an adventure with flour?

I love a thin, crisp pizza with a bit of char on the crust, and just a sprinkling of toppings.  Not for me, the oozing cheese and topping overload that dominates the current chain pizzeria world.  Which led me to the google world of pizza.  And one reoccurring theme in that world was double zero flour from Italy.  It wasn't easy to find, it was expensive, and from the majority of sources, it required purchasing a very small quantity at a ridiculous price, or buying a 55 pound bag, and what was I going to do with 55 pounds of flour?

Finally, I found a source that was parceling out 20 pounds of the by now must-have flour.  So I ordered.  And, much to my surprise, it most certainly makes a difference.  The dough, produced with water, salt, and yeast, stretches more easily than dough produced with all purpose flour, and is certainly WAY more manageable than dough made with bread flour.

I always start the dough with a sponge

A sponge is really just the dough, made with less flour than you will ultimately need.  It allows part of the flour to really hydrate, and kick starts the yeast.

with the final addition of flour, the dough is still soft,

but elastic and workable

The Italian flour was extremely supple, and stretched easily.  I heated a pizza stone in a 550 oven, because I was too lazy to pull out the grill and heat it.  The grill is really the only way  mere mortals without a pizza oven are able to hit temps over 800 degrees, which is ideal for thin crust pizza.  The dough made such a difference on the final texture of the crust that next time I won't be so lazy.  The additional 300 or so degrees will certainly make a difference.

the sauce is an exercise in simplicity -- sliced garlic poached in

olive oil, fire roasted tomatoes, salt, and red pepper flake

When I first started making pizza, I made a very complicated sauce, loaded with a variety of herbs and aromatics.  Over the years, I have discovered that in the case of pizza sauce, less is more.  Limiting the flavors to garlic, salt, and pepper allows the tomatoes to really shine.  I adore the fire roasted tomatoes from Muir Glen.  I even prefer them to San Marzano tomatoes from Italy, which is heresy in the world of pizzafiles, but oh well.  I do take some perverse pleasure in being an iconoclast.

The toppings for this pizza were simple.  I found some fresh buffalo mozzeralla, so I used that, along with a little pesto I had in the freezer, and a bit of parmesan cheese.

toppings are limited, to let the crust really shine

On the buffalo mozzarella... well, for me, it wasn't worth the price tag.  Perhaps what I found wasn't a stellar example of the cheese, but I hardly tasted a difference between it and cow's milk mozzarella.  I will refrain in the future, unless someone convinces me that a different brand has a markedly different flavor profile.

Even in the wimpy 550 oven, the pizza browned and crisped beautifully.

a crisp crust, with a bit of char

So, in the end, I certainly think it was worth seeking out the Italian 00 flour, and I will continue to experiment with it.  I want to try making pasta with it.  Since it makes such a supple dough, I imagine it will make very silky pasta.

The big lesson here is to know your flours.  All purpose flour is great for a lot of things, such as popovers, cookies, and general use in the kitchen.  Very soft flours, like pastry flour and White Lily (a soft winter wheat flour available mainly in the South) are great for tender baked goods cut with fat, such as pie crusts, cakes, pancakes and biscuits.  Bread flour is good for bread, but I think it is too glutinous for pizza dough, and results in a tough crust.  

The more I cook, the bigger the variety of flours that find a home in my pantry.  Right now I have a little can of Wondra flour for thickening, white whole wheat flour (a variety of very light flour that looks much like white flour, but is whole grain -- love it for bread), Italian 00 flour, all purpose flour, corn flour, pastry flour, White Lily, rice flour, potato flour, and semolina flour.  I need a bigger pantry....