John Myers
Nothing beats the smell of a freshly baked pizza. Especially not if the dough is prepared by yourself. You can find out here: which flour is used to make the perfect pizza dough.
The flour makes the pizza
The choice of flour is crucial so that your pizza tastes like it is from Bella Italia. For a smooth dough that you can stretch out thinly, the amount of gluten contained in the flour is important. Gluten protein is nothing more than gluten, which unfolds its effect by adding water to the flour and kneading the dough. The stickiness of gluten influences the water absorption capacity and the rising time of the dough.
Tip: The higher the gluten content, the more water the dough can absorb. Which causes it to rise more when baking.
Flour is not just flour
The non-slip, fine wheat flour 405 is particularly suitable for your pizza dough, and the German wheat flour Tipo 00 is identical to the Italian wheat flour Tipo 00 in terms of the degree of grinding. Both have a particularly high gluten content. Together with the yeast, the dough becomes very elastic, so that it can be easily rolled out later.
The misconception
Many people assume that the type designation of the flour is related to the fineness of the flour, but it actually refers to the mineral content. For this process, the flour is burned and the remaining ash consists only of minerals. Good pizza dough should essentially be high in protein, and by that we mean stickiness. You will succeed in making a perfect pizza dough if the number of sticky proteins is high. This is because the dough is elastic and expands without tearing.
The perfect pizza flour
You can usually find wheat flour type 405 and type 550 in the supermarket. The number also tells you how many vitamins and minerals the flour still contains per 100g. In organic markets, high-quality wheat flour is also available, e.g. with types 812 or even 1050 – these flours are more expensive, however. For your perfect pizza dough, the wheat flour type 405 & 550 is perfectly sufficient to create a real Italian pizza.
Note: The higher the flour type number, the more intense the flavor and richer in minerals the flour is.
Gluten: a no go?
Do you not tolerate gluten or do you want to avoid it? Then you can use another alternative flour instead of wheat flour. However, the gluten-free choice of flour is not so easy to bake a real Italian pizza. Amaranth, buckwheat, or oat flour are very suitable. However, it often takes the more starch, egg, or some other binder to form these alternative pizza doughs. These recipes are often very complex and consist of many ingredients. You can avoid this and simply buy a gluten-free flour mix, which contains all the other ingredients to easily knead pizza dough.
Pizza maker tip no. 1
To round off the taste, Italian pizza makers like to mix their flour with other flours, which sometimes do not contain as much gluten but have a more intense taste, so that the wheat flour dough can be rolled out extremely thinly and processed. For example, you can replace a small part of the flour with durum wheat semolina or other flour. Now nothing should go wrong when choosing the flour to mix the perfect pizza dough. You can find out how to bake original Italian pizza dough here with this basic recipe – Buon Appetito!
