The Pizza Lab On Flour Types, Foams, and Dough. Pop quiz What do whipped cream, Nerf footballs, pizza, and Tempur Pedic mattresses have in common Thats right theyre all foams. Wait, huh Pizzas are foamsThe best recipe for pizza is an Italian recipe Heres what you need to know about Italian pizza and how to make it, especially how to make Italian pizza dough. This sauce is great for homemade pizza. It is also great spooned over sauteed chicken with melted mozzarella. Classic Pizza Margherita. Follow instructions for making dough and pizzas on this post. Your pizzas are beautiful Looks yummie I have been trying quite a few gluten free pizza dough recipes Now I am using the naturally gluten free norwegian. Canned Pizza Dough' title='Canned Pizza Dough' />You mean those annoying, piddly things that chefs were goofing around with in the mid 2. Yup, as are hot dog buns, Wonderbread, Pane di Genzano, Portuguese rolls, Naan, pancakes, and pretty much every other leavened batter or dough based product in the world. Why do I bring this up now Well, its not quite obvious, but once you start thinking of bread as a solid foam, it becomes much, much easier to understand its mechanics how leavening works, what gluten development is, oven spring, and the like. Today, were going to discuss a subject that weve danced around a few times in the past like when we were exploring how to make Neapolitan style pizza at home even without a wood burning 1. F oven, but have never really explored in detail. Now for you professional bakers and pizzafreaks out there, after today youll probably still feel like we havent really explored the subject in detail, but flour is a gigantic can of worms that only gets deeper and deeper, and for most of us, a good understanding of the very top layer is good enough for our needs. Foams, Defined. First off, what exactly is a foam At its most basic, its a collection of many air or gas filled bubbles accumulated into a single larger mass. Fluid foams, such as shaving cream, a whipped meringue, sea scum, or the head on your beer is made of bubbles surrounded by a viscous liquid. The bubbles can slip and slide past each other, giving the entire mass mobility and shape ability. But heres the interesting part. Depending on the viscosity and surface tension of the liquid, the strength of the individual bubbles in a foam can vary greatly. Plain water can hold a few tiny bubbles for a brief period of time on its surface. The science of pizza sauce recipes is unfortunately subject to as many variables as finding the best pizza dough recipe. Making homemade pizzas of the quality served. Thicken that water up or change the characteristics of its bonding with, say, some soap, and you can suddenly form much larger bubbles with sturdier structure. Rising dough balls, aka, edible Nerf footballs. Bubble size can also vary greatly depending on how the bubbles are formed. Though their size is limited by the strength of the bonds between individual liquid molecules, the mechanical means by which they are formed can change their size dramatically. Agitate a bubble bath slowly, or blow through a soapy film and you can create very large bubbles. Vigorously shake that exact same solution or better yet, throw it into a blender or beat it with a mixer, and you can create very fine bubbles indeed. But again, whats this all got to do with breadBread Solid Foam. Ideal hole structure. Turns out that bread is a solid foam that is, a foam thats been treated after its formed to solidify its walls and firm up its structure ever look inside a sliced loaf of bread and wonder why it looks so much like the top of a bubble bath. And just like with soapy water vs. Without bubbles, bread would be a solid brick of protein and starch, much like, say, a dog biscuit. Its the inclusion of bubbles of gas that make bread tender, chewy, and, well, edible. While there are a number of factors that can affect bubble characteristics in bread foams, the overriding factor by far is the type of flour your use, and more specifically, its protein content. Wheat flour, the ground up grain of the wheat plant, is composed largely of absorptive, sticky starch molecules, along with a few protein molecules, most importantly the molecules gliadin and glutenin. Its these molecules that cross link with each other in the presence of water, forming the strong, elastic matrix known as gluten. Gluten is like soap for your dough. The more gluten is formed, the easier it is to form large, robust, stretchy bubbles in your loaf. Thus, just like adding more Mr. Bubble will make your bubble bath foamier, the more protein in your flour, the larger and more robust the bubbles you can form in your dough. Okay, okay. There are other factors that can affect your flour performance as well. Check out this article for a more thorough rundown of wheat varieties. Dough for bread in which you want very large bubbles like pizza should be reinforced with enough gluten that you can stretch it out thin enough to see through this is known as the windowpane test. In order to form this tough matrix, dough must be kneaded until the proteins link up with each other strongly, and as weve seen in the past, the food processor is the best way to rapidly develop gluten in your dough. Through a combination of autolysis, plenty of water, and the action of yeast bubble production, the dough essentially kneads itself, forming gluten with almost no outside help. Good gluten structure. When it comes to pizza, there are a number of options. Lets take a look at some of them. The Major Types of Flour. Believing that the experts of the world will ever agree on what makes the best pizza dough is as crazy as thinking that Wilykit and Wilykat will give up their mischievous ways, but there are certainly a few things we can all agree upon when it comes to Neapolitan pizza crust. Captuo 0. 0 Bread Flour. Romanesco Broccoli Recipe. Protein Content 1. Water Absorption low. This is the gold standard of pizza flours by which most others are judged, but theres quite a bit of confusion as to exactly what it is. Youll read in countless sources that Italian Tipo 0. Caputo, is a soft wheat flour, with a low protein content. This is absolutely untrue and anybody who continues to spread this rumor should be immediately chastised with great prejudice. The fact is, the label Tipo 0. Rather, it refers to the fineness of the milling. Tipo 0. 0 is the finest grade of flour milled in Italy, and it has a consistency similar to baby powder. Its available with several different levels of protein intended for different baking projects, just like American flours which well get to in a moment. The ones youll most commonly see in pizzerias are the red Rinforzato bag, which features pictures of pizzas and bread, the blue Pizzeria bag, which pictures a single pizza, and the most common in the U. S. the red The Chefs Flour bags, which, in fact, contain the exact same flour as the Rinforzato. All three bags of flour have the exact same protein content 1. Because of the fineness of their milling, they dont need quite as much water as an equivalent American flour try making a 6. American bread flour side by side and youll find that the 0. So whats the difference between the Rinforzato and the Pizzeria Caputo guards that secret very closely, though one could assume it has to do with the blend of wheats that make it into the bag. As far as baking with them goes, Ive not noticed a huge difference between the red and blue bagsboth produce admirably workable doughs that produce great crust with a crackly thin layer of crispness, a nice open and airy hole structure, and just a modicum of chew. I stick with the red bag, because its easiest to find Whole Foods carries it, and you can order it in 1. Amazon. Most Neapolitan pizza dough recipes you see around here attempt to come up with viable substitutes for Caputo 0. None of them really work precisely. Do yourself a favor and order it online. All purpose Flour. Protein Content 1. Water Absorption moderate. King Arthur all purpose flour has a slightly higher protein content than most other brands, which clock in at around 1. All purpose flour is exactly what it sounds like. With a moderate protein content, its does a decent job at a wide range of goods from pizza and bread to cakes and biscuits. However, it doesnt excel at any of them. As you can see, bubble development is limited, giving you a network of relatively small bubbles instead of the large, irregular structure you get with the 0.