Pizzas are nothing but foam. You must be thinking of us as lunatics, we would have reacted the same way if we would be learning about it for the first time. Hot dog buns, naan, pancakes and every other leavened dough is solid foam.
What is foam?
It simply is a group of many airs or gas-filled bubbles accumulated into a single larger mass.
As it turns out, bread is a solid foam — a foam that has been preserved after it's shaped to harden its walls and firm up its structure. Bread without bubbles would be a hardened brick of protein and starch, much like, say, a dog biscuit. It's the presence of bubbles of gas that makes bread chewy, tender and edible.
Though there are various factors that can influence bubble attributes in bread foams, the dominant factor by far is the kind of flour your use, and more specifically, its protein content.
The ground-up grain of the wheat plant – Wheat flour is made largely of absorptive, gluey starch molecules, besides with a few protein molecules, essentially the molecules gliadin and glutenin. These are the molecules that cross-link with each other in the presence of water, developing the strong, elastic matrix known as gluten. Think of Gluten like soap for your dough. Additional the gluten is formed, the simpler it is to form big, robust, stretchy bubbles in your loaf. Therefore, just like adding more Bubble maker will make your bubble bath foamier, the extra protein in your flour, the bigger and more robust the bubbles you can form in your dough.
Let’s dive in and see the different kinds of flours used by people across the world to make pizza.
Types of Flours -
Bread Flour
Bread flour creates the foam structure that is considerably more robust and irregular than that of all-purpose flour. Likewise, it's also chewier. For pizza Napoletana, it means that you will end up with a taller cornicione, and better guard against sagging out with sauce and watery cheese.
It needs a little more water than most other flours to form doughs of similar thickness. Due to its high protein content, few people could find bread flour doughs a little difficult to stretch — it has a tendency to bounce back. The idea is to make sure that the dough is well-rested before you begin to stretch it.
All-purpose Flour
This flour has a moderate protein content, it does a decent job at a wide range of goods from bread and pizza to biscuits and cakes. Nonetheless, it doesn't shine at any of them. Bubble development is inadequate, providing you with a network of very small bubbles instead of large ones. Cakes have a distinct chewiness and Biscuits come out a little tougher than you'd like.
If there isn’t enough space in your pantry and you need only one flour to keep, then you should go with this one. Otherwise, you would want to consider some of the specialised flours.
Cake or Pastry Flour
Several people advise using some proportion of cake or pastry flour in their pizza dough. The outcome is a crumb structure that is not very chewy or stretchy as it is tender. The walls of the discrete bubbles are simply not sturdy enough to back any kind of weight on top of them. Something that should be light and airy instead loses steam and becomes thick and sticky.
Casillo Soft Wheat Pizza Flour Type “00
Tipo 00 soft wheat flour is considered the gold standard of pizza flour across the world. Specifically produced and used for pizza making, this is a superior flour for Pizza dough having a short-medium raising time. This soft wheat flour is conventionally used in Italy especially for preparing PIZZA and also consumed for home-made pasta, gnocchi, ciabatta bread, and pastry. The Casillo soft wheat flour type’00’ is created from the finest North Italian Soft Wheat. Because of the fineness of its milling, it doesn't need quite as much water as other pizza flours.
To make truly Italian pizza at home, use Casillo Soft Wheat Pizza Flour. Enjoy a great pizza experience at home!
Get in touch with us today to order Casillo flours from our import partners and get them home delivered all over India.
Contact us at italicswineclub@indiaitaly.com or call at +91 9811392313 for more information on our list of offerings, and place your order on this link, and get up to 25% discount.
Source: slice.seriouseats