The best flour for pizza dough depends on your desired crust: Italian "00" flour (fine, low-protein) creates a soft, tender Neapolitan crust, while Bread Flour (high-protein) offers chewiness and structure for New York-style or heartier pizzas, with All-Purpose flour being a good everyday option. For extra crispiness or flavor, you can blend in some semolina or cornmeal, but always look for specific pizza flour when possible for best results.
Flour choice
00 pizza flour (often labeled as "Tipo 00") creates a silky, extensible dough and a tender bite. Bread flour adds chew and browning due to higher protein.
There are many tricks to achieving a tasty, homemade pizza dough that rises into a beautiful pizza crust, such as making sure your ingredients are at right temperature, using half bread flour for a stronger dough and half all-purpose flour for a nice rise, substituting honey for sugar to help caramelize the crust and ...
Use Tipo 00 flour. Tipo 00 flour is the type of Italian flour that Neapolitan pizza restaurants use. It makes a beautiful, supple and fluffy dough that's a notch above regular all purpose flour. You can find it at your local grocery or online.
In Australia, "00" (double zero) flour refers to an Italian-style, super-fine, highly refined flour, smoother and whiter than standard all-purpose flour, ideal for delicate pasta and crispy pizza crusts, available in supermarkets and specialty stores under brands like Farina, Lighthouse, and Mauri. It's milled from hard wheat, creating a soft, elastic dough that's perfect for stretching thin, unlike bread flour which has higher protein for stronger structure.
Bread Flour
This higher protein content is what gives your pizza dough that perfect chew and stretch. For the best results, Tipo "00" extra fine bread flour is the top choice, but many other bread flours work wonderfully too and are easier to find in most grocery stores.
Lighthouse Plain Flour For Pasta Tipo "00" 1kg | Woolworths.
Enriched Wheat Flour (Wheat Flour, Niacin, Ferrous Sulfate, Thiamine Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid), Canola And/Or Sunflower Oil, Dehydrated Garlic, Salt, Yeast, Water, Natural Butter Flavor (a milk ingredient), Malted Barley Flour, Citric Acid and/or Tocopherols added to maintain freshness.
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In the heated embrace of a wood-fired oven, 00 flour truly shines. Its ability to form a delicate, light crust that remains soft and chewy on the inside, while providing the heat resistance needed for the quick cooking time of traditional pizza, is unrivaled.
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The "55 rule" for pizza dough generally refers to using 55% hydration, meaning 55 grams of water for every 100 grams of flour, resulting in a firmer, crispier crust ideal for styles like pepperoni or New York-style. It can also refer to a formula for water temperature (Room Temp + Flour Temp + Water Temp = ~55°C/131°F for a 16-18°C preferment), but the 55% hydration is more common for overall recipe guidance, providing a manageable dough for beginners that bakes up crunchier than higher-hydration doughs.
Pizza Dough
Best Overall: Antimo Caputo Pizzeria Flour Blue Tipo 00
Caputo 00 flour is a very unique type of flour made by the Naples-based company Antimo Caputo. Caputo is known around the world for its high-quality pizza flour that uses mostly locally produced wheat.
T65 vs North American Bread Flour
Canadian and American bread flours typically contain 12-14% protein, making them stronger than T65 but often lacking the mineral complexity: T65 Advantages: More complex flavour from higher mineral content.
00 Flour: This type of flour is finely ground, giving it an ultra-fine texture that's almost silky. It's commonly used in Italian recipes, particularly for making pizza dough and pasta. The "00" refers to the fineness of the grind, and it generally has a lower gluten content than all-purpose flour.
Place each dough ball in a lightly oiled container, cover, and rest for ~3 hours at room temperature. This is the game changer, gluten relaxes, dough becomes extensible, and shaping gets effortless. Gluten relaxation: no more snap-back when you stretch.
Pizza dough by its very nature is a lean dough, i.e. it doesn't contain eggs or butter. Without the extra fat to make the dough soft, the end result can sometimes be a little too crisp for some people's taste. The effect olive oil has on the dough will help the finished pizza have a delightful soft, chewy texture.
Overworking The Pie Dough
It's tempting when baking to combine the ingredients completely, but the texture should resemble a coarse meal before adding your liquid. If you mix more than that, the gluten in the flour will begin to develop, ultimately leading to a tough crust.
New York pizza dough, on the other hand, is generally made from American bread flour. Also high in protein, it readily develops gluten (the protein matrix that gives bread structure). It is made from a different variety of wheat and not milled as finely.
The best flour for making Deep-Dish Pizza Dough is all-purpose flour. In bakeries and pizzerias, Pizza Flour is often used because it is a high-protein flour that produces a light and airy crust. However, all-purpose flour will also work well for Deep-Dish Pizza Dough.
All pizza dough starts with the same basic ingredients: flour, yeast, water, salt, and olive oil.
Use Tipo 0 or Tipo 00 flour. Tipo is a grading of flour on the Italian flour scale. And these flours have just the right amount of protein content - around 12.5% for pizza baking.
In Australia, "00" (double zero) flour refers to an Italian-style, super-fine, highly refined flour, smoother and whiter than standard all-purpose flour, ideal for delicate pasta and crispy pizza crusts, available in supermarkets and specialty stores under brands like Farina, Lighthouse, and Mauri. It's milled from hard wheat, creating a soft, elastic dough that's perfect for stretching thin, unlike bread flour which has higher protein for stronger structure.
Pasta Tipo "00" Plain Flour (Super Fine, Mid Protein) contains only the centre portion of the wheat heart, is essentially free of germ and bran, low in ash and is naturally finer than standard flour.