Pizza 101

Earlier this evening the Italy-America Chamber of Commerce Southeast hosted a social networking happy hour at Piola Brickell that was preceded by Pizza 101: "we invite you to learn how to make a real Italian pizza with one of Piola’s master pizza makers! They will teach you all the tricks you need to know to make a superb pizza, while you make it with them right then and there. As a final reward for your efforts, you will get to eat the pizza you made during the class and share it with your friends!!"

I've got no particular need of the networking, but my pizza skills could sure use some work. So, off I went.

Parking's a pain in Brickell, but I got there more or less on time which meant, of course, waiting a good ten minutes for Piola to get their act together and for anyone else to show up. Once they did, they got four of us lined up along a table, dumped a truckload of flour on it and handed out discs of dough for us to work with.

The instructor did far more flirting than teaching, but I managed to pick up a few pointers. First of all, the texture of the dough was unusual. Soft, but not wet. Elastic, but not tight. That seemed to be the biggest trick of the night and I wish they told us how they managed it. I suspect part of it is from intensive kneading following by a lengthy rest to relax the gluten. The hydration level was hard to pin down, though. It can't have been too high as the dough didn't seem to pick up any of the flour, but normally a dough that dry is stiff. I dunno.

I'm also not sure why they used so very much flour. The dough didn't seem in any risk of sticking to the work surface. I presume it served some important function, though. There was a big minus as they never warned us to shake off the excess and we had big problems with baked on/caked on chunks of flour on the finished pies.

The chef demoed stretching the dough, so even if he didn't try to explain it, we had a model to follow. I've seen some folks say to use your knuckles, but he used his fingertips. He also had an interesting technique of letting half the dough droop off the side of the table while he rotated it around, letting gravity stretch it out. It worked pretty well for me too, but the texture of the dough was very forgiving. I'd want to be really confident any dough I made at home wasn't going to tear before trying it.

Most folks used tomato sauce and they showed us the technique you probably know of spooning a dollop in the middle of the pie and then using the back of the ladle to swirl it outwards. It was hard to judge just how much to use since a little goes a long way, but never quite as far as you'd like. Then a couple handfuls of shredded mozzarella and a pretty good selection of toppings. I lot of folks, I think, overloaded both with cheese and with too many and too much toppings. I believe it's traditional (and just a good idea) to use no more than three. I went with ham, roasted peppers and basil. OK, also some ricotta, but I went light on the mozzarella so the ricotta was intended as part of the cheese element, not a separate topping.

Here's before:













and after:



It turned out OK, but I had problems with excess flour and I like a spicier sauce than Piola uses so their unexpectedly sweet sauce threw off the balance of flavors a bit. One other point I learned from someone else's pie was that anchovies are to be used sparingly no matter how high quality they are (and these were really nice ones).

I think the big takeaway here was that getting the right texture on the dough at the start makes the process go much smoother and faster and gives you a better texture and flavor at the end. Does anyone have a favorite recipe they'd like to share?

CSA - Mexican pizza

I'm in a rare pizza mood today, but I've never tried any of the local take-out places and I don't feel like taking the gamble. I haven't got the makings of a proper Italian pie in the house, but I think I can pull off Mexican pizza. I have a residual fondness for such things, as most people do I suppose, from some truly awful pies I had at the local pizza parlor that had the best selection of video games. A dumb reason to pick a restaurant I'll admit. These days they'd have to have a good selection of pinball to get me in the door.


So to start off I have to make some dough. I used to do this fairly frequently, but any recipes I've kept are lost in the pile. Instead I'll use a recipe from another blog that I've been reading for a bit, A Good Appetite. The recipe's for a garlic bread that's actually more like a skimpy calzone so I left out the garlic and parsley filling and added some chili powder and Mexican oregano to the mix to make it suitably Mexican.

As is typical of my baking experiences, following the recipe left me with a unworkably wet sticky dough that inexplicably swallowed up at least another half cup of flour while barely changing in texture. Eventually it got close to the proper texture and I figured it got kneaded enough while I was folding in all that the flour. All that extra flour gave me rather more dough than I wanted, so I put half in the freezer and set the other aside to rise for an hour and a half.

An hour in, I started the oven preheating to 450 degrees. I keep a pizza stone in my oven all the time to act as a heat capacitor to smooth out any unevenness in my oven's heating cycle. For actually cooking pizza I took it off the bottom rack and moved it up one space.

When the dough had risen to around double its volume I dumped it out onto a silpat and spread it outwards with my fingertips. It's a bit too soft to properly work and it's a little underkneaded, but that means it won't spring back so it doesn't need a ten minute rest after deflation. Also, it sticks to the silpat which keeps it spread out into a good pizza shape.

I prefer a thickness that isn't quite that paper thin thin crust you can get. That's lucky for me because the under-kneading means the dough won't stretch out properly to get that. If you like it that way look up "windowing" to get the details. It will make more sense with the sort of pictures I don't have. When I got it to the right thickness I took a sideless cookie sheet I use for a peel, dusted it with corn meal and then held the silpat upside down over it so the crust could peel itself off and drop down. That wouldn't work with properly prepared pizza dough, but then with proper pizza dough it wouldn't be necessary.

I gave the crust a drizzle of olive oil and then spread a layer of herbs and spices--cilantro, chili powder, cumin, cayenne, oregano. A layer of shredded jalapeno cheddar on top of that and then slices of tomato and avocado along with chopped pickled peppers and crumbled fried up Mexican chorizo.




Into the oven for 10 minutes and I got this:


I've got to say I'm surprised but the crust is actually really good: crisp on the bottom and chewy on top. My camera's not great at close ups but you can sort of see the two layers in the cross-section. The toppings worked well, but to really get the right effect I should have used enchilada sauce under the cheese. The flavors are the standard Mexican set so you know they work well together. I did go a bit overboard with the peppers, though. Texturally, the cheese has melted into the crust to make the chewy layer, the avocado adds creaminess and the tomato melts during each bite with a little burst of flavor. The chorizo in particular has a lot more character than the traditional ground beef, both with its crispy texture and its rougher flavor. The big minus though is that the pizza's a bit dry. I tried adding some green salsa after the fact, but it overwhelmed the over flavors. Well, lesson learned; keep some enchilada sauce around just in case.

Lazy week - post one

Those tomatoes from last weeks CSA share are ideally suited for use on pizza. They're so meaty they stay structurally sound in the hot oven and don't leak a lot of juice to make the crust soggy. Plus, with a bit of salt, the roasting nicely intensifies the tomato flavor.

I used to make my own pizza dough and sauce and buy fresh mozzarella to put on top, but in retrospect, that turned a convenience food into a pricey chore. Mighty good though, if your oven is up to it. In my last apartment, it wasn't so I got out of the habit.

As this is lazy week, the pizza pictured above was frozen--Freschetta Brick Oven 5-cheese to be specific-- and it kind of stunk. I was under the impression that frozen pizza technology had significantly improved over the last decade what with a variety of rising crusts and real cheese and all. Have I been misled? Or was the on-sale Freschetta not the best example?