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Pizza - The Best Methods And Techniques to Make it At Home


alan7147

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the best way to make pizza at home is; FRIED
That looks disgusting. Distusting... and DELICIOUS!!! Tell more!!!

Pizza with artichoke, tomato, parm, lemon juice, garlic, shallots, savory:

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Pizza with asparagus, prosciutto, parm, lemon juice, truffle oil, garlic, shallots:

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I have some new advice for pizza makers out there: bake a lot of bread. Seriously.

All of the bread I've been making recently... boule, baguettes, hamburger rolls, brioche, "rustic"... I feel like it's REALLY helped me take my pizza making to the next level. It gives me a much better appreciation and feel for how different doughs behave and feel at different stages of development.

Also, artichoke hearts are very hard to make look good in a photograph.

Also, the odd shape of the asparagus pie made me realize I need a larger pizza peel...

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I've always wanted to try this, but have been intimidated by the burn factor. Plus, my dough making skills are sorely lacking.

Anyone have a dough recipe?

I dont have a dough recipe that we have tried, but a easy and inexpensive premade dough is found at trader joe's. I think it comes in 3 different "flavors" wheat, white, and a rosemary (I think that is the herb). It is easy to roll out and depending on thickness the crust is crisp, and not too doughy.

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MAde some pizza on the grill tonight after the torrential downpours stopped. Tomato sauce, salt, mozzarella, onions, pancetta (wafer thin), a few slices of mushrooms, a few slices of baby zucchini, garlic, oregano, a drizzle of olive oil after being done on the grill and a sprinkling of parmagiano reggiano. LORDY!

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I forwent the usual tossing and tried something new: pasta roller. I set it to the widest setting and after the first rise ran it through. Then I let the rolled out "pies" (strips?) proof for around 30-45 minutes.

The result was a consistently thin pizza with a crispy crust. The fact that they were also thin and long made for unique and fun serving and eating.

I wish I had the right oven to get both crispy AND chewy in the same pie, but alas, the old girl just doesn't get hot enough.

Made a pie with cheddar, spinach, salt cured bacon, and vidalia onions.

Also made a basic tomato and cheese... a good baseline when testing any new dough method or formula.

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Lately I've been experimenting with grilling pizza on the Weber.

I find that the pizza stone approach doesn't work. I end up with a burnt bottom and an uncooked top (and yes, I DO put the lid on) :rolleyes:

I've also tried the method where you put the pizza directly on the grill, flip it, then top it. I find that this produces very uneven results, and I've tried multiple levels of heat, different types of coals, different dough thicknesses.

I am not a fan of either method.

I guess I'll just have to content myself with my crappy, no-char-producing indoor oven. Maybe I'll try using the broiler in conjunction with a pizza stone.

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Lately I've been experimenting with grilling pizza on the Weber.

I find that the pizza stone approach doesn't work. I end up with a burnt bottom and an uncooked top (and yes, I DO put the lid on) :rolleyes:

I've also tried the method where you put the pizza directly on the grill, flip it, then top it. I find that this produces very uneven results, and I've tried multiple levels of heat, different types of coals, different dough thicknesses.

I am not a fan of either method.

I guess I'll just have to content myself with my crappy, no-char-producing indoor oven. Maybe I'll try using the broiler in conjunction with a pizza stone.

What do you mean by uneven results when you put it directly on the grill? Are you talking about the way the dough cooks or the entire pizza? I ask because I have done this many times with decent success. The one thing that I came to realize is that the results will not be anything like a pizza baked in an oven (home, wood, or coal fired) but more of a grilled bread with toppings. Many times, while the grilled meat is resting, I grill the dough plain and when finished top with olive oil and sea salt.

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Lately I've been experimenting with grilling pizza on the Weber.

I find that the pizza stone approach doesn't work. I end up with a burnt bottom and an uncooked top (and yes, I DO put the lid on) :rolleyes:

I've also tried the method where you put the pizza directly on the grill, flip it, then top it. I find that this produces very uneven results, and I've tried multiple levels of heat, different types of coals, different dough thicknesses.

I am not a fan of either method.

I guess I'll just have to content myself with my crappy, no-char-producing indoor oven. Maybe I'll try using the broiler in conjunction with a pizza stone.

Interestingly, I had some difficulty with burnt crust this weekend when cooking pizza on my gas grill with a pizza stone-the dough was a bit old (frozen and thawed) and was from The Italian Store. I'm not sure what type of flour they use, but when I make my own dough with 00 flour, the results were PERFECT. Same method, same temperature (600-650) with just the right amount of char.

Perhaps the flour makes a difference???

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Interestingly, I had some difficulty with burnt crust this weekend when cooking pizza on my gas grill with a pizza stone-the dough was a bit old (frozen and thawed) and was from The Italian Store. I'm not sure what type of flour they use, but when I make my own dough with 00 flour, the results were PERFECT. Same method, same temperature (600-650) with just the right amount of char.

Perhaps the flour makes a difference???

I've tried with both 00 and KA Bread. I really don't see how the type of flour would make THAT much of a difference in burnability.

The Weber just loses too much heat when opening to get the pizza in. I might play around with different coal types/arrangements.

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Made some pizze at a friend's house... I'm thinking about trying to make a side business out of this while I wait for my next gig to get into gear. Perhaps a mobile oven for parties and maybe some pizza making classes.. Anyone interested?

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Someone please tell me that I'm not imagining that the first picture shows a brick wood-burning pizza oven on a concrete slab IN THE BACK OF A PICKUP TRUCK!?!?

Technically I think it's an unenclosed box truck/flatbed. :rolleyes:

There is nothing that is not phenomenally awesome about this concept.

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I made pizza on the grill last night. Using a gas grill works perfectly. I do cheat and use dough from Trader Joes, but my boys don't complain. The gas grill is fairly uniform and with practice I don't get any really burnt spots. Of course it changes after a few glasses of wine-Different story.

And no stone, cook it right on grill.

Did you flip the dough. After 3 minutes I take off on pell, flip , put ingrediants on and then cook the raw side on grill.

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Technically I think it's an unenclosed box truck/flatbed. :rolleyes:

There is nothing that is not phenomenally awesome about this concept.

Agreed! Have wood-burning oven. Will travel.

As to the dough flip-I use a stone on my gas grill and don't flip. I'm quick to top the pizza and get it cooking right away so the top doesn't get soggy.

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Dan,

Using the stone on the grill resulting in burnt bottom with undercooked elsewhere. I've found that this is caused when the heat is up too high and the stone is too hot. Not only does the temp drop when you open the grill to place the pizza on the stone, but your typical steel box grill does not hold any heat.

You need the thick sides and top of a brick pizza not only to maintain air temp, but to store all that radiant heat in the oven to cook the top of the pie before the bottom burns on the stone. So unless you have a pizza stone box® that you can throw on your Weber and slide the pizza in, you don't want the stone to get so lava hot that it burns the bottom before the cheese is even melted. (Others please feel free to poke holes in science, too early for me to think well).

In fact, I remember one episode of Michael Chiarella's (sp?) show where he made pizza in the oven on a stone and put another stone on the rack above the pizza AND lined the sides of the rack that the pizza was on with tiles.

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Dan,

Using the stone on the grill resulting in burnt bottom with undercooked elsewhere. I've found that this is caused when the heat is up too high and the stone is too hot. Not only does the temp drop when you open the grill to place the pizza on the stone, but your typical steel box grill does not hold any heat.

You need the thick sides and top of a brick pizza not only to maintain air temp, but to store all that radiant heat in the oven to cook the top of the pie before the bottom burns on the stone. So unless you have a pizza stone box® that you can throw on your Weber and slide the pizza in, you don't want the stone to get so lava hot that it burns the bottom before the cheese is even melted. (Others please feel free to poke holes in science, too early for me to think well).

In fact, I remember one episode of Michael Chiarella's (sp?) show where he made pizza in the oven on a stone and put another stone on the rack above the pizza AND lined the sides of the rack that the pizza was on with tiles.

You hit the nail on the head. That's exactly what happened. Radiant heat is where it's at.

I've often thought putting together a grilltop pizza "oven" by sandwiching a wall of bricks between two pizza stones, but I really don't know that much about masonry.

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You hit the nail on the head. That's exactly what happened. Radiant heat is where it's at.

I've often thought putting together a grilltop pizza "oven" by sandwiching a wall of bricks between two pizza stones, but I really don't know that much about masonry.

You could probably build that pretty easily without any masonry skills. See rudimentary graphic below, ---- = pizza stone and *** = fire brick.

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***.......................***

***.......................***

***.......................***

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You would not need to move it during cooking and so long as you could fit a peel in the opening you should be ok. It may make adding fuel difficult and you would need a way to take the temperature of the stone. Would your Weber be large enough to do this?

I take it you don't like the results of dough directly on the grill and are looking for a more authentic pizza product.

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If the problem with the stone on the grill is that the bottom chars before the top cooks through, what about NOT waiting for the stone to get up to temperature before putting the pizza on?

You could probably work on that technique if you only had to do one pizza, but in order to do multiple pies with consistent results you would need a relatively steady temp.

I find that keeping front and back burners between medium and med-high works pretty well.

At least until the outside air temp drops and I don't mind doing pizza indoors again.

It's so hot and humid today that if I had any hair it would be completely frizzed out!

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You could probably build that pretty easily without any masonry skills. See rudimentary graphic below, ---- = pizza stone and *** = fire brick.

That's what I was considering, I was just hoping to be able to put something together a little more permanent. :rolleyes:

Does one purchase fire brick from the hardware store? How do I know what I'm getting?

Thanks for all the help.

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A lot of people have probably already heard about Heston Blumenthal's technique for the "perfect pizza" at home: heat a cast iron skillet on high heat for several minutes on the burner, flip it upside down, stick it in the oven under the broiler, and cook the pizza on that.

I have a few problems with the technique:

  1. Even large cast iron skillets aren't quite big enough for more than a personal-sized pie.
  2. You can only do one (small) pizza at a time.
  3. To get the pan back up to temperature between pies, you're basically sticking a surface covered in flour, dough bits, and other detritus directly on the cook-top.
  4. If your pan is seasoned, this isn't great for it.

So I tried to rework this to feed more people more efficiently:

  1. Crank the oven. Use two pizza stones. Forget the skillet.
  2. Once the oven is up to temp, turn on the boiler and try and squeeze a few more joules into the top stone.
  3. Switch back to bake.
  4. Put your first pie on the bottom stone, prep your second.
  5. Move the first pie to the top stone, put your second on the bottom stone.
  6. After a minute or two, switch over to the broiler.
  7. Switch back to bake, remove the top pie.
  8. Move the bottom pie to the top.
  9. Lather, rinse, repeat.

So basically, you're constantly rotating par-cooked pies from the bottom stone to the stone that's under the broiler, and using the power of the broiler to finish.

These were the best pies I've ever made. Beautiful crust from top to bottom, and the broiler really gives the pies a brick-oven taste and texture. There were a few nicely charred black spots that went really well with the sweet, fruity EVOO I finished them with.

This is my new go-to!

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[*]Crank the oven. Use two pizza stones. Forget the skillet.

[*]Once the oven is up to temp, turn on the boiler and try and squeeze a few more joules into the top stone.

[*]Switch back to bake.

[*]Put your first pie on the bottom stone, prep your second.

It's funny you should post this, I made pizza for the family last night (olive oil, caramelized leeks, goat cheese, and arugula for what it's worth) using a similar method to what you recommend, and it turned out ok, but what I struggle with the most is your fourth step. At this point, I've got a very hot pizza stone in the oven, and a flimsy pizza weighted with toppings sitting on a cutting board on the counter, and I've never figured out a good way to transfer this to the stone. I usually wind up folding it in half like a calzone, using a couple of big spatulas to transfer to the edge of the pizza stone, and then trying to unfold it...this is only sometimes successful...the dough sticks to itself and sometimes won't come apart, and it's always a bit of a mess. Any advice? There's probably some simple way people do this that I just haven't thought of yet.

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It's funny you should post this, I made pizza for the family last night (olive oil, caramelized leeks, goat cheese, and arugula for what it's worth) using a similar method to what you recommend, and it turned out ok, but what I struggle with the most is your fourth step. At this point, I've got a very hot pizza stone in the oven, and a flimsy pizza weighted with toppings sitting on a cutting board on the counter, and I've never figured out a good way to transfer this to the stone. I usually wind up folding it in half like a calzone, using a couple of big spatulas to transfer to the edge of the pizza stone, and then trying to unfold it...this is only sometimes successful...the dough sticks to itself and sometimes won't come apart, and it's always a bit of a mess. Any advice? There's probably some simple way people do this that I just haven't thought of yet.

How about a good-quality pizza peel? Would that do the trick?

I use semolina flour (burns less quickly) on my pizza peel, assemble the pie on that, and slide it into the oven. The same peel works great for removing it from the oven.

(but i might be misunderstanding the problem)

(caffeine is slow on the uptake this morning)

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At this point, I've got a very hot pizza stone in the oven, and a flimsy pizza weighted with toppings sitting on a cutting board on the counter, and I've never figured out a good way to transfer this to the stone.
A couple of tips:

  • As KMango says, try using semolina flour. Cornmeal works, too. And be liberal with it.
  • Assemble your pizza ON your pizza peel (you have a pizza peel, right???). As you work with it, though, the semolina you used as "lubricant" starts to moisten from the dough. So every step you want to slide the peel around to make sure the dough doesn't stick (shimmy it back and forth). Lay the dough down, shimmy. Apply sauce, shimmy. Apply cheese, shimmy. Top, shimmy.
  • Shimmy constantly as you move it to the oven and it should slide right off.
  • You say your pizza is "weighted down" with toppings. I used to have a huge problem, every single time, of overtopping the pizza. Use a light hand. There should be more empty space on your pie than topped space. You'll find that doing so makes things much easier, and you end up with a much better pizza.

Now, if you're prepping your second pizza on the peel, you obviously can't use the peel to move the first pie up and out of the way! Due to some overzealous gift-giving, I actually have TWO peels, so that makes things easier for me. If you can work quickly, you can also move the first pie up with your single peel, do the second pizza, and then by the time you're done you should be ready to broil the first.

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Ages ago Mktye suggested parchment paper to me and it works like a dream. I prep the pizza directly on the parchment, slide the parchment onto a cookie sheet for transfer to the stone, and bake the pizza on the parchment. This way you can prep a bunch of pizzas at the same time too and are only limited by counter space.

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Ages ago Mktye suggested parchment paper to me and it works like a dream. I prep the pizza directly on the parchment, slide the parchment onto a cookie sheet for transfer to the stone, and bake the pizza on the parchment. This way you can prep a bunch of pizzas at the same time too and are only limited by counter space.

This technique works great with baking bread as well.

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Ages ago Mktye suggested parchment paper to me and it works like a dream. I prep the pizza directly on the parchment, slide the parchment onto a cookie sheet for transfer to the stone, and bake the pizza on the parchment. This way you can prep a bunch of pizzas at the same time too and are only limited by counter space.

I use this for pizza and bread all the time and it works like a champ. It also helps to reduce the flour, semolina, and corn meal debris that seems to get all over the place. Well for me anyway. :(

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So, anybody tried this--pizza in a cast-iron skillet? I've been reasonably happy using a baking stone, but this looks intriguing.

Link's busted, but I'm guessing this is the Bittman technique?

I honestly haven't tried it. My beef with it is that you can't make a very big pizza that way. I guess the question is, how big of a difference is there between a 550 degree pizza stone and a 550 degree iron skillet in terms of the final product?

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Link's busted, but I'm guessing this is the Bittman technique?

I honestly haven't tried it. My beef with it is that you can't make a very big pizza that way. I guess the question is, how big of a difference is there between a 550 degree pizza stone and a 550 degree iron skillet in terms of the final product?

Hmmm. Link is still working for me. I've never seen Bittman do pizza in a cast-iron skillet. I guess the question would be what, if any, effect the sloped sides of a skillet might have as opposed to a flat pizza stone.

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Link's busted, but I'm guessing this is the Bittman technique?

I honestly haven't tried it. My beef with it is that you can't make a very big pizza that way. I guess the question is, how big of a difference is there between a 550 degree pizza stone and a 550 degree iron skillet in terms of the final product?

Link works for me too. Not a Bittman article, but they heat the skillet on a burner so the surface will be much hotter than 550F.

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Recently I used a similar technique with good results -- fry the dough in a cast iron skillet, then remove from skillet, top, and finish in the oven (not broiler). Alex Guarnaschelli's skillet fried pizza with roasted mushrooms and charred broccoli rabe pesto The pizzas (two 12") charred nicely in the skillet.

The technique in the article does not looked liked a fried pizza, just a vehicle to bring a ton of heat to the dough quickly. That said, frying the dough might have its merits.

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Wifey was out of town, and I was bored. No, that's not the prelude to my letter to Penthouse (this time)... it explains why I found myself with the time to do this:

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Yes, that's right! Using only the power of my imagination I'm going to try and use my Weber Kettle to make a brick oven pizza. This could go one of several ways (ordered from most to least favorable outcome):

  1. I make incredible pizza.
  2. The thing doesn't get hot enough, and makes okay pizza.
  3. One of the Weber legs buckles under the weight and the entire kettle crashes through my brand new sliding glass door. My house catches fire. The blaze incinerates everything except me, my wife, and her varsity softball bat.
  4. I make shitty pizza.

Wish me luck!

More pictures here: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2315663&id=5317785

Idle hands truly are the devil's playthings.

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Wish me luck!

So basically this turned into a $20 class on how not to make brick oven pizza. Pretty much everything important shattered in the heat, including the pizza stone and the all-important terra cotta roof (without which there wouldn't be enough radiant heat coming down on the top of the pizza).

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Luckily I had a backup pizza stone and my regular ol' oven preheated as a backup, so dinner was still on.

Back to the old drawing board.

I just wish I knew more about masonry: http://sites.google.com/site/pizzahacker/

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So basically this turned into a $20 class on how not to make brick oven pizza. Pretty much everything important shattered in the heat, including the pizza stone and the all-important terra cotta roof (without which there wouldn't be enough radiant heat coming down on the top of the pizza).

26761_719913385694_5317785_41005308_2997961_n.jpg

26761_719913390684_5317785_41005309_1018278_n.jpg

Luckily I had a backup pizza stone and my regular ol' oven preheated as a backup, so dinner was still on.

Back to the old drawing board.

I just wish I knew more about masonry: http://sites.google.com/site/pizzahacker/

Fire brick. Think fireplaces.

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