>why would you bother with a substitute for a regular pizza?

Shelf life, reduced calories, ease of working with, etc, etc. Basically all those secondary goals you optimize for once it's a given that the pizza will pizza properly.

there are different flours available which vary in suitability for different purposes and in cost. King Arthur Flour has a computer controlled mill and they offer a service to bread makers to let them specify their own "recipe" for the flour they wish to order.

https://www.cooksinfo.com/flour-grades

excerpt:

"French bakers will use straight flour in their bread making; North Americans and British generally don’t.

"Straight flour is separated by sifting in other grades. The straight flour is passed along a roller over different sieves. Different grades fall through the appropriate sieve along the roller. In the percentages given below, the lower the percentage of straight flour that falls through a particular grading sieve, the more desirable the flour."

It's annoying how flours are graded differently in different countries and following recipes from other countries becomes much harder because you need a spreadsheet to figure out the equivalent local grade and often it just isn't available in normal super markets who prefer to stock ten different brands of the same 2-5 grades instead of actual variety. /rant

Pizza adjacent:

Some clever fellow decided to shave a nickel by padding their shredded parmesan with sawdust and now the other brands of parmesan have "No cellulose!" on the label as if that is a selling point. Which it is, now, alas.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/feb/17/parmesa...

Reminds me of the Adulteration of Food and Drugs Act passed in Britain in 1860 to try to stop bakers from adulterating bread in all kind of unhealthy ways..

In the best case, you might have had chalk added to whiten your bread. In worse cases, alum..

A similar law in the US exists to prevent non-food being put inside food. It's why kinder surprise is banned in the US. It's not because Americans are "too stupid" to avoid choking, it's because the rule already existed and there's not really a good justification to change it for the sake of a foreign candy company.