Pizza Dough or Bread Dough? Why Your Flour Decides More Than Your Recipe Does
A 67% hydration pizza recipe that also makes a very good loaf of bread, and why that only works with the right flour.
For years I kept my own pizza dough recipe at 67% hydration. That’s what I settled on through training and trial and error, and it’s what I still reach for most weekends. At some point, more or less by accident, I used the same dough to bake a loaf of bread instead of shaping it into rounds. It worked. Not “edible, if you squint” worked — genuinely good bread, with a proper open crumb. What came out of the oven was, essentially, a ciabatta.
That shouldn’t have surprised me as much as it did. But it took me a while to figure out why it worked at all.
Tip: got a few pizza dough balls left over at the end of a session? Shape and bake them off as ciabatta. They’re perfect as a closing bite with drinks, or saved for the next day.
The percentage never lied, the flour did
My first assumption was the obvious one: pizza dough and bread dough are just different things, built for different hydration ranges, and what happened with that 67% dough was a lucky exception. That assumption didn’t survive contact with a second experiment.
I tried the exact same recipe again, same percentages, same method, except this time with ordinary supermarket wheat flour instead of what I’d used before. The dough never came together properly. It stayed wet, slack, impossible to shape. Same numbers on paper, completely different dough in my hands.
The recipe hadn’t changed. The flour had. That was the actual variable all along — not whether I was calling it pizza or calling it bread.
What made the difference
The flour behind that original 67% dough was Pinsa Romana, a patented Italian flour blend built specifically to handle high hydration. It mixes wheat flour, rice flour, and soy flour with a touch of dried sourdough, and the combination lets the dough hold onto far more water than a standard flour can, while staying light and easy to work with.
I’m not going to get into the full story of Pinsa Romana here. It deserves its own post, and it’s getting one. For now, the relevant point is narrower: that flour is engineered to absorb water most flours simply can’t.
Why the same recipe failed with supermarket flour
Which is exactly what I ran into. Standard wheat flour from the supermarket doesn’t have anywhere near the same water-holding capacity. Push it to 67% hydration and it doesn’t turn into a lighter, airier dough. It just stays too wet, because the flour can’t absorb what the recipe is asking of it.
So the recipe wasn’t wrong. It was just written for a flour that could carry it, and I’d swapped in a flour that couldn’t.
Strength decides your ceiling, not a chart
This connects directly to something I wrote about in Flour Power: A World Tour of the Bag You Reach For Every Day: 00, T55, Type 550 and a plain protein percentage are all measuring different things, and none of them hand you a ready-made answer for how much water your dough can take. That was deliberate. There isn’t a universal chart that says “this flour, this hydration.” Strength is something you find out by working with the dough in front of you, not something you look up.
My Pinsa Romana dough and my supermarket-flour dough prove the same point from opposite directions: the ceiling on hydration is set by the flour’s strength, not by whether what you’re making is called pizza or bread. If you want a deeper technical breakdown of the baker’s percentage math itself, Weekend Bakery has a genuinely excellent explanation of it, and it’s well worth the read if you want the full picture behind these numbers.
Why I built two different starting points
This is also why Baker Calculator’s pizza dough recipe sits at a deliberately modest 54% hydration, built around an ordinary, medium-strong Tipo 00. It’s a flour nearly anyone can buy, and a hydration it can handle without complaint. It’s not the most exciting number I could have chosen. It’s the one that works reliably on the first try, regardless of which bag of flour you’re holding.
From there, it’s on you to find your own ceiling, the same way I found mine. Use a stronger flour, push the hydration up in small steps, and pay attention to how the dough behaves at each stage rather than chasing a percentage for its own sake. That’s where a dough like my 67% Pinsa Romana version comes from: not a formula, but testing what a specific flour could actually carry.
More on Pinsa Romana itself soon. There’s a lot more to that flour than fits here.
— Rob