Silver Case

A while ago I tried to work toward  making ideal pizza.   I didn’t get that far.  Recently I watched an Alton Brown episode on pizza.  He advocated mixing the dough for fifteen minutes and then letting it rise for 24 hours in a refrigerator.  (Well, in that recipe. Apparently he’s published some other, different, recipes for pizza too).

I tried to follow his recipe today and it sucked.  His proportions made really really sticky dough. It needed way more flour than he called for.  Unfortunately I never got it floured enough and so I eventually just tossed it out as shit.

I was irritated by this because I had already prepared a nice tomato red sauce for it.  Following his cue, I made a standard soffrito of onion and celery and carrot, but then broiled it with the tomatoes, while I reduced the canned juice with some sherry, sugar, and spices into a thick syrup.   It makes a really nice sauce, I must admit.  Next time I’ll play with a roasting pan to try to make more carmelization.  Today’s preperation was too wet for much.

Anyway, I was pissed by this failure and brooding that I’d have to wait another round or more of twenty-four hours before I could try some more.  Then I stumbled onto a site I’ve seen before, The Ridiculously Thorough Guide to Making Your Own Pizza.  He talks about making a crust in approximately forty minutes.  I felt like giving this a shot.

I blended his recipe and alton brown’s.  I was low on flour, so i used the rest of the bread flour I had, and topped it off with mostly wheat flour (which should have some decent gluten content).   I used the alton brown technique of mixing it for 15 minutes to encourage gluten formation.  Once again the recipe made a too-wet dough, so i had to supplement with more flour.  The recipe said this would make enough dough for “two big pizzas” so I divided the dough into four.

Rather than a tedious blow-by-blow, what did I learn?

• Seems like lots and lots of rest for the dough makes a huge difference. The dough becomes much more plastic and elastic.  It turns out to be a painfully long time from start to finish to make the pizza.
• I need to work more on getting a thinner edge, I tied up too much dough around the edges, consequently the center could tend to thin.
• Keep the oven on max heat to cook the pizzas.  I forgot that last time I proved the metal pizza tray makes a crisper crust than the pizza stone.
• Maximize the gluten. Next time I will use “bread machine” flour, as it has the highest gluten content.  I’ll also mix it plenty long, and schedule nice long rests for it.  This ought to enable me to get closer to being able to toss the things so that they’re nicer and more uniform.

The sauce tasted very good, as did the mix of jack/mozarella/cheddar.   I cut thin slices of real pepperoni I bought in Sydney. It was nice.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 25th, 2007 at 10:49 pm and is filed under Alton Brown Good Eats, Food, Uncategorized.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.