Sainsbury's do in fact sell a oo flour in a pink bag called pasta flour so it may even have some semolina flour it it.. But there are better genuine italian flours well worth the trouble to find. The 00 flour makes an enormous difference. With it the dough gets perfectly elastic, does not break up and behaves beautifully especially when hand making pizza (no eggs) or pasta.

A few pointers.
for pizza use tipo00 flour,it makes the difference between "all right" and great.
cut down the yeast, it tastes bad and the dough should left to mature for a min. 4 hours so you don't want a big puff ball. 3g is enough per pound.
Use best possible salt, and two tsp per pound/half kilo flour
don't cook the tomato sauce, use as fresh high quality San Marzano chopped tomatoes. tinned from sainsbury's
Cook it hot as you can.  Jamie's pizza oven does it in 90sec, that's 60sec @near 400degC  then held up to the roof for a short 700+degC blast.

In a normal kitchen, recreate this at the top of your hottest oven, preferably one with top and bottom heaters, on a preheated pizza stone.  You can actually get better result from a halogen oven.


for pasta use the same tipo 00 flour. the correct way to measure egg/flour ratio is to simply add whole eggs to a well in the flour, no water nor oil, until wet enough.. more flour or an egg as required.

Try not to roll a pizza, just stretch and prod gently by fingertips.

My best pizza recipe is 500g tipo oo, 10g best flake salt, preferably Isle de Re fleur de sel. Mix in 325g warm water but leave to soak half an hour. then add Only 3g yeast, mix till elastic, five mins.
make into six balls to leave covered in the fridge for even a week to use as required

What??? yeast started off with Yeast???


Welcome to the forums seanfromsurrey...

I usually make pizza dough with strong bread flour, but I've had success with plain (all-purpose) flour and also with half plain and half wholemeal bread flour.

If I want to freeze the base, I bake it until set but not coloured, freeze, then finish baking from frozen.

I tried freezing the raw dough and baking from frozen, but it never rose as well as I wanted.

Have never tried 00 flour.

Kye, SR flour is just flour with baking powder already added (i.e. a mix of bicarbonate of soda and cream of tartar). The advantage with SR flour is that you can use imprecise or odd quantities of flour and know that the ratio of flour to raising agent will still be good. The disadvantage, apparently, is that it goes off and that after a long time the raising agent will no longer work. So people say, anyway, but it's never happened to me.

According to my baking powder pot, the correct ratio to replace SR flour is 8oz/225g of plain flour to 3 tsp (15ml) baking powder. Where SR comes into its own is if you want to use a quantity other than 225g!