Let’s talk a little bit about… pizza.
If you’ve been around the blog for any amount of time you know that I love to make pizza! I have several posts and even made a video which is 17 minutes long. The video is too long and needs editing but it does show you two crucial dough techniques for pizza making at home. If you only want to watch a few minutes, watch the first two or three that’s the real key to getting a good dough ball: it’s all about getting that gluten cloak.
For Christmas this year my daughter got me (really she got it for us) a book called “Mastering Pizza” by Marc Vetri. Vetri’s writing style is engaging enough to just pick up the book and read it through. Ok, he does repeat himself with technique on nearly every recipe but in the opening chapters he also muses on pizza and the power of homemade food while throwing in some pretty good sized chuckles.
I suppose I have to give a warning here: this is an old-school pizza book. There aren’t any cauliflower crusts or Bob’s Red Mill gluten free recipes. This is a book that takes you through about 12 different basic dough recipes (including sourdough), each one tailored to your specific home oven situation, and then offers you a veritable cornucopia of toppings to choose from – including some that are incredibly imaginative and fun to make, like the cacio e pepe – which is a pizza based on the famous noodle dish of the same name. For that one you bake your dough with ice cubes on top and then douse with pecorino romano cheese, shake it a bit to help form the sauce, and finish with black pepper and olive oil. Trust me when I tell you that this is a winner!
He also has recipes for marinara, pizza sauce, calzones, rotolo, focaccia, and in a surprise at the end, a few dessert pizzas.
So far, I have made four of the recipes: margherita, quattro formaggi, cacio e pepe, and il re. Now, I have made literally 1000 pizzas in my life so I feel like I have a really good idea of how to make pizza. I also think I have a pretty good pizza dough recipe! I get great holes and because I rest my dough for several days I get great flavor. But I went ahead and put aside my ego and followed Vetri’s instructions. And I have to say that even just using my home oven (cranked up to 550F), a thick square pizza stone (not a steel), and the broiler on high, Vetri’s suggestions make my pizza even better!
And I haven’t mastered his techniques yet. I’m struggling to get the dough stretched evenly, thinly, and into a nice sized round with a good rim. And in the oven I’m trying to find the perfect placement which will get me a crispy bottom and blackened bubbles. I’m not shooting for “leopard spots” because I don’t have an oven that gets to the correct temps for that.
Whenever I post a picture of a pizza I get asked how I make my pizza. Man, I can’t tell you how much I wish I could just be like “oh it’s easy, do these three things and you have a pizza!” But it’s not that easy. For something that is literally in its most basic form just flour, water, yeast, salt, tomatoes, and cheese, pizza is an incredibly difficult thing to get right. Just thinking about all of the techniques I have learned over the years in order to make a good pizza and the mind boggles:
- Fermentation (flavor)
- Gluten development (stretch)
- Gluten cloak (pre-shaping)
- Stretching (shaping)
- Oven characteristics and ways that the oven makes your pizza work or not!
I’ve spent some serious time on each of these with the most recent being getting the max out of my home oven. For example, yesterday (Wednesday or what I like to call “Pizza Day in America” in the voice of that guy who did those Reagan ads in the 80s) we made a margherita and pizza crudo. Vetri’s technique is to get a pizza stone as hot as possible in your oven, then turn on the broiler, let that go for a few minutes, then slide in your pie and cook.
That doesn’t 100% work for me. In order to cook the dough all the way and get a good crust on the bottom, I need to cook the pizza in the oven without any cheese for a minute, then pop on the cheese and put it back in the oven. If I don’t do it that way, my mozzarella will kind of “dissolve” into the pizza and overcook. Now, it’s possible I’m not topping it with enough sauce. So, while I feel like my latest pie was a success, I also need to keep experimenting with the recipe.
In a funny way, that’s the real beauty of Vetri’s book; it’s not a perfect roadmap to making pizza but rather a guide. You can’t just read one recipe and “master pizza” but rather the entire thing is about the process of “mastering pizza”. Will I ever be a pizza master? Probably not. The guys who make pizza for a living, pumping out 1,000 pies a day are masters. Me, I’m just happy playing with the process.
That pizza looks frigging delicious Tim.
Btw, seems you and I were both right and wrong discussion where Ozil might end up going and why some months ago.
I said Turkey was the only logical destination and Erdogan would be one reason, and if I remember correctly you said MLS.
According to the “Middle East Eye” Ozil was going to DC United but a phone call from Erdogan convinced him to come to Fenerbahce , so I guess we can call it a draw 😉
I’ve made a few, and I do have a pizza oven that sits on top of my outdoor grill that will get to 800 degrees.
But getting the crust right with any kind of consistency is still a battle. Thin, but not so thin that it folds when getting on to the stone. And moist, but not so moist and sticky that you can’t get it off even with liberal amounts of cornmeal and rice flour underneath.
Kudos to anyone that has that dialed in, because I certainly don’t, despite a fair amount of trying.
excellent post Tim!
Ok guys, I have a very important question to ask because I have heard so many debates about this for ages now. So can Arsenal fans just settle this once and for all?!
Pineapple on Pizza, good or bad?
That’s an abomination. Why would anyone ruin a pizza with fruit?
Tomato is a fruit, just ask the Gipper!
So are strawberries and mango.
I believe that pizza’s should all be made two slices larger than personal size, that everyone should order what they like on a pizza and that everyone should share. That way you get the most chances to share and enjoy food possible.
As for pineapple on pizza in particular; there are a lot of examples of fruit on pizza – I happened to have the Vetri book opened to a pie called a “pera” which is pears and guanciale with provolone. Fruit works well on pizza because it provides a flute-like light contrast – sweet and tart – to the more trombone and tuba flavors in cheese and meat. In short, I like to think of getting a variety of flavors in my cooking – acid, fat, salt, spice, and sweet – because I find it most pleasing. That’s why I love pineapple, bacon, and jalapeno. You get the tartness and sweetness from the fruit, the salty and fat from the bacon, and the acid and spice from the pickled jalapeno.
But Avie is a picky kid and for most of her life I just made her pizza with cheese. And whenever I cook for a lot of kids, about half of them like just white cheese on bread. I learned to stop worrying about what folks like on their pizza and just make it for them the way they want. It’s funny to have an argument about pineapple and what does or doesn’t belong on pizza but if it gives people joy, I’m all for it.
Yes, I’m all for ordering spaghetti vongole with a side dish of strawberry jam.
not even remotely the same. cheese and fruit and bread all go together.
Good. Very good.
Keep the sweet stuff away from my pizza. Not a fan of either pineapple or overly sweet ham or canadian bacon.
always, pineapple on pizza!
I take it you’re being ironic.
Pineapple on pizza? Bad. Totally bad. Awful. I can’t think of anything worse. Embarrassingly naff. Just imagine an Italian taking a beautiful woman out for dinner and then ordering a pizza with pineapple on it. She’d probably walk out on him there and then.
Basically a ploy originally to get kids to eat it. The gastronomic equivalent of putting 10 tons of sugar in a tin of baked beans.
Tim
Your pizza dough was pretty good to start with and we have made some a while ago with my daughter. Our recent favorite is the aglio olio with garlic red chili flakes and parley with olive oil
Strangely enough we started with preheating the pizza stone in the oven to 500 before putting the pizza and it works well-
And yes to pineapple- there is a place in Lexington, KY in an old church that has a great pineapple pizza
awesome! I’m glad I got you started on your journey!
Baked a ton of pizzas over the years, but for my upcoming house build, cant decide between a stone oven in the backyard, or one of those assembled portable pizza ovens with a chimney. Thoughts, 7am community?
I like the idea of a stone oven.
Pineapple is fine on pizza, the worst thing you can put on pizza is canned mushrooms and sweetcorn.
It looks like Tim might be right about the stimulants taking their toll at Liverpool, they look burned out.
Odegaard news is interesting, in terms of pure skill and technique he looks like a next-level kind of player. I’m happy to see that we are still looking to bolster our attacking talent, although if Pepe and Willian were living up to expectations we might not need to, so it points to a problem that needs a longer-term solution. But we still need back up GK and LB.
Ah, Matty Ryan! Good.
that’s the end of ESR.
Off-topic:
Tim, your prediction about Pool not keeping up their performance levels seems to be coming true.
Ofcourse they have had long term injuries to some keep personnel.
Ofcourse the downside is you had also predicted Arsenal as a middle table team.
Yum yum!