i am an itaian pizza chef , i started making pizza with my father as a young child and the little things i have learned are that dough is never weighed it should be meausured by size and by eye changing for temperature and humidity, flour is the most important ingredient and a 00 flour made from grano duro will work better than an average overprocessed flour with little elasticity but the perfect mix for me is half 0 type flour (sightly harder and less fine) and half manitoba or neretto flour (types of finer hard grrain flour with high elasticity) and a little bit of semola. i like to roll the dough in a little bit of large milled semola that adds crunch to the base and doesnât leave a burnt , unworked flour taste.just my 2 cents.
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my recipe for home made pizza.
use âstrogâ 00 flour 260W
the night before
500g of flour
500g of water
3g of Brewerâs yeast
half spoon of sugar
mix and leave for at least 8 hours
the next moring you find that mix (aka poolish double in size)
add
30g of olive oil (extravergine)
25g of salt
350g of flour (or 270+80g of Durum wheat)
mix and leave for 30min
cut in 250g piece and put in frige
2h before cooking take it
heat the oven to the max temperature
and turn on the grill
put the pizza 12cm from the grill and cook for 3/5minutes
enjoy.
Thatâs closer to my house recipe, but a tad more waterâcloser to 70-72% by bakers weight. Also never needed sugar, always had enough vegetables from the starch.
Nothing beats a slightly cold, gassy, â â â â â dough. rereads last sentence . for the large irregular and chewy holes obviously. rereads last sentence . oh I give up.
âeditâ
I just noticed autocorrect changed âcarbohydratesâ to âvegetablesâ. Perhaps my phone is trying to tell me somethingâŚ
half coffe spoon of sugar 
or better malt syrup
Manitoba or high force flour
use this calculator for focaccia genovese http://vivalafocaccia.com/2011/01/23/calcolo-ingredienti-focaccia-genovese/ (sorry all italian but itâs easy)
and follow the recipe
http://vivalafocaccia.com/2009/09/21/video-ricetta-focaccia-genovese-ingredienti/
skip all the part that add oil and salt on the top and add pomodoro
25 kg is a lot of flour. If you have a good dry air tight place to store it and will be baking often then go ahead, otherwise youâre going to have a lot of wasted flour.
Why brewerâs yeast?
This is a great site for just that thing - Flour volume vs weight conversions | Grams | Ounces | Cups | Pounds | Kilograms | Quarts
Also, I would recommend using this flour, but doing the Jim Lahey no knead pizza dough method. That same recipe will make awesome baguettes, too. Or rounds cooked in a dutch oven.
There is no right answer - you have to figure out what tastes best for you. Bread flour or 00 is going to give you crispier crust, but I generally mix it 50:50 with whole wheat for flavor and density. I also like my dough on the sweet side so I add probably 3-4 tbl to an average batch. You have to experiment a bit to find what you like best!
Since you can often anticipate when youâre going to make pizza, try using a sponge method to start the dough.
- All the water (or beer) you normally use
- About 1/3 the flour
- The salt
- About 1/4 the yeast
- The oil
Beat the flour, water, salt, yeast, and oil together into a sort of batter. Let sit, covered and and not too cold, for at least six hours.
Add the remaining ingredients (you may be able to skip the sugar, if you allow enough rise time) and proceed as usual with your bread/crust.
Iâve been baking bread this way for several years, and the taste is superior. I donât really mind the reduced cost of yeast either, despite buying it by the kilo at Costco. The latest version includes a long soak with dried onion flakes and a dash of chipotle powder. Makes a subtle contribution thatâs really good.
Italian flours can be hard to find in the US, so we tend to use American âAll Purposeâ flour or âbread flourâ. Both are more coarsely ground than the tipo 00. And AP is gonna have less protien, while Bread Flour can have slightly more. There are some American âpizza floursâ that grind to the 00 size, but they tend to have too little protein. We tend to miss understand what tipo 00 means over here. A lot of people think it specifies a kind of flour, or type of wheat rather than a grind size and ignore that you need a higher protein content for good pizza.
So the best Pizza in the US, even American styles of pizza, tend to be made with the imported Italian flour that Jason is posting about.
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No US bread flour often has about the same (and sometimes more) protein as the Italian 00 bread flour. The grind size is important to how the dough forms and works, so itâll effect the end product heavily. Our flour is coarser than tipo 00
The serious eats post I linked covers the varieties of flour available in the US and their respective impacts on pizza.
Your comments are awesome. Thanks.
Thank you Jason, you keep posting great things about stuff Iâm interested in. For clarity I was referring to commercially made Pizza. I donât think Iâve walked into even a bad pizzeria in NY and seen anything but Italian flour. Even if it was packaged and sold by an American company. Though there are some styles of American Pizza that probably do just fine with American types of flour come to think of it.
Since Iâm not exactly in a metropolitan area, the flour options tend to be limited; this is the recipe I use (shamelessly stolen from Cookâs Illustrated, and all over the Intarwebs):
It uses cake flour mixed in with all-purpose flour to lower the protein levels, which gives it that crunchy-yet-chewy feel that you get from pizzas you get from an oven.
sorry in italian is called âlievito di birraâ i donât know the english name for Saccharomyces cerevisiae
Thank you for that link. It makes the point that the higher protein is necessary for baking at extremely high temperatures, which most peopleâs kitchen ovens canât achieve anyway.
Iâm going to try this recipe, but maybe using farina or semolina instead of All-Purpose.
Donât forget: you can order flour online. My dad lives in an area where the only lettuce available is icebergâŚno way to have that sent by UPS! But flour can handle a few days in a truck.
Try using flour made for bread making machines. The result is amazing. Alton Brownâs Good Eats turned me on to that little tip. The episode, if you are so inclined is âFlat Is Beautifulâ and gives a good run down of why this is a good flour choice for pizza dough.
Just as a heads-up: depending on where you live, lettuce can be relatively easy to grow, at least in-season. Outdoors, you can grow it in the ground, or in potting soil. Despite having an acre to play with and living in the country, my soil is poor enough that this past year I just bought a couple of potting soil bags, cut off one side, and kept it â â â â â . Worked well until it got hot. You can also grow it in potting soil indoors, if youâve got a place where you can put a fluorescent light (disclaimer: Iâve never done this.)
Thanks, but my dad only learned how to make coffee (using pre-filled filters and an electric coffee pot) after retiring, and that is the sum total of âcookingâ he knows how to do. Gardening is well beyond his capabilities!
Also, deer.
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