Let’s talk about flour.
When it comes to pizza dough everyone has an opinion what flour makes the best crust and we were no different when developing our dough recipe. It doesn’t matter is you have the right amounts of yeast, water and salt if you end up blending it with a sub-par flour.
For years it was thought that the only way to have success making a great dough was to use a 00 flour out of Italy (Cultural bias? Perhaps.). Like many local restaurants we had to ask ourselves, “We want to support local businesses, but what is we can’t find anyone who can produce the quality flour necessary to make a great dough?”
Enter THE SHEPHERD’S GRAIN. Check out their story here.
The story of founders Karl Kupers and Fred Fleming is almost impossible to resist when you think of family, commitment to sustainable agriculture and the support they have brought to the local farming economy. For us, the icing on the cake is the way Shepherd’s Grain flour performs.
We needed to know some key things about their flour before we could give it the green light:
- How far can the dough stretch before it breaks?
- Can it be stretched relatively quickly before it breaks.
- When stretched does it try to bounce back or will it stay stretched?
All of these are critical components to the handling of and ultimate performance of the dough when it hits the oven and in our early tests Shepherd’s Grain performance performed as well as any 00 flour we tried.
So, we really do feel like we’re able to bring our guests the best of both worlds—the highest quality flour, grown locally by farmers who really care about creating the best possible products they can.
