It all depends upon the type of pizza that you are making. All Trumps is great for a New York style pizza or for making dough that will be managed for more than 3 or 4-days through the cooler, but it may not be the best flour for making thick crust/deep-dish pizzas as it might impart excessive toughness into the finished crust. Caputo “00” flour or any of the lower protein content flours might be just the ticket for making a more tender eating deep-dish or thick crust pizza. Caputo, or any of the other similar “00” type flours excel at making hand tossed Neopolitan style pizzas where the softer dough characteristics can give better oven spring when baked on a hearth at 600F and hotter. We have also found that dough made with the “00” type flours do not hold up as well as doughs made with higher protein flours when subjected to several days of fermentation in the cooler.
One of the main advantages to using a lower protein flour is that it can reduce the amount of dough memory we have to contend with which can be an important consideration with some forming methods. On the other hand, if you are into amazing your customers with dough acrobatics, nothing beats a very high protein content “pizza” flour with 14+% protein content. I don’t think that there is a right or wrong flour, but some might be better suited to some applications than others. Based on all my years experience in making many different types of American style pizzas, if I had to pick out a “go to” flour for making the broadest variety of different styles of pizza (both thin and thick/deep-dish varieties) I would select a strong bread type flour with 12 to 12.8% protein content. Some of the flours falling into this catagory are Progressive Baker Qualitate, Prarie Best Flour, Full Strength, Rex Royal, Washburns, Superlative, Morbread, Mondako, Organic Pizza Germania, Kansas Diamond, Majestic, Springcup, Red Rose Rocky Mountain King, Red Rose Harvest Classic, Red Rose Baker’s Special, Red Rose Bleached Bakers Special, Red Rose Keith’s Best. These are but a few of the many different flour brands fitting into this protein range.
Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor