babadoh blended dough

the world of brewing and baking are such wonderful bedfellows. who doesn't enjoy a pint of beer with a pizza or better still, pizza with a nice cold pint? it's no surprise that so many home pizzaiolos have at some time or other tried their hands at brewing beer.

we discovered both around the same time. process wise, they are very similar. both brewing and baking involve wheat, water, salts and yeast. the baker and brewer process the ingredients and then leave the yeast to create the magic. so for us, it seemed obvious to borrow the skills, tips and ideas from each.

simple beers like a lager or pale ale use a single type of grain which is then crushed and mixed with warm water to create wort; the sweet liquid the yeast will feast on. more complex beers use a mix of grains, each offering different properties which add to the final product.

it was this mixing of grains that we felt could benefit our pizza dough. we are fans of caputo and while we’ve always preferred to bake with higher hydration dough, when we used super nuvola, the dough was just too sticky and wet to work with. dropping the hydration made this easier but we wanted more than 60%. so we started mixing flours and found that a mixture of 70% caputo blue and 30% caputo super nuvola offered the perfect blend of hydration and light fluffy corniche.

so here is our perfect blended flour recipe for 6 x 250g dough balls (about 12” pizza).

the recipe is based on 24 hours cold bulk proving in the fridge followed by 5 hours proving as balls in babadoh at room temperature. we like to use a home mixer with a dough hook.