Explanation of nerd info for each flour
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W: indicates how strong a flour is, measured in an Alveograph. For pizza, you usually stick to strong flours with a w from 260 to up to 380 in some cases. The higher the number, the stronger the flour. According to us, it's perhaps the most important measure to consider. The stronger the flour the more water it can usually handle. It can also generally handle longer fermentation times. Strong flours are often used for Pizza canotto (indirect doughs). However, the Alveograph only measures short-term fermentation with a hydration of 50% unless it is measured in an AH Alveograph, so it needs to be supplemented with your own tests as you can read about below.
Spread test: In the future, we will specify the differences in dough strength with certain flour so that you know how to adjust the amount of water. The biggest difference between flours is their ability to absorb water and maintain strength over time. This is important because most people ferment their Napolitan pizza doughs longer than 12 hours at room temperature, which can be called long fermentation. We thus complement the Alveograph's limitations here. Possibly the most important info about each flour. It takes time to get the results, but bear with us, it's coming.
Water absorption capability: Something we have discovered that is highly related to W is how much water the flour can absorb. Sometimes a certain flour can absorb a lot of water but still not be very strong in the end when we check the spread tests after 24 hours. Therefore, it is absolutely essential to check the final result on the pizza and compare flours against each other if the strength of the dough performed in a spread test is the same. This means that when we decide how much swoosh a flour gives, we always adjust the amount of water in the dough to a level where we achieve the same diameter in a spread test as we do with the recipe we are currently baking with. Usually this is similar to the recipe in our book. Caputo flours generally absorb a lot of water and therefore you have to decrease the amount of water in most other flours to get a comparable dough. When we have achieved similar results in the spread tests, we bake and check the result. We will progressively present more accurate values for the different flours but this must be tested over time under controlled conditions. But we have already given guidelines on how much more or less water you need to use to achieve similar strength in the final dough as you normally do and like. As a basis for these guidelines, we have used our own tests and a farinograph.
Sometimes you read that a certain flour becomes weak and difficult to bake with, but often you do not take into account the water absorption capability. If you take this into account, the flours become more and more comparable. It is only here that you can see clear differences in swoosh and color above all. If you, for example, use Caputo pizzeria which you usually get good results with but want to try Piantoni red sack which on paper has similar properties. If you don't change the amount of water, you will be shocked by how loose the Piantoni dough became and it will be a nightmare to bake when you are used to the Caputo dough which is stronger at the time of baking. Instead of neglecting Piantoni, you should give it a chance where you adjust the amount of water by let's say 4-4.5% less than you usually have when you bake with Caputo flour. You will see that the Piantoni flour behaves more like the Caputo dough on the bench and you can now make a good comparison. As we often say, it is a good idea to stop obsessing over how much water you have in the dough, it is less important than most people think. The strength of the dough is 10 times more important.
Water absorption in Farinograph
Caputo Tipo “00” = 61.6% Caputo Nuvola Super = 63.9%
Molino Pasini Verde = 58.8% Molino Piantoni MD = 57%
Molini Pivetti Professional = 59.1% Costa d`Amalfi =58.5%
Molino Pasini Marrone = 58.7% Molino Piantoni LG = 58.2%
Direct :VS: Indirect doughs: We also indicate whether we personally use the flour for direct doughs or for indirect doughs that use some type of sourdough/starter/poolish. In other words, for doughs that aim at a lot of swoosh on the edge. Read more about pizza canotto here. This is a modern development of Pizza Napoletana that has its origins mainly in the Caserta area. The inventors of the style even want to go so far as to call it Pizza Casertano. With direct doughs, we mean a dough where you from the beginning directly mix all the ingredients like for example the recipe in our book. This is the way you bake the traditional Pizza Napoletana and it has been done that way since it was invented in the 1600s. One thing we should add about flour for direct doughs is that by modifying the recipe just a bit, we personally can achieve almost equivalent results since the flours are relatively similar. However, we work with this full time so of course it's easier for us. So our recommendation is to try different flours in your way of baking and making the dough and see which one you like best.
Tipo (xx): Indicates how white the flour is. In other words, how much shell parts have been filtered out. This is indicated in Tipo and then some number after. This does not indicate anything about the flour's performance or such, but only how white it is. Tipo 00 means that the flour is very white, similar to a standard "wheat flour special" in Sweden. Tipo 0 means that it is slightly darker and so on. With pizza flours, the differences are so small that you barely notice it but of course, you can argue that a tip 1 flour is healthier than a tipo 00 flour if you want. Many believe that tipo 00 means that the flour is good for pizza but that is not the case. There are many different strong tipo 00 flours that absolutely don't work for Pizza Napoletana.?Many also seem to believe that tipo 00 stands for the flour being finely ground but that isn't true either. Finely screened, one might say. The particles are not smaller if that's what you thought. So let's get these misconceptions out of the way, come on :)!!!!
P/L: is often indicated, but it always lies between 0.5-0.6 for Napolitan pizza flour so it's not that relevant according to us and can be ignored.
Protein/gluten %: we could care less about, as there are many different types of gluten that perform differently. A flour with low gluten can sometimes be stronger than one with high gluten so don't focus too much on this.
Falling number: We don't write about the flours' falling numbers since all flours on our site have a falling number that's adapted for very quick and hard baking that’s done with Neapolitan pizza. The falling number, which stands for how quickly the dough converts starches to sugar, is a contributing reason why Swedish flours don't work for Neapolitan pizza. They have a too low Falling number which means that sugar is formed quickly in the dough and leads to the pizza being burnt too quickly in a 500° hot oven. The Falling numbers in flours intended for Neapolitan pizza often lie above 400 while Swedish flours stay around 300.