Time for a little zombification.
After having become lazy the past years, i have not made pizza that much the past three or four years, only bought frozen ready-to-eat ones, some of which (if you know which ones to choose) have become surprisingly good, even using
real yeast dough and being topped by hand. The sad truth is you cannot buy a good pizza in my hometown, the restaurants and delivery services all do exotic things and dysfunctional, disavory experiments, using no salt so "to make them healthy" (I could get mad when hearing this nonsense on salt), and clubbing the Gluten (no gluten and protein - no good dough behaviour, that simple the formula is, since the dough has a bad W-value - baking power - then and cannot hold sufficient moisture). German grade 405 and Itlaian grade tipo 00 flour IS NOT THE SAME, its worlds apart. I have checked pizza in so many places and restaurants. No herbals used. Lousy, really lousy doughs, bad toppings. Expensive. I do not go to any of them anymore. Although I LOVE pizza, still.
And so I went back to do two things myself again: I bake my own bread again, and I make pizza fully manual again.
The flour for baking bread I grind myself, but for pizza I use original Italian flour, by Caputo who probaly makes the best pizza flour in the world. Use it once yourself, and you believe it, promised. ;) They have three flours, a red package for longer dough times 24-48 hours, a blue one for shorter dough times 2-3 hours minimum, and a relatively new lilac one I still must try, said to create an icrcredibly fluffy, "cloud-like" dough. I will try that soon, its ordered. I can only recommend with utmost seriousness to pay attention to use Italian tipo 00 flour of good quality. It beats EVERYTHING when you make pizza dough. I provide a link below. Germans: you cannot hope to get these results with German 405 or 550 fliur. The ingreidnet sin it are such that it just doe snto work as well. Thats no imagination - that is simple chemistry.
I also tested the new vogue of not using pizza stones, but pizza steel plates. My results with that are not impressive, however. The thing gets not hot enough in a normal household oven, no matter how I set it up, low or high, with or without grill on, and then when it is not hot enough, the moisture in the dough cannot escape through the plate, and so the dough gets cooked, yes, and it rises, but it builds no crust, stays soft, remains too moist. These plates are expensive and cost several times as much as a stone, your risk them to ruin the thermostate in your oven, and the theory behind them, that they store more heat than a stone and radiate it back into the dough faster, for me simply does not work. Instead of using a steel plate high in the oven, I return to my proven stone placed low in the oven. No air frying of course, just maximum upper and lower heat, passive. I reach 250° - 270° in my oven, and on a stone that works perfect for me, cooking time is around 4.5 minutes.
This is the best flour I know, I now use it for everything when I do not grind my own flour, I do not buy German flour anymore. Its different wheat, grown in different places (Italy...), with different mixtures of minerals, proteins and Gluten, and that makes all the difference. Wheat is not wheat, there have been hundreds of kinds of wheat. I pay a bit more, but via Amazon in packs of 6 or 10, I can reduce the price
https://www.gustini.de/molino-caputo.html
The red package has a w-value of 300-320 and a gluten content of 13-13.5%. The blue has a w-value of 200-230 and gluten 10-11%, the lilac coloured pack has a w-value of 250-290, and a gluten content of 12-12.5%. The more gluten, the higher the w-value, the more stable the dough rises, but the more time it takes. the softer doughs with less gluten are more "liquid" and a bit more tricky to handle. But you can work faster with them. If you use the blkue flour, you will need to vary your water aml8nt a bit while using the same amount of flour like with the red one. Both flous need slightly different amounts of water.
Healthier are longer dough times, the yeast then processes more of the critical encymes your digestion can negatively react to. Thats why so many people have so many problems with industrial bread, these are packed full with up to two hundred chemical agents allowed in the EU that make ingredients better to store, to handle,
and reduce the processing times of doughs. That is good for the industry, and bad for your health! All the chemical toxins wheat has build in defence to its eating enemies - us - do not get neutralised that way and end live in our digestion system - and there they cause more and more problems. Its better to have doughs given longer times, even days. True for bread. True for pizza. True for anything related to cereals and corn, wheat etc. etc. Taking your time is healthier!
It sounds unbelievable, but many restaurants over here serve their pizza without dough or topping salted. No salt, NONE. Despicable, it has become an obsession. Also, vegan eating. No animal fats. Not that much interesting with pizza, yes, but with other kinds of food preparations. It just does not taste, it is lame on your tongue. I do not save on fats and salts. I just look at good quality of both and avoid certain types. See my health thread.
My dinner tonight was this. Salami I use rarely on pizza, but I was in the mood for it. Pickeld paprika, the onyl tpopping I really use often on pizza beside spinacci or champignons, I mostly use only several cheese, do variations of Margeritha.
https://i.postimg.cc/g2H9sB9N/20210615-174603.jpg
https://i.postimg.cc/ZR01TbWM/20210615-174411.jpg
https://i.postimg.cc/gjZQZgqy/20210615-181722.jpg
My last try with the pizza steel plate, I will now sell it. As you can see in the thir doicture, almost no crust on the bottom outside, the dough had baked up, it was done, but not crispy, no crust. On a chamotte stone this would not have happened, not in my oven at least! The dough in the centre of the disc stays too soft, and no crust on the centre bottom. Maybe it works as they say in much, much hotter ovens, but not in mine. Porose chamotte stone it must be. Crust gets perfect in no time with that.
