I would suggest NOT buying that...

What always struck me about that beehive oven is how flimsy the legs and wheels look.

Made a batch of dough using this recipe. Cold ferment recipe that uses weights as well as volume measurements. The resulting dough was very easy to work with and made nice thin crusts with great flavor. I'll have to try it on the grill next since it will soon be too hot outside to bake pizza indoors.

Oh, yes, I'd like to second the vote this recipe. I've been mking it for a while now and it's fabulous, easy to work, and flexible. We are pizza eating fools. Recently, when the electricity was out, I ended up doing it on a pre-heated cast iron griddle on the grill, but I was nervous about doing it right on the rack. It came out very well.

Having finally managed to try his pies (and going early enough that he had some time to chat), Anthony Mangieri is my new pizza hero. It's now $21 for a 12" pie at Una Pizza Napoletana in NYC, which is a hefty premium over other noteworthy pies, but what you receive in return is a true work of art.

The dough. The dough! It's delicious. It's obsessive. It's insane. It's the finest pizza crust I've ever eaten. The soft texture he draws out of a classic lean dough is remarkable, and makes a strong case that you must have the right sort of oven burning the right sort of solid fuel in order to make a truly great pizza...it simply doesn't have time to get tough and brown. The menu says that making the dough is a two-day process from scratch: a slow 24-hour room-temp ferment using only the residual yeast in a lump of the previous batch, and a 12-hour second rise. As far as I can tell, Mangieri personally assembles and bakes every pie. Travellers note: he's going on vacation from mid-August thru mid-Sept, and the restaurant will be closed those weekends.

I guess I could quibble about how "wet" the San Marzano sauce is, but this is a great pie, and my current favorite among American pizzas in the Neapolitan style. Despite the fact that it was already 6pm and we were supposed to be having a large Italian dinner elsewhere at 8, I just couldn't resist ordering a second pie for Gubeen and me to share.

Edan, I hope this is your crust benchmark. Wow.

Haven't been to UPN since Anthony installed the new oven, however, over a year ago he was baking some fine pies in what I believe was a homemade forno. He makes the best pie I have had on this continent.

As far as my personal best pizze experiences, they were all in Naples. Salvo, Da Michele, Starita and Gino Sorbillo would be the best. They are all different. If I could make a pizza as well as any of theses places, I would be quite pleased with myself.

Here is a photo, (I didn't take it) of a Pizza Marinara at Salvo.

In case anyone's interested, here's a pizza making video by Ruth Gresser of Pizzeria Paradiso.

It's not going to win any awards for pacing... but still, a solid intro to pizza making. You really need to WATCH someone do it first because SO much of pizza making is getting a feel for things (the feel of the dough, the look of the crust, etc.) and watching gives you a head start.

Cook's Illustrated Pizza Bianca recipe is great. Really fantastic crisp, but not thin crust and quite easy to prepare with their bake in baking sheet trick.

It reminds me of a recipe I made a few years ago from the Bread Bakers Bible. High moisture... almost like water in the bowl until it magically comes together into something reminiscent of high viscosity ectoplasm...

This heirloom tomato from the North King Street Fresh Farmers Market in Old Town, plus a frozen Italian Store pizza dough at home led me to make pizza for lunch--actually, the dough made 2-10" pies.
Click to view attachment

I pre-heated the oven with pizza stone at 550 degrees for an hour. What a difference a little more heat and a lot of pre-heating makes. The pies took 7-8 minutes each.
Heirloom tomato, mozzarella, basil, olive oil and parm reg=

Click to view attachment

Click to view attachment

Dan, you posted last year about trying different freezing techniques but never followed up with the results. I was wondering how that turned out? Did the "par-cooking" method work? I was worried that this wouldn't get the same rise and fresh-baked, chewy texture as the stuff that is frozen directly after the rise.

The best way to freeze dough is "sometime before cooking." That is, while it's still dough and not yet crust.

That said, when I freeze them, it's usually after shaping them and throwing them in the oven for a minute or two to set it in shape, kill the yeast, and basically end up with a ready-to-go pizza crust. If I'm having frozen pizza, it's on a weekday when I don't have three hours after work for the dough (even if thawed overnight in the fridge) to come up to room temperature. With the pies already shaped and ready to go, I just thaw 'em, top 'em, and toss 'em in the oven. It's convenience.

If it's the weekend and I DO have time for the dough to come to room temperature, well, then I'm working with fresh and not frozen dough in the first place.

Ok so here is a question. I am making pizzas for some guests in a few days. I usually make it the day before and do a cold ferment but that still leaves a considerable amount of waiting/work/mess the next day that I don't want to deal with when the guests are there. I am thinking of making the dough 2 nights before and cold fermenting until the next night when I will make shape and stretch the dough, then stacking them up on wax paper or something in the fridge overnight so that the next day when the guests are there I can take them out, let them come to room temp, top and bake. My concerns are that they second night in the fridge will be too much rise or the integrity of the thin stretched crust will be breached by rising air pockets somehow, or that the dough will stick to the wax paper as it rises and I will get a giant mess when I pull them out. So what do you think? Should I just suck it up and do the dough the night before or do you think my plan will be fine?

Or, just par-cook it. That's going to be your most RELIABLE option.

Shaping and leaving in the fridge... I dunno. You might end up with crust that's a little "bready." If you're gonna do it, just make sure you keep the whole apparatus covered somehow so the dough doesn't dry out.

So Dan, I have an idea. I thought it up when I was running this morning and I don't have the balls to try it when I have my guests over this week. Maybe you could give it a go. They have pre-made jars of tikka masala sauce at Whole Foods. Get one of those, grilled chicken cut into chunks or shredded, maybe some extra tomatoes (dried out in the oven or something), shredded and blanched carrots, green peas, shredded spinach or something for a little bit of color and variety and some paneer. Use the jar of tikka masala to sauce the pizzas and top with the veggies and chicken and crumble paneer over the top. It won't melt but I think it still might be good. Then when it comes out drizzle some yogurt (mixed with mint lemon and garlic) over the top. Indian pizza. A pizza crust isn't that far from naan anyways. The only concern I have would be the lack of melted cheese but I don't think replacing the paneer with mozarella would be a good idea.

Melted cheese does not a pizza make. I used a non-melting Mexican cheese last week.

Let p = pizza and d = pizza crust

p = d + x

Where x is a topping >0.

I say go for it, but easy with the veggies. You don't want the pie to get waterlogged.

I don't think the extra days of cold ferment will hurt, if anything it should make the dough more flavorful. I would portion the dough into balls for each crust before putting it into the fridge but not bother stretching the dough until you're ready to bake. It only takes a few minutes to stretch out each crust so you don't save that much time.

Except a ball is going to take longer to come up to room temperature than a disc will. The ball will be too cold to work with when it first comes out, so you have to factor that into your total time required.

Yeah I was thinking more like choose one of those that I listed. Whatever is handy. Dude I am not making it. I already told you I don't have the cajones. Hahaha, I was trying to talk you into making it first.

Plus as per Alton Brown I always let them rest for awhile after I stretch them. Sometimes I even let them rest between two stretching sessions in order to get them as thin as I like without tearing.

I live in Philly and attended a pizza making class several months back at a local housewares store, Foster's, taught by one of the chefs at Osteria, Marc Vetri's transcendent pizza restaurant up here.

I was quite intimidated by the intricacies of pizza making but after seeing a simple recipe in Kingsolver's Animal Plant Miracle I decided to belly up.

Here's the link to Kingsolver's recipe and also to Osteria's recipe.

http://www.animalvegetablemiracle.com/pizza.pdf

http://www.philly.com/inquirer/columnists/...za_maestro.html

I am a bit puzzled by the Kingsolver recipe. It doesn't say anything about kneading the dough. We made two pizzas, one a simple pizza margherita, the second a margherita plus carmelized onions and peppers. The margherita plus was cooked on a pizza stone the simple margherita was cooked on a cookie sheet. The margherita plus turned out much better than the other, I suppose mostly because of the pizza stone. The crust was crisp and not soft and doughy like the one I cooked on the cookie sheet.

I welcome people's thoughts on both recipes. I'm sorry not to have pictures to post.

Thanks.

The people here are insane. I feel like a complete neophyte:

http://www.pizzamaking.com

It features posts like this:

It was brought to my attention in private that there also looms a myth involving Potassium bitartrate (Cream of Tartar) inhibiting browning in baked goods. Well, here you go:

Solution A (top)
Solution B (middle)
Solution C (bottom)
20.0 g water
1.00 g potassium bitartrate
0.96 g sucrose
0.50 g VWG
0.04 g cornstarch

The potassium bitartrate treated strip tested with a blackness level of 76%. Although a slightly different hue than the acetic acid solution, it is actually the darkest.

- red.november

EDIT: In the interest of disclosing a more complete picture of the methodology, I've also attached an image of the control test strips. The top is untreated and unheated, while the bottom is treated only with water and heated the same length of time (3 minutes) at the same temperature (500 F). The water-treated and heated strip tested with a blackness level of 4%.

I don't have the patience to go through this entire thread so sorry if this is a repeat question:

What can I use instead of a pizza stone if I want to make pizza in my own, pathetic, not always completely even oven?

An upside down cookie sheet. But you should buy a pizza stone - they aren't pricey!

For a variety of reasons not worth going into, I don't want to go purchase another kitchen tool to indulge a culinary whim that will most likely end when tomatoes are out of season

Use a cast iron skillet and make deep dish.

Roasting halved tomatoes in the oven with a little bit of EVOO, thyme, and salt + a food mill + a freezer = the natural evolution from a squirrel gathering nuts to humans enjoying great pizza all year long

Go to the hardware store and buy some unglazed quarry tiles. They work just as will as pizza stones but without the excessive markup. If you're worried about cluttering your kitchen, they're so inexpensive as to be disposable.

Unlike arboreal rodents, which gather fatty nuts to get through the winter, or other mammals like bears and whales which keep their winter stores tied up in their body's fat cells, here is a mammal with an utterly unique approach.

Facing the fast-coming winter, this homo sapiens sapiens harvests his pack's stores of, of all things, tomatoes and turns this bright red fregetable into a sloppy gloop which he then freezes in his cave's ice box.




He then takes this mush and spreads it onto a thin sheet of fermented wheat paste.


How fascinating.


Seriously. Words cannot describe how good this tomato sauce was. Salt, pepper, whole garlic cloves and thyme poured over as many halved heirloom tomatoes as I could carry back from the grocery store. Grill over indirect heat on a sheet of aluminum foil for 2-3 hours at around 300-350 degrees, or until the tops are just starting to blacken. Remove all but the tomatoes and run them through a food mill. Optionally, add reserved tomato juice, a splash of your favorite flavorful alcohol, and some stock (veal, in my case) and reduce until nicely thickened. Holy shitballs, this blew my mind.

My camera skills were nonexistent, though, so this was the best shot I got of a pie:


I lament not having my own woodburning brick pizza oven. This is a fantastic way to get that smoky, hearth-baked flavor into your pizzas. It's like I used tomatoes to capture the very essence of fire, to do with what I will. I feel a bit like Prometheus. You know, before the whole eternal liver-pecked-out-on-a-rock thing.

Pizza Making - Getting Out of the Intermediate Rut

I've always thought of myself as a pretty good home pizza cook. I didn't drop my pizzas to the floor of the oven. I used a pizza stone. My pies didn't come out covered in raw sausage (or worse, charcoal). But something was missing. My toppings were good and my crusts consistent, but there was nothing truly great here. I found that, even with practice, I was still churning out mediocrity. I wanted to go to the next level.

So I absorbed myself in study. I read books on bread and pizza making. My best resource was a handful of individuals at pizzamaking.com. I also made a lot of dough. A LOT of dough. I set out to take myself to the next level, and now I share what I learned here.

1) Measure by Weight

No questions here. This is the only way to achieve consistent quality and control in your dough. I even weigh the water down to the gram.

2) Know Your Ingredients

Pizza is so simple in terms of what goes into it: flour, water, yeast, maybe a few extras. But that's just it. The fact that it's so simple means that each component is that much more important. Using Pillsbury flour to thicken a pan sauce versus using some kind of specialty flour would be all but undetectable. Not so with pizza.

3) Go Easy

Part of my problem in the past was that I would try and cram twelve pies worth of ingredients into my mixer. This meant uneven and inconsistent dough. Now I don't go more than two or three twelve inch pies worth at a time.

So what did all my experience yield?

Dan's Ultimate Pizza Dough

-100% flour. I use a mixture of 75% Caputo 00 (available here) and 25% King Arthur bread flour (available at your local megamart). The bread flour is mixed in because the Caputo is optimized for a 900 degree oven.

-58.5% water. Filtered, of course. The chlorine in tap water kills yeast!

-0.25% instant dry yeast. Available through the King Arthur Flour website.

-2% Diamond Crystal kosher salt.

-2% olive oil (not extra virgin - the florals in it yield off flavors when baked).

For those unfamiliar with bakers percentages, basically you just take the amount of flour you have (by weight!) and multiply that by the percent. So for example if you start with 300g of flour (good for about two 10-12 inch pies - and remember, that would be 225g 00 and 75g bread flour), you would put in 300 x .585 = 175.5g of water.

Different flours absorb water at different rates, so the amount of water might change depending on the amount of flour you're using. For example, Caputo 00 has an absorption rate of 57%, while the bread flour has an absorption rate of 63% (.25*.63 +.75*.57 = 58.5%).

"What? No sugar? What the frak?" There is plenty of sugar in this recipe. It's locked up in the starch in the flour, and the yeast is going to free it for us during a long, cold fermentation. This fermentation has the added bonus of turning the dough into the perfect texture for stretching into a flat pie easily and without tearing. It also brings some amazing flavors to the party. These same starch-derived sugars contribute a nice browning to the final product, even in a home oven. That's why we don't have sugar: the yeast would eat it too quickly, die, and you'd end up with an overfermented dough. It's also why there's so little yeast (less competition, more chance to grow slowly).

Make sure your water is no warmer than 40 degrees. You want a final dough temperature that's below room temperature to hold off activation of the yeast as long as possible.

Start by sifting the flour. While you prepare the other ingredients, keep the flour in the fridge (again, to keep your final temperature low).

For this recipe, never go above the lowest setting on your mixer.

Using the whisk attachment on your Kitchen Aid, whisk together the salt, oil, and water with 25% of the flour. Switch to the hook attachment and add the rest of the flour. Once you've got an homogeneous blob that's pulling away from the sides, knead for five minutes. Add the yeast, and knead for another minute more or until you no longer see yeast on the surface.

"You're adding yeast at the END? You're a madman!" No, I'm not. Adding the yeast at the end decreases the time the yeast spends working in a warm fermentation, allowing you to let it go long and slow in the fridge. Don't worry, the yeast will even out in the end.

Remove, then knead by hand on a lightly flour surface for another 1-2 minutes. Keep it short, you don't want to heat the dough up!

Roll the dough into a ball, and place in a covered container in the refrigerator. I like to use small cookie tins. They're not airtight, so they let the dough breathe, but they keep moisture in so it doesn't dry out.

Keep the dough in the fridge for 7-14 days. You should notice that by the fifth or sixth day it will start to flatten out. It can be used any time after that, but after eight or nine days you start running up against the spoilage/overfermentation clock. I like seven days: make the dough on Sunday, enjoy pizza the next Sunday.

Bring the dough to room temperature over the course of two to three hours. With gravity as your bitch, stretch the dough into the appropriate shape. Stick it on a floured and slippery pizza peel. Sprinkle on salt, then your favorite toppings. Do NOT brush the dough with oil. Cook on a pizza stone in the hottest oven possible until delicious. Also, go easy on the toppings. If your toppings come up higher than the dough is thick at the rim, cut back (individual pieces of bacon that stick up higher than this are perfectly fine).

So, to sum up:

-300g sifted flour, 75% Caputo 00 and 25% KA Bread
-58.5% cold, filtered water
-0.25% IDY
-2% kosher salt
-2% olive oil

Whisk 25% of the flour with the salt, oil, and water until well combined. Using the dough hook, add the remaining flour and knead for five minutes once combined. Add yeast, then mix for an additional minute until incorporated. Hand knead an additional two minutes. Roll into a ball, then store, covered, in the refrigerator for 7-14 days. Bring to room temperature over the course of 2-3 hours, shape, salt, top, and bake!

And enjoy. You are now a pizza pimp.

Last Night's Pies. I apologize for the crappy photos. I'd been drinking.

Pepperoni and cheese
The aforementioned awesome dough with the aforementioned awesome amazing tomato sauce, topped with a blend of grated vacuum packed mozzarella and parm. I don't use the fresh moz that's soaking in water because I don't have the 900 degree oven needed to dry it out; also it doesn't grate properly. The pepperoni is uncured and high quality, so I didn't need to use my microwave and paper towel trick to get rid of the orange goo.


Butternut Squash, Shallots, Thyme, Bacon, and Balsamic Syrup
This tasted like Fall. Some apples would have been nice. I cooked the shallots and squash in the bacon drippings.



Wild Mushroom Medley with Leeks, Thyme, and Local Chevre (on half)
Really, really earthy and delicious. I glazed the mushrooms with veal stock.


Potato Skins
Just in time for football season. Translucently-thin russet potatoes (thank you, Benriner!) with leeks, bacon, and 6-year Widmer cheddar (holy flirking shnit is that good cheese!). I know it looks like I undertopped the side nearest the camera, but it's just that the potatoes were so very thin.


This was my first time working with this new dough formula, so in the future I'll know I can make the pies even bigger and flatter. But hot damn was the texture and flavor perfect!

You know what's cool to use when making pizza?



Ramones records and natural yeast!

One of these things is suffering from overfermentation...

Yeah, that is true. The yeast was last fed on Wednesday evening, right before I put it in the fridge. It's been slowly bubbling ever since.

Now it's warming up to room temp. Tomorrow morning I will wash it and feed until Tues, when I'm next baking pies...

Or was it the record? The ring wear stinks, for sure.

Then again, I've had a few. Maybe it's me

made pizza at a friends house last night..

Nice! What was your heat source?

small mugnani oven, burning oak. made 30 pies in about half an hour.

Can you post your dough recipe? Thanks!