No life-long search for the ultimate pizza could be complete without attempting to take matters into one’s own hands and create it oneself.
I have spent years looking for pizza crust recipes, and no matter how many I find and try, I’m amazed at one salient point: There is so very little variation in the recipes as to be almost meaningless.
So from where does the variation come from? Is it the flour, the oven, the yeast or what?
I’ve tried every variation imaginable and have been unable to find a consistently good-tasting and properly-textured pizza crust.
I was pleasantly surprised when I recently saw an old episode of Good Eats explaining the bread-making aspects of pizza dough.
It delved into the importance of the gluten content (I knew that), but more importantly, it explained how working the dough in the correct fashion directly altered the texture and the flavor of the finished product.
And so, yesterday, just in time for New Year’s Eve, I implemented version 1.0 of this pizza dough.
To really make the whole thing really experimental, I went ahead and make the Good Eats version of a red sauce to use on it also. The whole process took 24 hours and you can see the picture of the first pizza here.
In the interests of fairness, I think I should review my own pizza efforts, so here goes:
If I’d received this pizza in a restaurant, I’d have sent it back.
Although it looks nice on top, the bottom is burnt black, clearly I had a temperature control failure with the pizza stone, it was simply too hot and burned the bottom before the toppings could finish cooking.
Other problems, the sauce was too sweet and had a carroty flavor. (The sauce does have a small amount of carrot in it, but the flavor was too dominant in the final sauce.)
The flavor of the crust was, where possible to tell, not bad, but the texture was still wrong, being too fine (more like a loaf of bread rather than a crust.) There were some good pockets of air, leading me to believe I’m on the right path.
The cheese was good, but I’ve been using the same personally-developed mixture of whole-milk mozzarella, white cheddar and provolone for several years. I think it works quite nicely when I’m not just using mozzarella.
One of the issues while working the dough was that it was too elastic, pulling back too much as I worked the dough out to shape. Supposedly, that eases up if you leave the dough out longer (say, 30 minutes.)
Luckily, the recipe created two pizza doughs, and so while I ate this pizza, I let the other rest in the hopes of a superior product on the second try. I also let the oven temperature lower.
Review of Version 1.1 to follow.