As a home baker will you be cooking in a conventional gas oven or are you using a Wood fired Oven??? Reason I asked is that besides the hydration issues discussed here, Caputo 00 Flour doesn’t brown very well south of 700 degrees. What I do is make a 57% Hydation Dough, but I will add Barley Malt Syrup(~10 grams) and a 1/4 tsp of Malted Barley Flour to a 500 grams of flour to encourage browning. Italian 00 flours are unmalted where KABF already contains a small amount of Malted Barley to increase Amylase activity. Also only use 1/4 tsp of IDY. I prefer a small amount of yeast and long proof times.
At 57% the little red bags with the pictures of pizza, pasta and cookies on it, will shine. All that is needed is either a 4-6 hr countertop ferment after dividing into Pats, or a 24-48 cool rise in the fridge wil add loads of flavor.

If you were going to mix Semolina 20% would be a good starting point, but you will still need to drop the hydration to likely 57-59%. Ideally pizza dough should be a nice dough that will still have a ~1″ section of dough that wont come off the bottom of the KA mixer at speed 2 with the dough hook.

Keep us posted!! Good Luck

Two questions 1.) can you be a bit more specific about the flour; and (2.) what style of pizza do you intend to make with the Caputo flour ? The reason I ask is there are two red bags in the Caputo line in the US. One is labeled “Chef’s Flour”, and comes in small 1 kg (2.2 lb) bags. The other is labeled Farina di Grano Tenero “Tipo 00″ and is found in larger bags. They are may be slightly different beasts (exactly what is in the Chef’s Flour bag the debate rages on), but either way they are very, very different than the KA Bread flour you have been using.

Both the red bags are predominantly soft wheat flour, more like American pastry flour. Both claim 12.5% protein, but the gluten developed by either is weak compared to KA’s hard wheat flours. The KA bread flour will take a lot of water, perhaps more so when admixed with a Semolina, and produce a fairly elastic dough and chewy crust (the semolina probably adds some additional crunch or bite). The soft Caputo flours, by comparison, will take less water to develop a comparable dough stiffness and the resulting dough will be much more extensible and less elastic. The more extensible dough will not rise as much and will not support a load (toppings) comparable to the more elastic dough. When baked the soft wheat Caputo crust will be more tender. Both flours are excellent for the right application, meaning style of pizza, but the appropriate styles are very different.

The Caputo flours, by themselves, are best suited to very thin crust pizzas with very light toppings (Neapolitan style). If you read through the discussion above two of us target hydration levels around 57-59 % using Caputo flour for Neapolitan style crusts. Anything more than ~59% and you will end up with a very slack dough that will probably be very challenging.

Hope this helps as a starter.

If you want to find a bunch of game meat sausages, then you should check out the selection at Fossil Farms. They have great quality meats in general, but I can see the sausages being highly compatible with pizza making.

What you are doing is not really a great departure to VPN tradition. There are 4 “official” Pies in the VPN…..Margherite, Marinara(all sauce no cheese), Quattro Formaggi(all Cheese no sauce) and Salame( a pie with sauce, cheese and any type of provision, Salami, Proscuitto, Cappicola, Pancetta ect).

The element I am missing is the wood fired oven…Someday Maybe! I think I have taken Propane to the limit of what I can achieve.

Joanie and Eric:

I do make Foccacia in several ways depending on available time. Erics recipe is technically a direct method, but the long cool rise and high hydration gives the flavor of an indirect method.

I have perfected a mixed Levain with Poolish and a Secondary Method with a Biga and an all sourdough method with Biga and/or Poolish. The sourdough is the most time consuming,and requires a min of 8 hrs combined proof time. All are Delicious….with I believe is my Secondary method with Biga is my favorite. I make the Biga from my natural Levain which also gets a cool rise. I don’t do that one often, but when I do its special. Biga is made with KA bread flour and the bulk of the flour is either a W300 Tipo 00 flour or my American approximation…Heckers AP, Unbleached/unbrominated. all are 62.5% Hydration and contain the same ratio of ingredients, I will just subtract the flour used to prepare the Biga from the bulk of the remaining flour.

While I LOVE the taste of Italian 00 Flour, I think my family has been using Heckers for ~57 years. Heckers is to Chicago Deep Dish Pizza as Tipo 00 flour is to pizza napoletana…its the “official flour” of the Midwest Deep Dish community. Its my Go To when I run out of 00 flour, though 00 is still my favorite.

Consistent with that thought one of our family favorites here is a simple pizza we call “The Dough Boy” — a Napolenta skin, coated (brushed) with very finely chopped garlic in EVOO, sprinkled with Fleur de Sel, freshly ground black pepper, fresh thyme leaves and a maybe a few rosemary leaves, fired at 700-750 °F until charred a bit and done, then topped with a sprinkle of freshly grated Parmigiana Reggiano. It’s hard to get much better.

Pizza is simple food….the more people try and modernize it the more they ruin it….like the baked zit pies you see in dive pizzarias here in NJ…they become vehicles for toppings. But simple is not really so simple….you cant hide bad dough, processed cheese foodproduct, soybean oil on a Pizza Margherita….Once you start making pies with buffalo chicken wings and Hot sauce, the focal point is the toppings, they can be served on a ceiling tile at that point!