Help me build a better pizza

Cafe Society
1

I have a pizza stone (purchased when I was on a binge of doing the “artisan bread in 5 minutes a day” thing, and still used periodically for that purpose).

Recently, the kids have wanted to make pizza at home, using a crust recipe that Dweezil brought home from school. It called for a combination of whole wheat, and unbleached white flour. He’s made it twice using just unbleached white flour, since the whole wheat was almost certainly infested with pantry moths (blech. I’d seen a few flying around since we bought the flour, and when we opened the bag there were some strands that seemed to be attached to the paper flaps).

Anyway: first day he made it, he didn’t know about heating the pizza stone along with the oven - just shaped the crust right on the stone. This of course led to a doughy crust that stuck to the stone. Second night, I had him put the stone in the oven when we turned it on. Then I helped him shape the crust into individual “circles” so we could each have our own pizza; we put those on a cookie sheet dusted with cornmeal to make moving it easier. Added sauce (from a jar), toppings, slid them onto the sheet, and baked.

So the crust was better, but still a bit doughy.

What other things should we try? Hotter oven? (we’re using the recipe’s temperature of 425). Cooking it longer (we gave it 15 minutes) would seem counterproductive, as the toppings were all hot, the cheese was melted, the veggies were cooked appropriately, etc.

Oh - and anyone have a good pizza sauce recipe? I bought a jar of stuff at the grocery store but it can’t be that tough to make from scratch especially if I start with canned tomatoes / tomato sauce.

2

CRUST
Enough for three or four large pizzas:
Unbleached white flour (about nine cups)
Tablespoon of sea salt
Packet of dry yeast
Half cup of extra virgen olive oil
Liter of warm water

In a large bowl, mix the dry ingredients thoroughly with a whisk.
Drizzle in about half the olive oil as you stir.
Slowly add the warm water while stirring with a wooden spoon. You won’t need the entire liter.
(Some people proof the yeast in the water, but I find it’s not necessary.)
Stir until the dough is moist but not sticky, elastic but not tough.
Use your hands to roll the dough into a ball.
Coat with EVOO to keep from drying out.
Cover the bowl with a dishtowel and leave in a warm place so the dough can rise.
After it’s doubled in size, punch it back down and let it rise again.
Cover tightly, refrigerate, and keep coated with EVOO until you’re ready to roll it out.

SAUCE
Enough for five or six large pizzas:
One large can crushed tomatoes (15 oz)
One large can diced tomatoes (15 oz)
One large can plain tomato paste (12 oz)
Cupful of Italian seasoning (oregano, basil, parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme)
Half cup of EVOO
Quarter cup dried red chile flakes
Quarter cup granulated garlic
Quarter cup fennel seeds
Juice of one lemon

Combine all ingredients and mix thoroughly.
Cover tightly and refrigerate until ready for use.

When ready to cook, let all ingredients warm to room temperature.
Cover work surface with a coating of flour.
(If possible, use a marble work surface.)
Oil your hands.
Take a good handful of dough and roll in into a ball.
Squeezing the center, roll the ball out into a disk in your hands.
When it’s 6–8 inches in diameter, put it on the work surface and coat with flour.
Press it out with your hands or a rolling pin until it’s about 16 inches in diameter.
Transfer the crust to your pizza pan or stone (whichever you use, buy a good one).
If the pan isn’t non-stick, first oil it lightly or sprinkle it with corn meal. Ditto for the stone.
Stir the sauce again and ladle it on (not too much, or your pizza will be soggy).
Spread to within about an inch of the edge of the crust.
Sprinkle with grated Parmesan and/or Romano cheese.
Grate 12–16 ounces of Mozarella cheese.
Add your toppings. Put thinly sliced meats and anchovies under your grated Mozarella; other seafood, gobs of Italian sausage, and sliced veggies on top so that they cook through in the heat of the oven.
When you add the Mozarella, start in the center and work your way out toward the edge. It should be thicker in the middle than at the edge.
Bake at around 400 degrees F for about 20 minutes, or until the crust is golden and the cheese is bubbly and starting to brown.

ITALIAN SAUSAGE
Enough for 2–3 pizzas:
Pound of ground pork
Tablespoon of granulated garlic
Tablespoon of EVOO
Tablespoon of sweet paprika
Tablespoon of fennel seeds
Tablespoon of anise seeds
Tablespoon of crushed red chile flakes
Tablespoon of sea salt
Teaspoon of black pepper
Juice of half a lemon

Mix all ingredients by hand in a large bowl.
Cover tightly and refrigerate for two–three days.
Let warm to room temperature before cooking.
Tear off gobs with your fingers and put on top of mozarella.

SUGGESTED COMBINATIONS
Pepperoni and Canadian bacon slices
Pepperoni, Italian sausage, mushrooms
Italian sausage, sliced mushrooms, sliced green peppers
Anchovies, shrimp, chopped onion, black olives, green olives
Anchovies and capers
Sun-dried tomatoes, black olives, chopped garlic
Four cheeses (Mozarella, Provelone, Emmentaler, Gouda)

At the table, add freshly-ground black pepper or Italian herbs, more Parmesan and/or Romano, or drizzle with EVOO.

Enjoy! :cool:

3

A few hints.

Get the stone massively hot, The pizza should cook in 7-8 minutes, no more.

Keep the pizza thin and even and don’t overload with the toppings

I don’t put salt, pepper or garlic on the pizza when baking it, but I do flavour some olive oil with them and drizzle it over with a pastry brush when it first comes out of the oven.

Fresh yeast gives a wonderful beery smell to the dough and a better texture to the dough (IMHO)

Dough will keep perfectly happily for a few days in a tub in the fridge and the flavour develops all the time.

It will make wonderful pitta bread as well, just roll it into rough ovals and give them 5 minutes in a hot oven.

Or even better, if you are cooking outside, roll the dough into ovals and stack them on a plate separated by baking parchment and whack them on the grill, a minute a side and you have probably the best bread you have ever tasted. Freshly cooked with a home made salsa dip, or hummus, or greek yoghurt…oooooooo! food of the gods.

4

Use at least 1/2 semolina (durham) flour. It should be a fairly coarse grain. You can use 100% if you want the dough to taste even better. Also, instead of throwing cornmeal down on the stone as some do, use the semolina for that also. It doesn’t turn into extremely hard sand the way cornmeal does.

Break your dough before shaping the pizza. Take a ball of dough and pound it with the side of your fist to flatten out. This breaks the gluten bonds to change the texture of the dough. Pizza dough should be fairly dry and stiff to start with.

Cook your sauce. Don’t over season it. Sprinkle some Mediterranian herbs over the sauce and/or cheese just before baking the pizza.

Do not ever use non-fat mozzerella cheese (part skim is allowed).

The easiest way to improve pizza is to make more of it. Two pizzas are better than one.

5

I agree about the oven and stone being massively hot. Pizzeria ovens operate at around 600 degrees F. Unfortunately, my kitchen oven does not. :frowning:

Twenty minutes at 400 degrees may not be ideal, but it works for me.

The other thing about hot stones is that you need a peel to take the pizza in and out of the oven. If you have one, great. If not, you’ll have to build the pizza on a room-temperature pan or stone, or find another way of transferring it.

BTW, the best pizza I’ve ever had was baked in a wood-fired brick oven. That has to be the ne plus ultra of pizza making!

6

Using a peel, try baking your crust a bit before adding toppings. That is something that has worked for me.

7

When I used to work in a restaurant, I would have the cooks make my pizza with BBQ sauce instead of tomato sauce. Made any pizza taste nice and sweet.

But its got to be thick BBQ sauce. Nothing runny.

8

It depends on the style of pizza you’re making. It can be anywhere from 400F to 1000F. I believe most of the non-brick oven styles of thin crust here in Chicago are made at around 425-500F. Certainly attainable in a conventional oven. But if you want those Neapolitan or coal-fired styles, it’s gonna be a little tough. Still, not impossible to get close.

Here’s pictures of a pizza I made tonight. I did this in my oven, without a pizza stone:

Top view
Side view
Bottom view

If that crust looks good to you and something you’d like to attain in a conventional oven, it can be done, but it requires a bit of attention.

Make the dough however you like it. For this method, I shoot for 65% hydration (I can explain more if needbe.) A little wetter is fine. You can even use the no knead bread recipe for your dough. Preheat the oven to 450F.

I used to always do my pizzas on preheated cast iron or pizza stones, but I stumbled across an idea a few weeks ago that works: shape your dough on parchment paper (this makes life easy and you don’t have to worry about the pizza sticking to your peel or rolling out surface.) As soon as the oven finishes preheating, you’re ready. You don’t have to wait any more. Top your dough, slide it unto the floor of your oven (I use a pizza peel) along with your parchment paper. (Make sure you’ve cut the extra paper so it doesn’t get set on fire.) Close the door. Wait about two minutes. Rotate the pizza about a half turn. Wait another two minutes. Check on the bottom of your pizza. If it looks charred enough, immediately move to the top rack of your oven, otherwise, wait another minute or so. Cook about another two minutes. Turn on the broiler. Broil the top for about 3 or 4 minutes, turning halfway through. Just watch the pizza so it doesn’t burn.

Now, this should work if you have a conventional oven like mine: with heat from the bottom, and a broiler on the top. It will take some attention to get right, as these times are approximate, so take peeks every couple minutes to see how things are moving along.
But it produces a surprisingly good New York-Neapolitan style lightly charred crust with that distinctive smoky flavor in a conventional oven in minimal time and with no special equipment.

9

A trick I first heard on the dope but havent tried yet.

A sigificant fraction of the water you use in the dough is not water but vodka. Its not to booze up the crust but to lessen the amount of water in the dough. The vodka just evaporates out. Supposedly makes a much better crust. I think America’s Test kitchen had a report on it.

10

No, no, never do that. Heat the stone in the oven for a long time (45 min to an hour). You can build the pizza on a cutting board liberally dusted with flour. Better yet, use a big piece of cardboard (like a oiece of a pizza box). Shake the cutting board/cardboard until the pizza moves around freely, then transfer it to the stone. Getting it off without a peel is easy if the pie is cooked enough. Just snag the crust with a fork and pull it on to the cutting board.

11

Well, that’s pretty much what terentii said - build it and find a way to transfer it. We don’t have a peel, but a cookie sheet works well enough - nudge the pizza off the sheet with a flat spatula.

We’ve actually found that once we’ve loosened the crust from the pan we make it on, transferring it to the heated stone is easy, as is removing it from the stone at the end.

Using parchment paper: interesting idea, I hadn’t thought of this. It might affect the crispness of the bottom of the crust, I would imagine.

I agree, semolina vs. cornmeal would probably give a nicer result; I’ll have to see about getting some (we had the cornmeal on hand).

We did pizza last night again, using a mix of whole wheat and white (unbleached) flour and the crust was vile - like chewing mushy paper. As in, worse than high school cafeteria ‘pizza’. Not sure whether that was an artifact of the recipe, or the kids did something wrong mixing it up.

Wood-fired ovens: Ooooh, yeah, I’ve had some yummy pizza made that way. However another trend, of sorts, is a coal-fired oven. Lombardi’s in NYC does it that way, for example. I guess it yields an even hotter oven. Regardless, the one time I ate there the pizza was very nice indeed.

12

Nope. Not at all, at least not that I can tell. Place that parchment paper on a blazing hot surface, and you will get the same crispness as without.

13

In my book two things are key: crust and herbs. All other things will take care of themselves, but you’ve gotta get the crust and herbs right.

Crust: it’s been a while since I made homemade pizza, but I used to make the crust using the “dough” cycle on my bread machine. Because I like a thick chewy crust on a homemade pizza, I used bread flour for, as I recall, about half of the flour in the recipe. Bread flour has extra protein/gluten, making the dough “stretchier” and nicely chewy. Anyway, I ran the dough cycle, adding some garlic powder halfway through for flavor. When the cycle was done, I flattened and shaped the dough and went from there.

Next important thing, herbs. You don’t have to get too fancy, and you don’t have to buy armloads of fresh herbs from the store or start an herb garden; a little bottle of “Italian” or “pizza” seasoning will do just fine. The blend I found came in its own little herb grinder, which is nice. Herbs are one of those things that you’ll notice if they’re missing, even though you can’t quite put your finger on what’s wrong. Anyway, after you lay down your sauce layer, sprinkle on the herbs, not too heavily. You want them between the crust and the cheese, for protection; if you put them on the surface, they’ll burn in the high oven heat, and burnt herbs taste nasty.

Cheese is up to you, although I find that a blend works best; pure mozzarella turns soupy at high temperatures and makes those long strings when you try to pull a slice away. A blend of mozz with something else, like parmesan, romano, and/or provolone, will curb that stringiness. Besides, mozzarella is pretty flavorless by itself.

Keep experimenting! What the heck, flour’s cheap.

14

Also, for the best collection of pizza making tips and recipes, no matter what style of pizza you prefer, check out pizzamaking.com.

15

That’s pie dough, not pizza dough. Pie dough is a matrix of flour and fat, so vodka works there. Guessing it does not work so well with pizza dough, which is a yeasted, raised bread.

16

The keys have already been mentioned.

Pre heat your stone, and heat it for a lot longer than you think you need to. Give in an hour minimum at the highest heat your oven will allow, the pizza should cook in under 10 minutes. Then you just have to play with how high up in the oven the stone is. My pizza cooks best when the stone in on the second rack from the bottom. But your oven may vary. I second the parchment paper idea, it’s what I use and I have no issues. Build the pizza on the paper, then slide it onto the stone. I don’t need to find a place to keep a peel and I don’t get burned. Win win.

You don’t need as much sauce or as much cheese as you think you do, less is more with all toppings. For sauce I am lazy and use classico jarred tomato basil sauce. It is exactly what I want my sauce to taste like so I don’t mess with it anymore. You can make a good quick sauce with crushed tomatoes, tomato paste, a hit of red wine and some garlic and basil cooked together for about a half hour. But the Classico works for me, and I can get about 4 good sized pizzas out of a jar.
For a really fantastic pizza dough recipe (not that there is anything wrong with what you are using, but you might as well experiment) try this. You have to make it the day before, and I have found that it is best if you let it rest in the fridge for 3 days (found that out by happy accident) but it is really really good.

17

Yes, aging it for at least a day really improves its flavor. You can around it a little bit by using a tablespoon or so of vinegar in your dough, and even by substituting a little bit of beer for your liquid (no more than 1/4 of the total liquid volume.)

18

someone just mentioned it a dozen posts in, but it should be top of the pile,

must use bread flour!

19

But aren’t pizzas pies ? :slight_smile:

Yeah, thats what I was remembering. And I suspect the vodka killing the yeast might not help either.

20

Or even higher glutten flour if you can get your hands on it. This is key.

What works surprisingly well is going to your local pizza joint and asking to buy a couple lbs of flour off of them, or at least finding out what flour they use.