Food Homemade pizza

I should have clarified--that was one of the NYE pizzas. It was pretty amazing. I've got a recipe now that results in about 10 6-8" pizzas. It's perfect for feeding a small crowd. I also recently calculated that my pizzas cost about .60 cents a pizza for the crust/sauce/cheese, so feeding a crowd is usually about $6 in ingredient costs. Not bad.

 

You'll need a scale. Using a scale cuts down on cleanup considerably; I just zero out a measuring cup for the wet ingredients, and zero out my mixing bowl for the dry.


611g water, heated to 110 degrees
8g active dry yeast
20g sugar
1019g bread flour
30g salt
20g oil

Combine the water, yeast, and sugar; stir until all the yeast granules are wet. Allow the yeast to proof for 2-3 minutes, until it is foamy and all the yeast is dissolved. Meanwhile, weigh out the flour, salt, and oil into the bowl of your stand mixer, and put on the beater. Once the wet ingredients are ready to go, pour them all into the mixing bowl. Turn on the mixer to 2-3. Once all the ingredients have come together to form a shaggy dough, turn off the mixer, scrape the beater, cover the bowl with a tea towel, and let it sit for 10 minutes to autolyse. After the autolyse, put on the dough hook and knead for approximately 10 minutes at speed 2 or until the dough passes the windowpane test. Transfer the dough ball to a well-oiled container; I use an 8-cup measure so I can track whether or not the dough has in fact doubled in size. Let the dough rise for an hour or more, until it is doubled in size. Once it has, portion out the dough balls and shape them. The scale is also useful here if you want to be precise; I just grab similarly sized hunks of dough out of the measuring cup and mold them into mini-boules. Let the dough balls sit on a piece of parchment paper or Silpat on the counter; cover with another piece of parchment or a flour sack towel. They'll need about 10 minutes of relaxation time to be ready to shape into pizzas.

Other tips: let the oven heat up sufficiently, and CRANK IT. I wish I could get mine higher than 500, but turning it on an hour or so beforehand seems to work pretty well for me. I use parchment paper to ease the transfer from peel to stone. One thing I've figured out is to stretch/shape the dough, lay it out on the parchment, and sauce it, then bake it for 2 minutes or so to "set" it. This also allows some of the moisture in the sauce to evaporate. Then I top the pizza with toppings/cheese, then slide it back in without the parchment paper for another 6-8 minutes. Additionally, don't forget to allow time for the stone to heat back up after taking a pizza off. You may or may not want to dock your pizza.

 

This is why my husband bought me my Emile Henry stone.

 

Nice! I've never heard of using milled granite for a pizza stone, but it sounds like a cool idea.

I love my stone. I just leave it in the oven all the time--unless it's on the grill. It makes the temperature of my temperamental rental oven more stable.

 

That's true 43C is what you want in metric.

 

Yesterday I made pizza with dough that I had frozen. Since I usually make dough in big batches, I usually end up with extra if I'm just making pizza for my husband and I; I just throw the leftover dough (after the rise) into a well-oiled freezer bag. It wasn't my first time doing it, but it was my first time trying to defrost it in a relative hurry. I defrosted in a warm water bath. The rise still took about 3 hours due to the temperature of the dough, which gave me a nice, long, slow rise. It had a really nice chew and crispiness to it compared to my pizza that undergoes a warm rise, and was similar in results to doing a cold rise in the fridge (which I've also done before with leftover dough). If those are two characteristics you enjoy in your pizza, try a cold rise.

 

I did pizza on the grill on Sunday night. I'm getting better at it, but the results still aren't optimal. I've got some things to mess around with to improve my results.

Last night, with the dough we had left over from Sunday, I made a pizza "pie." Using a buttered Pyrex pie plate, I stretched some of the dough to form a bottom crust, docked the very bottom, and then parbaked it. I filled the bottom crust with a mixture of ricotta, egg, and roasted kale, topped with roasted red peppers and zucchini. I then used another dough ball to stretch out a smaller top crust that fit just inside the bottom crust. I baked the whole thing for 45 minutes at 325 to ensure the center would cook evenly. It turned out great! I would definitely make it again as an alternative to another night of pizza, as it tastes a bit like lasagna and pizza had a delicious baby.

 

Donna Currie bakes with yeast at high altitudes: Cookistry Hope that helps