum, all the air has been sucked up by the 00). From this, tiny magic fingers tickle the 00 and it giggles itself into bags where it it hovers waiting to meet its future best friends, butter and sugar. From here, the flour, so finely ground and so fluffy at heart is floated to earth, blown this way by angel’s trombones. I won’t bore you with the delivery logistics, but will just briefly say it is largely driven by a network of pumpkin carriages drawn by white unicorns .

You may not know this, but 00 was actually called 00 by Parisian bakers in the 18thcentury because it is 00h so light. Now, don’t say I never told you anything and that this blog isn’t factual and educational. Every day is a school day.

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