Did more pizza work this weekend. I experimented with the cheap, high-gluten ‘Flying Fish’ brand flour.
I made a batch of dough yesterday, letting it double in size, and then sticking it in the refrigerator. It was shit. Heavy and undeveloped. I made a mistake involving either amount of water (not enough) or amount of kneading (not enough). I am pretty sure it was the lack of water. Water is needed for the gluten development. I never caught the mistake because I stupidly didn’t check to see if I could make a ‘baker’s window pane’ (translucent film) with the dough.
When I realized what a turd I had in the bowl this morning, I got pissed, threw it away, and made another batch. This time I made it a bit wetter and after a good long beating with my kitchenaid (idiotically the hinge/kingpin of the blender isn’t keyed, so vigorous blending walks the kingpin out of blender. Inevitably a catastrophic failure) I could make a perfect windowpane.
But alas, I made anoter mistake (I think). I put the dough to ferment and came back about 75-90 minutes later. When I went to play with the dough I realized once again I couldn’t make a windowpane. I think the mistake I made was over-fermenting the dough.
Disgusted, I considered throwing it out, but for some reason didn’t. Instead i made a pizza with it. It was my best pizza yet! This is where I learned a few new things:
- I like a medium crust. If I make the dough crust a lot thinner than I think I want, this winds up being a medium crust like I prefer. Same goes for the crust lip. I don’t like a big dough handle, so I make the crust lip pretty small, but it still grows big or bigger than I want.
- I like my crust crispy. So this time I baked the crust blind (no sauce) for about seven to ten minutes, and very close to the bottom oven element to get the bottom as crisp as possible. Generous spritzing of olive oil on the crust, too. By the time it was fluffed up and starting to brown, then I added on my sauce and toppings and baked it on the middle rack. This made really crispy, brown pizza crust.
A few things for next time:
- Increase amount of olive oil in the crust and decrease the sugar. Sugar attracts water. Oil fries the crust. Should mean a crispier shell.
- When I’m mixing the dough ingredients, I’m going to let half the flour soak in half the water for thirty minutes first. This will give better hydration to the flour and should result in better gluten development.
- In throwing the crust, I realized if I twirl the crust at eye level using my fists, I can generate the centripetal force needed to stretch out the dough. It seems unecessary to launch the thing to the ceiling (at least at first).
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