Mulino Padano S15 Tipo 00 Pizza Flour – Medium Proofing (1kg/2.2lbs)

This flour is a new favorite of mine. It’s so easy to mix with and it’s very strong. I would suggest hydrations around 65-70% for the perfect sweet spot. It can withstand long fermentations up to 72 hours. The flavor is nice, bready, but THE TEXTURE is so cripsy. My new go-to.

This flour is just amazing, I just made my best pizza in teglia ever, mixing the s15 flour (70%) with the “tipo 2” (30%) from the same mill (Mulino padano).
If you wanna try to replicate it I’ll leave the recipe here.
350gr (12oz) S15 pizza flour
150gr (5oz) Tipo 2 flour
340gr (12fl oz) water room temperature
10gr (0.35 oz or 2 tsp) salt
4gr (0.14oz) fresh yeast (look for Fleischmanns compressed fresh yeast).
If you don’t want to buy the whole pound block of yeast, try to look for bakeries in your area, and try to ask if they use fresh yeast and they might be able to sell you some.
I don’t recommend using dry yeast or instant yeast. A good alternative would be sourdough starter that I’ve never used, but it would be way better than the two other yeasts I’ve mentioned.

Process:
Knead well all the flour, yeast and 80% of the water. Then add the salt and the remaining 20% of the water little by little until completely absorbed.
This first part will take you 15-20 minutes hand kneading, I didn’t use a spiral mixer.
It will take a while to absorb the last 20% of water. If you struggle in this phase is normal, but don’t give up, keep needing, believe in the process, it just takes some minutes.
Then fold the dough two times (bread style folding) and settle it in a big bowl slightly oiled and cover it with a lid or transparent plastic wrap, the essential is not letting the air getting inside.
Leave the dough at room temperature for an hour and then 24 hours fermenting in the fridge.
Take it out of the fridge, and fold again the dough two times and seal it.
Let it raise for one hour in the same bowl again covered.
Then slightly oil a baking tray and spread the dough as much as you can, if you see that it retracts don’t worry you’ll fix it later, just do your best in this phase and be careful not to tear it.
Then cover the baking tray with transparent plastic wrap for another hour.
Then spread again the dough to cover all the tray’s surface, now you’ll be able to do it because in the meantime the dough raised and relaxed.
Spread the tomato sauce all over the pizza and slightly also on the crust side. You can do this with your hands, I prefer to do that to have more sensibility and control on spreading the sauce instead of using a spoon. I highly recommend a good Italian passata or crushed italian tomatoes or whole san Marzano tomatoes to squeeze by hand before putting them on the pizza.
I tried different tomato sauces from US but the huge problem is their acidity.
For the tomato sauce I just added some extra virgin olive oil, some salt and some basil leaves.
Cook the pizza on the bottom of the oven just with the tomato sauce at 500°F (260°C)
for about 18-20 minutes (you can check the pizza’s bottom at around 16 minutes to see if it needs 2 or 4 more minutes).
Then take the pizza off the tray and put it on the oven rack, add the mozzarella cheese (previously dried squeezing it between paper towels and left in the fridge for about 10 hours. You can either do this or buy the hard mozzarella block that’s already dehydrated).
Put the rack in the central part of the oven half way from the top and bottom heating element.
Now, if you want just a Margherita pizza (cheese pizza) let the pizza baking for 5 minutes.
If you want to add other ingredients as I did, I suggest to bake the pizza just with mozzarella for 3 minutes, take it off the oven and add your favorite ingredients, then other 2 minutes in the oven.
If it results wet because the mozzarella released some of its water, just lightly dab the liquid with some paper towels paying attention to not remove sauce or other ingredients.
If you want to put prosciutto crudo, do not put it in the oven during the baking time, that goes at the end, when the pizza is out of the oven and it’s already completely baked.
Enjoy.

My flour was shipped in a paper bag. So when I opened it, there was a huge gash in the actual flour bag, which resulted in me losing about a quarter of the flour. I notified the company of this and included pictures. I didn't hear anything back from them. The flour itself is great, but I don't think I would buy it from this company again.