Someone try this flour mix, please.

[AKSteve]

I live in Alaska and can't find KASL flour anywhere, so I decided to try to add a bit of high gluten whole wheat flour to my King Arthur Bread Flour. The results have completely changed my pizza quality. This is the first time I've been able to hand stretch my dough. It's almost impossible to rip. When I make the pizza in my regular oven at around 520 degrees, the crust is light and puffy. When I cook it at a higher temp on my outdoor grill at around 700 degrees, it's even lighter and puffier (bubble city).

I only substituted 1/2cup of the high gluten whole wheat flour, but the results have been pretty amazing. It's Fairhaven Flour Mill Whole Wheat Bread Flour (Fine Ground Montana Grown Hard, Red Spring Wheat). According to their website, it's 15% and higher in protein. It's organic, too. I found it at the local organic produce store.

The dough mix was originally based on Peter Reinhart's neo-neopolitan dough mix:

4 1/2 cups King Arthur Bread Flour
1/2 cup Fairhaven Whole Wheat Bread Flour
3 tsp Kosher Salt
2 Tb. Extra Virgin Olive Oil
1 TB. Honey (I used Spanish Rosemary & Lavender honey)
around 2 cups (maybe a tiny bit more) of room temp water
1 tsp. SAF Instant Yeast

I mixed it in my Viking stand mixer. I put the flour & salt in the bowl and hand mixed everything up. Then I poured on the olive oil & honey. I combined the yeast with the first cup of water and poured that on. I started the mixer at the lowest setting and then added more water 1/4 cup at a time until all the dough formed into a ball. The total time at this mixing speed was the recommended 4 minutes. I let it rest 5 minutes and then mixed it at one notch above the lowest setting for an additional 2 minutes.

I divided the dough into 3 balls, oiled them, and zip lock bagged them. They sat out for 15 minutes and then went in the fridge for 48 hours. The balls were removed from the fridge 2 hours before forming into a crust.

If someone else could find some of this same flour, I'd appreciate hearing their results, especially in comparison to KASL flour.

Thanks,

Steve

[AKSteve]

I've made this dough a few times now and I'm still really pleased with it. I hope someone else with a bit more experience than me can try this mix out and tell me what they think. I only have one pic of a finished pizza, and no pics of individual slices. But you can see how puffy the edges get. The crust was light, crispy, and chewy. I've been hand forming my pizzas lately, which probably adds to the puffiness. I'm not very good at it, though. The middle is quite thin, but the edges are a bit too thick. Also, this pizza stuck to the peel when going onto the pizza stone, so it got a little messed up.

[Pete-zza]

Steve,

Thanks for posting on your bread flour/whole wheat flour pizza. I like your thinking on this. And I like the looks of your pizza.

My estimation is that the addition of the 1/2 cup of the whole wheat flour to the 4.5 cups of the KA bread flour will raise the protein content of the combined flours above the 12.7% of the KA bread flour, but not by enough to get to the 14.2% of the KASL. The only way I can think of offhand to get to the KASL level without adding more whole wheat flour, which might not be a good idea, would be to add a small amount of vital wheat gluten.

I don't have access to the Fairhaven Flour Mill whole wheat flour, but I do have some of the KA whole wheat flour. It has 14.2% protein and is milled from hard red spring wheat from the Northern Plains. (KA also has an organic version at 14%.) For bread flour, I don't presently have the KA bread flour on hand but I do have some Giusto's Artisan Malted Bread flour, which might serve as a reasonable substitute for the KA bread flour. Maybe this combination is worth trying to see if the results replicate yours. Since the KA whole wheat flour has less protein than the Fairhaven whole wheat flour, I would be inclined to add a bit of vital wheat gluten to close that gap. BTW, was the pizza shown in the photo baked in your home oven or on the grill?

I think your dough stuck to the peel because of the amount of water you used. The Reinhart Neo-Neapolitan dough recipe calls for 1 3/4 cups water for 5 cups of flour. My recollection from another Reinhart recipe (the NY style) using the same quantities of flour and water is that the hydration ratio (the ratio of the weight of water to the weight of flour) is about 62.4%. Admittedly, the whole wheat flour can absorb more water than the bread flour, but it will not itself take up the full extra 1/4+ cup that you added. Unless you used a heavy hand in measuring out the flour, I estimate that the hydration ratio you used was over 70%, which would be very high for a pizza dough.

I don't know where you are located in Alaska, but there is an outfit called Charlie's Produce, in Seattle, that sells high-gluten flours in 50-lb. bags in the Anchorage and Dutch Harbor areas. I believe it is the Fisher brand, which was acquired by Pendleton Mills. I think one of the flours is the Mondako pizzeria flour, which is used by many pizza operators in that part of the country. I don't know if Charlie's sells at the retail level, or if you are close enough to Anchorage to benefit, but their website is charliesproduce.com if you'd like to investigate.

Peter

[AKSteve]

Thanks for the response. I cooked this pizza on my grill at a little over 750 degrees. I think the temp was actually a bit too high as my toppings started to burn before the crust got any real char on the bottom. I've cooked this same dough in my oven at around 520 degrees (my oven stalls at this temp) and I got really good results as well, although the crust didn't get as bubbly.

I know it doesn't seem like adding 1/2 cup of this Fairhaven flour would make much of a difference, but it has completely changed my pizza quality. I don't know if it's just really high quality flour, or what. I'm just reading an article with a quote by Chris Bianco of Pizzeria Bianco that seems to sum up my recent success: “There's definitely a science to it but it's almost like a farmboy science. I put it in, I don't know what the hell it does, but it works.”

You're right about my using too much water, but as long as the pizza tastes great, I'm not too concerned. I usually dust some corn meal on the pizza peel, but I got cocky and tried it with just flour this time and it stuck. One of these days I'll end up following the recipe exactly to see if I get better results. I end up using too much water mostly because I'm a novice at this. When my mixer won't gather all the flour together, my inclination is to pour in a little more water to help the loose flour join the rest of the dough.

My family actually owns a wholesale foodservice company in Anchorage and deals with Charlies Produce occasionally. My mother said she'll check to see if CP has any high-gluten flour we can buy.  I hate to say it, but I don't really like most of the products at my family's business enough to use them on my own pizza. Either that, or the bulk quantity is too high. I don't need 20lbs of Fontina Chicago Style topping. The only flour we sell is ADM All-Montana bleached, enriched flour. An awful lot of pizza places up here use it, but I haven't tried it myself because I don't want to be stuck with 50lbs of it if it isn't very good. Do you have any info on this flour? I'm going to see if I can find out the gluten info.

Thanks,

Steve

[Pete-zza]

Steve,

The next time you make the dough, I suggest that you hold back on some of the water. The amount doesn't have to be exact. A quarter of a cup will do. As the dough is being mixed and kneaded, just trickle a bit more of the water into the mixer bowl. When you see that the dough won't really take any more, you can stop. You can also let the dough rest for a minute or two and try adding a bit more water again. And don't be afraid to stop the bowl and use your hands to help the process, either to better incorporate the ingredients (and especially the oil) or to reorient the dough so that it kneads better and doesn't "ride" the dough hook. Also, feel free to use a spatula or something similar to scrape the dough ingredients into the path of the dough hook, especially at the beginning of the mixing process where the flour and water tend to stick to the sides of the bowl. If you wait for the machine to do all these things by itself, you may find that you end up with an overkneaded dough. It is better that the dough be slightly underkneaded than overkneaded, unless you want a breadlike quality to the crumb, with small, tight holes rather than large, irregularly-shaped ones. 

I checked the ADM website and couldn't find the flour you referenced. I did see the Pillsbury Balancer high-gluten flour and another high-gluten flour called Gigantic. I know that the Balancer flour is a popular one but I don't know anything about the Gigantic. I still lean toward the KASL and, in this regard, I might mention that there is a bakery distributor, Dawn Food Products, in Seattle. Most of the Dawn distributor locations seem to carry the KASL (all the locations I have looked into do carry it). Since your family is in the business and has a tax number, maybe they can look into the possibility of getting some KASL from Dawn. The Dawn telephone number is 425-251-4022.

Peter