👇 Visit my website https://matteoferroni.it/ 👇 Discover my cooking courses https://matteoferroni.it/corsi-di-cuc... Hello everyone from Matteo, in this video we talk about hydration. What is hydration? It is the quantity of water or liquids in general that a final dough can absorb and it is an element of hydration expressed as a percentage of the weight of the flour. For example, when talking about pizza, when we say this is a pizza dough with 70 percent hydration, it means that there will be 70 percent water on the weight of the flour. If I knead a kilo of flour, I put 700g of water. This is to give a simple example of a dough that is all in all simple like pizza dough in which there is only water as a liquid, but in other doughs like brioche, leavened, panettone, we can also find other liquids in the recipe, other elements that are halfway between liquid and fat like eggs, yolk, cream, butter. Even butter contains a little water, so all the liquids present in the dough give life to the final hydration of the dough which is expressed as a percentage. What is the purpose of adding water to dough? It is used to create the gluten mesh, or the mass, the actual dough. Flour contains various proteins but two of which when they come into contact with water and are worked create gluten, or the rubbery element that holds the dough together. How can we exploit this element to our advantage or disadvantage by remembering that if we are making a dough that must be nice and firm (bread, pizza) we must create the gluten well and use a good amount of liquids, while in dough (like shortcrust pastry) that must not be rubbery there must be as little gluten as possible, we will not put as much liquid or as little as possible. In pizza therefore this factor influences various elements in the pizza. First of all the final result. Usually pizza and bread, the higher the hydration, the more you can have a very open crumb with very large bubbles and many pronounced alveoli. However, the most important element to take into consideration regarding hydration is the final cooking, because especially in pizza, a lot of water we put in the dough, a lot of water will have to come out during cooking, so the more water we put in the dough, the longer the cooking time and consequently it means that I have to lower the oven temperature. Huh? In what sense? In this sense: if I make a round, Neapolitan pizza in a very hot wood-fired oven (400-500 degrees), the pizza must be left for a minute and then come out. If in that dough I reached 80 percent hydration, so on a kilo 800g of water, imagine such a soft, liquid dough, entered into the oven at 400-500 degrees, it burns on the outside and remains raw on the inside, so we must adjust the hydration based on the cooking time. If we lower the cooking time, it is very short, the hydration must also be low because we must give the water time to come out. For a Neapolitan pizza, the hydration is usually around 55-60 percent water. Vice versa, when we make a pizza at a lower temperature (270-280 degrees) like the Roman pan, we can reach a higher hydration of around 70-75 percent because the cooking will last 10-15 minutes and therefore there will be time for the water to come out easily. So the important thing to understand about hydration is this: what final result do we want to have and what oven do we have available, what recipe do we want to make. If we want to make a pizza in a wood oven we will keep a certain type of hydration, so a little lower, if we want to make a pizza in a theft at a slightly lower temperature we add a little more water so the mass will have time to cook properly. What type of water should we use? Tap water is fine. Bottled water, still, sparkling, it makes little difference. Subscribe to the channel and activate notifications to stay up to date on the release of the next videos. Follow me on other social networks, Instagram and Facebook all the links are in the description. See you in the next video, bye! #MatteoFerroni #Lievitomadre #Lievitodibirra ****************************************************** 👇 Visit my website https://matteoferroni.it/ 📖 Download my free ebook HOW TO STUFF A PIZZA: MISTAKES TO AVOID AND RULES TO FOLLOW https://comefarcirelapizza.com 👇 Discover my cooking courses https://matteoferroni.it/corsi-di-cuc... Follow me on Facebook / matteoferronimdc Subscribe to my group MATTY PER LA PIZZA / 398286724447562 Follow me on Instagram / matteoferroni_mdc