Relative Gluten-Free Hydration

Hydration is the pizza-making equivalent of baker’s percentages. In traditional pizza making, if you know the style of pizza you want to make and the typical range of hydration that dough would use, you can dial in a recipe for your particular oven and temperature. However, that general rule of thumb does not apply in gluten-free pizza making.

Gluten-free flours and starches absorb water at wildly different rates. That means that, depending on the component ingredients that make up your pizza flour blend, the same amount of water might yield one dough that’s too wet to work with and another dough that’s too dry to even consider shaping into a pizza. We call this idiosyncrasy relative gluten-free hydration.