I promise that our Test Kitchen is not trying to trick you.
It seems like it should be obvious: Pizza flour it's for pizza and cake flour it's for, well, cake. You don't have to be an experienced baker to figure this out.
But in blatant disregard for those “rules,” our new ones Lemon ricotta cake is made with '00' pizza flour.
A cake that borrows a trick from pizza
Lemon Ricotta Tart is a compelling recipe for many reasons: it's sweet but not sugary, topped with a crunchy lemon glaze and plush whole milk ricotta. But its melt-in-your-mouth texture really makes it stand out, and it's all down to the flour.
Intrigued by this new recipe, I asked developer Sarah Jampel why she chose '00' pizza flour instead of just cake flour for this ricotta cake. “00 is softer than cake flour because it's more finely milled,” she explained. It's also made from a blend of soft and hard wheat, as opposed to hard wheat, like all-purpose flour. and pastry flour. These features are meant to make the best pizza, creating a dough that's easy to handle and giving the crust a crisp outer shell. But in this lemon ricotta cake, the soft flour it makes the cake crumb softer and more delicate.“This cake is so easy,” describes Sarah.
Photography by Danielle Sykes; food styling by Kaitlin Wayne
In fact, although the protein content of '00' pizza flour is actually higher than cake flour – closer to all-purpose flour, in fact – “cake made with pizza flour is softer and easier than if it was made with cake flour”, reports. Sarah. “He'll also grow a little taller.”
She points out that these differences are subtle—you wouldn't notice them unless you compared the two cakes side by side. So you can certainly use cake flour (the cake will still turn out beautiful), but for the best texture (and if you happen to have some '00's you're looking to use), she prefers pizza flour.
Can you substitute pizza flour for cake flour in other recipes?
Inspired by the success of '00' pizza flour in her Lemon Ricotta Cake, Sarah tested the pizza flour in several recipes originally developed for cake flour – including Soft white cake AND Rhubarb-Ginger Coffee Cake — to see if this flour technique could be applied elsewhere. Unfortunately, it is not successful in every case.
“Pizza flour made the cakes incredibly soft—softer than versions made with cake flour,” she reported. Good news! But there was another side. “Some of the desserts made with pizza flour substituted for cake flour were so soft ones that were fragile, and I would worry about layering with dips, creams, fillings, etc. It just doesn't seem like such a delicate cake could hold up,” Sarah says. “After all, I wouldn't recommend a 1:1 pizza flour to cake flour swap in other recipes.” (And for that for what it's worth, you shouldn't substitute cake flour for '00' when making pizza!)
Sarah explained that the reason '00' pizza flour works so well in the Lemon Ricotta Cake is because there's a lot of texture in the cake from other ingredients, like ricotta and lots of eggs. “Because of the support they give, the softness of pizza dough is a benefit in this cake,” she says. “In other recipes, it's more of a liability: the pizza dough is too soft to provide the structure needed for the cake.” Additionally, ricotta cake is a one-layer cake with glaze, not cream, so it's not meant to be stacked or frosted in the first place.
It turns out that not every cake can be treated like a pizza. But in this case Lemon ricotta cakethe results are quite excellent.
Cover photo by Danielle Sykes; food styling by Kaitlin Wayne.
