Flour

[Senkusha]

Recently, I purchased Pizza flour. I honestly had no idea what I was getting myself into! I bought 55 pounds of this stuff, because, oh, it's like bread flour, okay!

So, I started doing some research. First off, this stuff is called 00 Flour, or Double-Zero Flour, and it's specifically designed for pizza crusts. Which is what I wanted. I'm gonna be baking pizza quite a bit for dinners. But here's some stuff I just discovered.

First, the flour is milled from a different type of wheat that's local to Italy. It's got a softer kernel, and that changes the glutton formulation when making dough. And because of this difference, the dough that forms is much harder to work with, meaning I'll need to kneed it for slightly longer.

Okay, then there's the baking temperature. It's recommended for wood ovens. You're supposed to bake these pizzas at 900°F for like a minute and a half. Problem detected! My oven only goes up to 500°F. Solution: There's a nifty contraption called a Baking Steel, which is nothing more than a 16" x 22" rectangle of quarter-inch thick steel, that will bite my butt for the low cost of like $79! Basically, what this does is it rapidly transfers the heat from the oven to the crust, simulating the wood-oven that's typically used for pizza crafting.

Next issue is the fact that 00-Flour compacts very easily, so it's recommended to use weighted measurements rather than measuring by volume. So no more measuring cups. I need a scale! And I need one that can measure in grams, because professionals and seemingly the rest of the world use the metric system, because it's convenient! Like did you know that one gram is the same as one milliliter? I totally didn't' know that! And I think it's awesome! Yeah, I know, you can totally make fun of the stooopid American writing this!

Also, let's toss in the fact that there are percentages and ratios in professional baking. That means MATH! Yikes! So, what started out as a simple pleasurable hobby as become this massive undertaking.

Someday, I'll get into bread flour...

 

[Ravenfreak]

I never knew there was a completely different type of flour specifically crafted for making pizza dough lol. I don't know how to cook, so that is probably why I never knew this. This sounds complicated though I suck at math and would probably end up measuring the wrong amount lol.

 

[Senkusha]

Actually, professional bakers use the metric system (at least from what I gather). And it's super simple working with ratios when working with the metric system.

Dry weights are all in grams. (g)
Wet weights are all in milliliters. (mL)

One gram = one milliliter worth of weight.

So if you have a dough formulation that requires 35% hydration, and you have 400 grams of flour, you'll need 140 mL of water (reduce the flour to 100, then multiply, percentage, then de-reduce (I can't think of the opposite of reduce right now!), so we get 35 * 4 = 140 mL of water.)

I really like how it makes cooking more scientific. I feel more like a research chemist at this point, instead of an alchemist performing magic -- although, that's not a bad way to think about cooking either.