We know many basic recipes online that just say to use all-purpose flour, and they leave it at that. However, choosing the right flour for the crispiest crust isn't as simple as going to the store and picking up the first bag of flour you see.
Flour needs to have certain specific qualities in order to lend itself to making a great pizza crust, especially if you're looking for a more traditional Italian-style pizza.
You also need flour that will give you a strong gluten mesh, meaning that your flour needs to have a higher percentage of protein. This is why bread flour is a better choice than all-purpose flour for pizza dough--it's 12-14% gluten content allows the dough to develop a very strong gluten mesh during the resting period. In contrast, highly refined all-purpose flour may only have a 9% gluten content.
Another reason that bread flour works is because you can find both highly refined bread flours to whole wheat bread flours, to everything in between. The more refined versions would be similar to Italian 00 grain, while whole wheat flour with a naturally high percentage of bran would be too dense, and therefore lead to a heavy crust.
However, a less highly refined bread flour will give you something similar to what we use in our professional pizza production, which is type 1. The type 1 flour is more complete, but not quite a whole grain, so the percentage of bran in the dough is low enough that it doesn't negatively impact the structure of the dough.
The majority of Italian pizzerias prefer type 1 flour because it results in pizza that is easier to digest without the "heaviness" that someone may feel after eating a pizza made from more refined flour.
It may be tricky to find the Type 1 flour in the USA. However, Molini Pivetti, Caputo, or King Arthur manufacture great flours for pizza you should be able to find even in the States.
