The Secret Life of Flour: What Every Pizza Maker Needs to Know
- Fabio
- Feb 13
- 6 min read
Updated: Feb 24
Ever wondered why two different pizza recipes, with the exact same ingredients, can yield completely different results?
One day your dough stretches like a dream. The next, it tears at the slightest touch. The culprit? It's not your technique. It's your flour.
The qualities of the flour define those of the dough itself. The amount of proteins influences water absorption. The kind of proteins determines the qualities of the gluten. The enzymatic activity influences the speed of rising and fermentation.
Let's start at the very beginning, but in case you prefer a video, maybe to be listened like a podcast, here you are:
What's Actually Inside a Wheat Kernel
Wheat, like all cereals, comes in kernels. Each kernel has three parts:
The Branis the external layer, full of fibres, some proteins, minerals, and more.
The Endosperm represents about 80% of the single grain. This is the treasure chest for us bakers.
The Germ is the embryo of the wheat plant, packed with nutrients: proteins, fats, vitamins, and minerals. It's about 2.5% of the single seed.
When you grind the whole wheat kernel, bran and germ included, you get wholemeal flour. When that flour undergoes various stages of filtering, you get white flour, which comes ONLY from the endosperm.
And the endosperm contains the elements that we, as pizzaioli, discuss all the time: carbohydrates and proteins. They determine how much water our flour will absorb, which means they heavily influence the hydration we can afford with that particular flour.
The Hidden Water Absorbers
Most of those carbohydrates are starch, around 75% of the total. During milling, some starch granules get damaged. Here's the surprising part: while undamaged starch absorbs water up to half its weight, damaged starch can absorb up to TWO times its weight. Overall, about 46% of the total water in your dough is absorbed by starch.
Then there are the pentosans. They're just 2 or 3% of the total, but they absorb up to TEN times their weight in water. They're associated with around 23% of total water absorption.
Now, there's no way to know how much of these carbohydrates are in your flour, unless you ask the mill. But that's not really a problem, because we can focus on the element that's always disclosed: protein content.
Even though flour contains way less proteins than starch, consider this: proteins absorb water up to two times their weight. A small change goes a long way, as they account for around 31% of total water absorption.
The Protein Rule (With a Catch)
As a rule of thumb: the higher the protein content, the higher the water absorption. Just check the nutritional table on the package.
However, we must always be aware: two flours with the same amount of proteins may NOT absorb the same amount of water, because carbohydrates play their role too.
And here's another crucial point: proteins contained in the bran absorb little to no water. So don't be tricked if you see a wholemeal flour with very high protein content, that's not enough. Wholemeal flour contains fibres, and they do absorb water, so that's another element to factor in.
How Professionals Really Measure Flour
On a professional level, water absorption is calculated using a farinograph, a machine that prepares a small batch of dough and measures the resistance it opposes to the mixer's hooks.
Another interesting machine is the Falling Number tester. It determines an index called... Falling Number, which tells you how active the enzymes are in your flour. This determines how quickly the complex structures in the dough will break down.
In a nutshell:
Low Falling Number = high enzyme activity = short rising time recommended
High Falling Number = low enzyme activity = long fermentation possible
The last machine worth mentioning is the Alveograph. It's used to determine the strength of the flour, quantified by an index called W.
While protein content is a good indicator for strength, the Alveograph gives us greater accuracy. It makes a small batch of dough with certain standards, then blows air inside it so it inflates like a bubble until it pops. The machine draws a chart called an alveogram.
Please note that the alveograph is only used in some countries, Italy and France for example.
Gluten: What It Actually Is and Where It Comes From
The proteins we've been talking about produce gluten. And we all know gluten is essential in any dough because it holds the gas that allows rising during fermentation.
But here's what many don't realize: IN the flour, you will NOT find gluten as it is.
Gluten is a complex protein that forms when two families of proteins bond together: Glutenins and Gliadins.
Glutenins give elasticity, the ability of a stretched dough to return to its original dimension. This is somehow expressed by the "P" value of an alveogram.
Gliadins give extensibility, the opposite of elasticity. Your dough stretches and stays there, without snapping back. This is somehow expressed by the "L" value of an alveogram.
The different proportion of glutenins and gliadins determines the quality of the gluten they can build, and consequently the characteristics of the dough, including the P/L ratio from an alveogram.
The Truth About 00 Flour
P/L ratio, W index, they're not used everywhere, but they're definitely standard in Italy, where we deal every day with 00 flour.
Many people obsess with 00 and swear it's the only flour for pizza because it's finely milled and works miracles. I'll cut the long story short: it's not true at all.
00 is NOT finely milled. It does NOT have higher protein content compared to other flours. It does NOT make better pizza.
00 is one of the names Italians give to flour, a category. We have four more names, and the whole range goes:
00, 0, 1, 2, and Integrale (Wholemeal)
They're in order of refinement, with 00 and Integrale as the extremes. While 00 is the most filtered and contains just the endosperm. Integrale is not filtered at all and also contains wheat germ and bran.
This classification comes from a law that doesn't mention milling or purpose. What defines the classification is ash content, increasingly higher when you go from 00 to Integrale.
The same law also defines Semola (Semolina) a quite coarse product of grinding and filtering HARD wheat, whereas everything we've discussed so far is flour from soft wheat.
Hard wheat usually contains a higher amount of proteins. And being hard, it requires more effort to be reduced to flour, leading to more damaged starch. Therefore, semolina and flour from hard wheat absorb more water than flour from soft wheat.
So... What's the Best Flour for Pizza?
Well, flour is quite a little world of its own, with all these tiny things inside and the influence they have.
At this point, the question should arise: "What is the best flour to make pizza?"
Or, more geekily: "How do I CHOOSE the flour for the pizza I want to make?"
There's no one-size-fits-all, but if you're ready to go deeper, I've got you covered:
Grab The Pizza Geek and learn everything you need to know to master pizza making, or Join my YouTube channel to unlock exclusive content, including the complete video that answers to these questions, plus monthly live Q&A sessions with me.
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Ciao, see you next time 🍕
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