I’ve used KA with absolutely consistent and excellent results and have been told that KA is more for the home baker and not really used in the professional pizza business. The types of crusts I use it for are Chicago Pan’s (KAAP) and Cracker crusts. I tried others (many) but it just seems the KAAP consistently produces the same dough, batch after batch. Others I use are fairly consistent, but have minor variances batch to batch, mostly with water absorption. Finished temps are right on at 75-78 off the mixer, then balled and into the cooler.
Is KAAP or the Commercial Sir Galahad good choices or are these really for the home user? I’m just not seeing others produce the same results time after time…
Variations in dough absorption are completely normal with flour from different mill lots/codes, add to that one manufacturers flour might be coming out of a distributor’s warehouse where tons of it are stored (slow turn over) which can result in some drying of the flour from about 14% moisture content as it is from the flour mill to something closer to 10% under extreme drying conditions which will have an impact upon the dough absorption, add to that the temperature that the flour is stored at (cold/cool storage not an issue but warm/hot, above 100F, can result in oxidation of the flour which in a way mimics a bromated flour so the dough could be seen as being tighter and requiring more water/higher dough absorption. In short, it’s not so much the flour it’s how it is stored between leaving the mill and arriving at your door step that impacts the variances you are noting. Back when bread machines were all the rage bread machine users were looking for a commercial grade flour to use in their bread machines, Pillsbury obliged and began putting their Pillsbury-XXXX flour into consumer size bags that, were and still is, marketed through supermarket chains and sold as Pillsbury Bread Flour, there you go, a commercial flour in consumer/retail packaging.
In short, it’s entirely plausible that different brands of flour are coming from different distributors with different storage conditions which could be affecting what you are seeing as flour performance or consistency of performance, if you feel that you are getting better performance from one brand of flour over another by all means use what you are most comfortable with, just remember that it probably isn’t the flour that’s creating the difference, it how the flour has been stored and this can change with different geographic locations.
Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor