Using proper flour to make pizza
I make a lot of pizza. At least relatively to everyone I know, excluding my actual pizzaiolo friend, duh. Since I got my Ooni oven 4 years ago I must have made more than 300 pizzas (I lost count after 200).
My preferred style is Neapolitan. I really enjoy the process of making the dough, experimenting with different techniques, preferments, hydration percentages, tweaking variables, etc. It's like a science experiment that I get to eat at the end, so it satisfies intellectually and digestively.
A few weeks ago I helped my pizzaiolo friend with his food truck and as part of the payment he gave me the bottom 5kg of a bag of proper Neapolitan Caputo flour. This is the golden standard of pizza dough flour. And boy now I know why.
With very little effort I managed to make the best dough I've ever made on the first try. It's so much easier to work with and it tastes so much nicer than any other flour I've ever used. It reminded me of how the very first pizzas I made with the Ooni were the best pizzas I'd ever made at the time.
I have to say it's a bit annoying that just buying better shit makes such a big difference and all the work I put on learning new techniques, folding the dough, keeping track of times and temperature, etc. barely moved the needle.
On the other hand, I had fun and made a lot of people happy. And I can make decent pizza with shitty supermarket flour. And now I've leveled up my game and have a new "dough space" to apply all the stuff I learned to. I reckon I can push the hydration percentage a lot further now. Here we go again.