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This is the first time in a long time that Joe and i have shared a uniformly topped pizza. Typically, my half has a lot of sauteed/ semi fancy toppings, and his looks a bit like what you might find on a dominos menu. I decided to give his style of pizza a try tonight and really enjoyed the simplicity of sweet peppers (Italian and red), onions, and grape tomatoes. It was especially tasty with some red pepper flakes on top… sweet and spicy.
I used the same crust recipe as usual, but left it on the sticky side while kneading. This proved to be a good thing and made it softer than usual on the inside. After proofing for two hours, dividing into thirds, and shaping one into a disc, i drizzled it with olive oil, covered it with aluminum foil (so it wouldn’t stick) and let it sit an extra hour or so before baking (as the oven preheated).
The sauce was delicious and homemade and contained:
- 6 halved and seeded cherry tomatoes
- 1/4 t garlic powder
- 1/4 t onion powder
- 1 t dried basil
- 1/4 t salt
- 1/4 t sugar
- mix it all with an immersion blender till the tomatoes are completely crushed. Yum.
I personally thought that this was the best pizza in the past 3 weeks. I have been using the same dough each time, and realizing how much technique influences the results. This week’s crust was crunchy on the bottom, soft on top, and FULL of bubbles. Toppings were roasted garlic, sauteed portabello mushrooms, sauteed onions, cherry tomatoes, and sprinkled sea salt. Perfecto! Here are my steps to a perfect pizza:
- I start by transferring the dough (click for recipe) from the freezer to the fridge the day before baking. The day of baking, i remove the dough from the fridge around 5:30 (or at least an hour before shaping).
- To shape the dough, i coat a sheet pan with semolina flour (coarse grain cornmeal would probably also work) and press the dough into a disc using oiled hands. I have stopped using parchment paper to transfer pizza to the stone, so the semolina helps to slide the crust onto the pizza stone.
- After shaping, i like to lightly coat the dough with oil, and let it rest for 5-10 minutes. i think this helps develop better bubbles.
- Now top the pizza with a little sauce (slow cooked from fresh tomatoes is best, but we often use canned crushed tomatoes). Add your choice of toppings (2-4 max) and then top with cheese (we use sargento’s Italian blend). Maybe a little sea salt or basil.
- The temperature dial on our oven here does not go over 500° F and i doubt that the oven even reaches that. The dough is so sticky to start with that i have to bake it on the sheet pan for 5 minutes then use a spatula to slide it off, then continue baking for another 7 minutes to crisp the crust. If you can, bake it at 550° F for a total of 7 minutes.
- Finally, do NOT rinse your pizza stone. Simply wipe it off and let the hot oven do the ‘cleaning’.
So, this was pretty good, but it wasn’t the greatest pizza i have ever made, but the photo above does not do it justice.
This is the first time in a long time that i have dared to make a wheat pizza crust for Joe. I am using the dough recipe from the New Best Recipe and substituting 1/3 of the bread flour with white wheat. This recipe yields 2 medium sized pizzas (one pizza is plenty for two hungry Jenkins).
Fortunately, our oven here is small, but just barely wide enough for our pizza stone. Unfortunately, it claims to only reach 500F, but i doubt it makes it that high. Instead of cooking our pizza the usual 7 minutes, I had to keep it in for 12-13 minutes, drying it out. When i cook our leftover (frozen) dough next Friday, i will try spraying the crust with extra oil before baking. If that doesn’t work, the next week i will try spraying the oven walls with water a couple times while cooking. I’ll keep you posted.
- 2 2/3 C bread flour
- 1 1/3 C whole wheat flour
- 3 t yeast
- 3/4 C warm (90 F) water
- 2 t salt
- 2 T olive oil
- 1 C lukewarm water
- sprinkle yeast over 3/4 C warm water and let sit for 5 minutes, or until foamy.
- pulse flour and salt in food processor to fluff and mix.
- add 1 C additional water plus olive oil to the yeast mixture, then slowly pour over flour in the food processor.
- mix until the water is fully incorporated.
- turn the dough out onto a floured counter and knead until only slightly tacky.
- place the dough in a lightly oiled bowl and turn to coat. Cover with plastic wrap and let it sit for 2 hours, or until doubled in size.
- gently turn the dough out onto a lightly floured counter and cut into three pieces. I typically freeze two. Just make sure that you put them in the fridge the day before you plan to use them.
- At this point, you can either bake it immediately, or (if you have things to do, or don’t time your pizza making well – like me) return the dough to the bowl and let it rise in the fridge for a couple hours. Just pull it out of the fridge at least an hour before you plan to bake it.
- Preheat oven to 550 (or as high as it will go). Lightly coat your hands with evoo and press the dough into a disc. top with sauce, cheese, etc. and bake for 6-10 minutes, depending on your oven temp.
roasted garlic:
- 1 bulb of garlic
- approx. 1 T evoo
- Preheat oven to 400 F (mine was preheated to 500 F for the pizza).
- Remove the outer skin of a whole bulb of garlic and chop off the top 1/4-1/2″ so that the tops of the cloves are exposed. Spray or sprinkle the top with olive oil so that all the cloves are coated.
- Loosely wrap the bulb with foil and bake for 35 minutes, or until the cloves are soft. When they are done, you should be able to easily squeeze them out of their skin.
Whew. Ever since our pizza stone broke a few weeks ago (okay, i broke it by rinsing it with water) I have been craving our homemade pizza! So much so, that i went a little overboard . I usually try to limit it to 2-3 toppings. I just don’t know what happened!
I tried a new crust recipe this time and REALLY liked it. It only took about 2 1/2 hours total and was very tasty. I think i would add a smidgin more salt next time (maybe an extra 1/4 t) and push it down to about 1/4″ thick – I shaped ours to about 3/8″ it nearly doubled in thickness in the oven.
pizza dough:
- 3/4 C warm water
- 3 t yeast
- 4 C bread flour
- 1 t salt (i will add an additional 1/4-1/2 t next time)
- 1 C water, room temperature
- 2 T olive oil
- sprinkle yeast over 3/4 C warm water in measuring cup and let sit for 5 min (until foamy).
- pulse flour and salt in food processor to fluff and mix.
- add additional 1 C water and olive oil to yeast.
- slowly add water mixture to flour in food processor while mixing on medium speed. continue mixing until dough becomes smooth and elastic.
- use a rubber spatula to turn dough out onto a well floured counter and knead until a tacky – not sticky – ball forms (7-10 minutes).
- transfer dough to a lightly oiled bowl, turn to coat, and let sit at room temperature til doubled (2 hours).
- punch dough down to degas and cut into 3 equal pieces. I was not ready to form the pizzas yet, so i repeated step 6 with the 3 pieces of dough.
- set a pizza stone on the middle rack and preheat oven to 550°F.
- to form crusts, press dough ball down and outwards with lightly oiled hands on a piece of parchment paper. Add toppings, then use a cookie sheet to transfer the pizza and parchment to the preheated stone. Bake for 4 minutes, slide parchment out from under pizza, and continue baking an additional 3 minutes.
We had a couple of friends over for pizza last night but i was too shy and hungry to take pictures while we were baking the pizzas. I made 5 ‘personal’ doughs ahead of time, and we each topped one, leaving the one photographed above for today’s lunch. I must say that they were some of my best pizza crusts EVER. They were very bubbly and soft on the inside, slightly crunchy on the outside. Last night we had green peppers, pepperoni, red onions, sun dried tomatoes, mushrooms, spinach, and kalamata olives for toppings. A little bit of everything was leftover today, so our lunch pizza looks like a Smörgåsbord.
.
tomato basil sauce + sun dried tomato + kalamata olive + onion + spinach + sea salt
It has been so easy to do pizza night now that i make the dough ahead of time (still using Peter Rinehart’s dough recipe from the Bread Baker’s Apprentice). Tonight i used my mother in law’s shaping technique – pressing the dough out into a disc instead of stretching it by hand. The result was a MUCH more circular shaped, even thickness pizza. I shaped them directly on parchment paper, slid them onto the pizza stone in a preheated 550 F oven, baked for 2 1/2 minutes, then removed the parchment paper and baked directly on the stone for another 5 minutes. My personal pizza (photographed above) was from a much smaller ball of dough than joe’s and basically wafer-thin. I enjoyed it, but it was hard to appreciate the crust when it was the consistancy of a cracker.
Guest Chef: my mother in law
This was so fun! Friday night pizza with the whole Jenkins crew (Joe’s grandparents, parents, his brother, and us). Joe’s mom is a great cook and someone i am glad to get pizza making tips from. ‘We’ made 4 pizzas and at all but one skinny slice. She makes her dough much thicker than joe and i typically do, then presses it out into a circle, instead of tossing. This makes for a much more uniform pie. Let the dough rest for about 10 minutes before adding toppings. After preheating the oven to 550 F, she spread out sauce (a can of whole tomatoes + oregano + basil pulsed in immersion blender), then cheese, and toppings last (i always put cheese on last and was a little surprised that the spinach on top did not burn). Once all the toppings were on, she used a peel to transfer the parchment paper to the pizza stone. After about three minutes in the oven, she slid the parchement out from between the pizza and the stone, and cooked for 3-4 additional minutes to crisp the crust. I think the oven at our beach house didn’t really get to 550 F, so check the pizza after about 2 1/2 minutes.
dough RECIPE coming soon!
Finally! Figs and blue cheese! I have been dying to make this pizza combo and i seem to have never had these two ingredients on hand at the same time. I know this sounds pretty silly – if i wanted it that bad, why didn’t i just go out and buy them? I don’t know.
again, we are using the Napoletana pizza dough recipe from the Bread Baker’s Apprentice. When that week of the challenge comes around, i wonder if i’ll have to make it afresh? I guess, chances are i will be making it that friday, anyway.
we broke our friday pizza tradition last week because we went to a friend’s house for a double dinner date. We have a wedding rehearsal dinner coming up this friday, and i just couldn’t bear the thought of no pizza for two whole weeks!
Last night i started a new batch of Bread Baker’s Apprentice pizza Napoletana dough [right after i finished the Brioche (our little kitchen never gets a break)]. The recipe yields 6 personal crusts (i usually have 1/3 left over anyway). Today, i decided to get a little inventive with the toppings. See the dough recipe at 101 Cookbooks.
Sauteed baby bella mushrooms (with garlic) + chopped dried figs + thinly sliced onion + 1/2 t sea salt
it sounds really sorta strange, but it was REALLY good. the figs and sea salt were a nice combination. I sauteed five baby bella mushrooms with a clove of garlic in about 1 t olive oil for 5-7 minutes.
tonight we used whole wheat dough that i made a while ago (maybe two months?) and froze. I transferred the dough from the freezer to fridge a day ago and out of the fridge a couple hours in advance of baking to let the yeast come back to life. I have to admit, i have constantly struggled with wheat dough. just intuitively, it seems like the graininess of the wheat flour prevents it from rising well. chemically, wheat flour is lower gluten than the nice white bread flour that is typically used. tonight i did two things differently; i left the dough a bit thicker than usual, and while shaping it, had my hands coated with olive oil.
On my half of the pizza, i used a spinach pesto sauce with red onions (sauteed for 5 min. w/S + P and a little thyme), kalamata olives, and mozzarella.
- 6 T warm water (may need up to 1 or 2 tablespoons more water)
- 2 T white wine (or 2 T more water)
- 3/4 t active dry yeast
- 1/2 t honey
- 1 t salt (heaping)
- 1 T olive oil
- 3/4 C wheat flour
- 3/4 C all purpose or bread flour
- Cornmeal for sprinkling
- Flour for dusting counter
- Whisk wine, water and yeast in a medium bowl until yeast has dissolved. Add honey, salt and olive oil and stir. Add flour and no matter how dry it looks, work it with a spoon and your fingers until it comes together as a dough. Add more water one tablespoon at a time if you need, but in my experience, this is almost never necessary.
- Sprinkle some flour on the counter and knead the dough for a couple minutes.
- For Joe’s sake, i try to reduce the number of dirty dishes left at the end of the night. Just rinse the bowl you made the dough in, dry it and coat the inside with olive oil. Put the dough in, cover it with plastic wrap, and let it rise for an hour or up to two, until it is doubled.
- Preheat your oven to its highest temperature (typ. 550°F). Put your pizza stone in the oven as it heats up!
- Once the dough has doubled, turn it out onto a floured counter and gently deflate the dough with the palm of your hands. Form it into a ball and let it rest on a floured spot with either plastic wrap over it (sprinkle the top of the dough with a little flour so it doesn’t stick) for 15 minutes.
- Stretch the dough out into your crust shape, either on a conrmeal dusted baking sheet or a piece of parchment paper.
- Slide the pizza from the baking sheet to your preheated pizza stone, or just transfer the parchment paper onto the stone.
- Bake for about 7 minutes, checking at 5. Slice and serve immediately.
