FOOD - Pizza #1,2

Pizza Dough

June 25, 2011

This was my first attempt at making a pizza at home in any respect. I've never made the dough, sauce, or pizza so there was a lot of haphazard guesswork that went into this. I also made it on a whim so I didn't have the ideal combination of ingredients. Next time it will be much better, I hope. 

I made two separate pizzas with the same dough; I adapted a recipe from the river cottage bread book by using the below ratios: 

[250W - 250WM - 150ST - 325WA - 10SA] mixed well with 1T olive oil and left to rise for about 3 hours until it doubled in size. Proved in a warm oven without doing the stretch/folding I normally do with loaves. 

The dough was initially quite sticky so I dusted it with a lot of flour and probably added a lot of flour to the dough in the process. After cutting the dough in half, I shaped each half into a boule (otherwise called a ball or a round) and rolled them as thinly as possible with a rolling pin, then carefully stretched them over the surface of the two baking sheets I used to cook them in. In some places, after cooking you could actually see the ingredients from the bottom of the slice through a very thin and translucent layer of dough. After stretching out the dough I did a light coating of garlic infused oil and used a very basic tomato sauce with stewed tomatoes and fried garlic that packed a pretty good punch. 

On the first pizza (top photo) I used tinned anchovies, fresh parsley, and pecorino romano as toppings. I was a bit short on options in the cheese department and completely forgot how strong pecorino and anchovies were.. this one turned out quite salty but it was decent enough to eat. The second pizza was topped with salami, fresh parsley, british cheddar, pecorino, and freshly ground black pepper. The second turned out much nicer, with the flavor of the parsley cutting through quite well. 

The dough itself was thin enough for my liking and pretty tasty, but I might try using more white than wholemeal, or perhaps using a wholemeal and spelt mix for my next try. The dough was also quite flat, lacking  air pockets that I would have liked to see in the crust. It might have been a slow day for my sourdough starter, as my feeding schedules have been erratic lately.. but the dough did rise pretty well, I thought. Maybe a longer rise would have done it some good. The bottom of the crust was not cooked to my liking, and I'm convinced that I need a baking stone or something similar in order to get the texture that I crave when I feel the urge to eat pizza. I'm looking forward to trying slightly more complicated recipes for pizza like this one over at Apa Faina Sare and tweaking the River Cottage recipe as well.