Elaine's Top Pizza Flour For Sourdough Tips

Tips for using Cotswold Pizza Flour with Elaine Boddy's Sourdough Master Recipe

This flour has been designed to relax so that it is perfect for handling and shaping for making pizza bases, therefore it includes a flour conditioner to assist that. 

As explained by Sophie Carey, Matthews Bakery Development Manager:

“The improver is a combination of two things - one is a form of vitamin C which basically helps to give the dough extra oven spring - you can get similar results by adding a squeeze of lemon to some recipes or by adding some vitamin C powder.

"This vitamin C (ascorbic acid is its technical name) helps to emphasise the size of your gas bubbles, giving you a more open structure. The other part of it is a dough relaxer - this helps the dough to relax quicker meaning you can stretch it further - making it great for pizzas!”

Further explained by Bertie:

“A dough improver is a combination of ingredient's used in baking to enhance the quality of the dough, improver contains ascorbic acid, it relaxes the dough, helps it to develop stronger gluten network. It improves fermentation by supporting natural yeast activity which also improves dough handling helping make the flour more consistent.”

Pizza Flour For Sourdough? 

When using the flour to make dough for our sourdough you will find therefore that it produces a very soft, very stretchy and bouncy dough which might seem a bit challenging to work with when you first use it. 

So my recommendation, as you’ll see in the recipe, is to start with less water in the dough to make it easier to work with. You may decide to stick with that moving forward too because it produces a wonderful loaf, and because there’s never any reason or need to use more water in dough just for the sake of it, finding the best level of water for the flour that you’re using is far more important than increasing the amount of water unnecessarily.

The Loaf

This dough will bake up to a loaf with a very thin crust and a perfectly light and chewy interior, as we expect from our sourdough, but with the dough improver in the mix you will see a slightly different look to the external crust. This is all normal.

The flour also works perfectly to make sandwich loaves, it produces a really soft fluffy loaf, and if you do fancy trying that then I do suggest slightly increasing the water again as the tin will give the dough the shape that it needs.

If you do make dough for pizzas - after you’ve already shaped it into dough balls and didn’t get round to using it - place the dough into loaf pans, let it prove again and bake into sandwich loaves. You can snuggle 1 or 2 dough balls into a cube Pullman tin, or 2 or 3 together into a standard size tin, it works very well! 

Elaine's Sourdough Master Recipe With Cotswold Pizza Flour

Get Elaine's Master Recipe tweaked for use with Cotswold Pizza Flour here. Elaine "Foodbod" Boddy has made this fantastic recipe for you to try at home. Proving that the Cotswold Pizza Flour can make more than just great pizza, this tasty sourdough loaf recipe is an absolute must try!  

More Pizza Flour Sourdough Tips Coming Soon!

Watch out for more on this in August as I bring you another fabulous Pizza episode with our very own pizza superstar, Scott Deley, on the Foodbod Podcast on 16th August, plus I’ll be sharing lots of posts showing how I’ve used the Pizza flour in various loaves on my Instagram and Facebook accounts.