A question of flour

trentv

Hey all,
I was wondering if anyone knows anything about flour?
I was going to make some pizza dough, and need "strong flour" according to the recipe i was using, I couldn't get any in the shop last night, and found that i had "cream flour" in the press at home.
I think that cream flour is an irish invention as i cannot find very much on the web except in irish recipes and noone seems to have heard of it.
Does anyone know the difference between cream flower and strong flour / plain flour and whether it could be used in making pizza dough essentially?
Any thoughts would be great, i will probably go ahead and use it and see what the result is just for fun anyway, but any feedback is appreciated........
Cheers!!!

Occidental

Cream Flour = Plain Flour

Same thing

CJ_Will

I’m not sure, but I’ve thought “cream flour” is less about the type of flour, and more just about the way it is prepared. I believe it is just ground more, then bleached white until it has a silkier feel, kind of like a like a cream (thus the name). It seems like you should be able to use it for pizza, but I have never tried (so I can’t say for sure).

Blub2k4

Google is your friend :
Strong flour, increasingly called bread flour on packaging, is suitable for all yeast cookery, for extensible doughs such as choux and filo pastry, and also puff and flaky pastry.

dudara

srong flour is less refined and more suited to making pizzas. It's easily gettable in Tesco and so on.

Alanna

Cream flour (I think it is the Irish equivilent of american superfine flour) is most suitable for making cakes and sweet pastry etc, strong flour has a higher level of gluten in it which is what makes the pizza dough or bread crusty and chewy. Pizza dough made with cream flour would probably be crumbly and not very nice.

the evil belly

i work in a pizza place and we make our own dough. we use odlums cream flour. might help, might not.

Blub2k4

Alanna wrote:

Cream flour (I think it is the Irish equivilent of american superfine flour)

Doubt it, superfine would be the equivalent of 00 flour from Italy for making pasta.

Mewzel

strong flour has a higher gluten content, therefore making the dough more elastic.
plain/cream flour work too though

oblivious

dudara wrote: »

srong flour is less refined and more suited to making pizzas. It's easily gettable in Tesco and so on.

Its not less refined it produce from grain that has a higher gluten content and is better suited for breads and such where you want a more elastic dough ,usual in conjunction with yeast as the raising agent

lynngsbart

use strong flour it has a high protien content and a lot of kneading to ativate the gluten the more kneading the tougher and crispier the dough try different times and add semolina and cream flour to it it in differeent amounts till you get what you like trial and error:D

Fringe

Plain/cream flour will still work though. Shouldn't be a huge difference and you won't notice it. As others have said, more gluten just makes it more elastic so you'll get a better dough.

oblivious

If all you have is plain just give the dough an 1-1/2 hour or double in size knock back a let prove again for 30 minutes to 1 hour and then shape the pizza dough.

But with strong flour you can down the one hour rise, then place in the fridge to ripen the gluten over night and then let prove for a hour or two the next day. help increase elasticity and flavor but might be best left to a high gluten flour.

Enjoy

Nothingcompares

What's the recipe? How did you get on, which flour did you use?

Faith

This thread is 4 years old and was bumped by a post that's now deleted. I doubt the OP will still be reading it!

oblivious

Sorry about that faith, this thread appeared yesterday as a fresh unread one in food and drink I didn't even look at the previous posting dates, very strange?

Sorry again my slip up

Faith

oblivious wrote: »

Sorry about that faith, this thread appeared yesterday as a fresh unread one in food and drink I didn't even look at the previous posting dates, very strange?

Sorry again my slip up

Not at all, the same thing has happened to me before. Might as well lock this thread though, I think the OP got his answer .