At Last, Pizza - Part 1

Quick garden update: Just wanted to show off the front EarthBoxes as I didn’t include photos in the previous post. They’re doing great guns relative to the DIY boxes thanks to better sunlight and that they were planted earlier. It couldn’t possibly be that their patented design is superior to zip tie and hacksaw jobs. You don’t need to know that two of the DIY plants have already died. See, they were just genetically weak varieties. Yeah. Future marinara Not yet Big Boy Anyhow, I’ve been meaning to do a post about making pizza and I keep putting it off because it’s such an expansive topic so I thought the best way to tackle this is in stages. We’ll start off with the dough. I know everyone says that it’s all about the water, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the flour, the salt, the kneading, the yeast, the proofing, the olive oil and whether Mercury is in retrograde or not are more important factors than the water. I’m not saying that water isn’t a factor, but there are so many other obstacles working against the home cook than the mineral content of your water. As an aside, there was an interesting experiment about water and pizza crust done on the Food Network show, “Food Detectives.” Compelling stuff but if you make pizza in a toaster oven with Bisquick and Velveeta, it ain’t gonna be good just because you used Manhattan tap. Over the past year and a half, I’ve experimented making dozens of pizzas with good ol’ L.A. municipal and I think it’s tasty stuff. And my pizza making skills are developing nicely, though a friend of mine said, “Man, that reminds me of when I worked in a pizzeria. 160 pizzas a day.” Basically John made more pizzas in a day than I’ve made in 18 months. Only 9,935 hours to go until pizza mastery! I was always wary of making pizza from scratch because I thought my kneading skills were sub par. My bread was always dense and crumbly and the dough was tough to handle. Once I got a Kitchen-Aid standing mixer with a dough hook I thought all my worries would be over. But it turns out my problem was, in fact, with the water - quantity, not quality. I may still be a shoddy kneader but my dough just wasn’t wet enough. It's got to be like sloppy, sticks-to-everything wet; dough that's a couple ounces of Evian short of being batter. It's a quality that I couldn't grasp in a recipe or a cookbook. It wasn't until I make several botched batches until I got a feel for the dough. Which sounds horribly wax on/wax off New Age-y, but...there you go. And because flour types vary and most recipes use volume measurements instead of weight, no recipe is going to get the same texture every time. You just have to play around until you get it. If you think, "This is way too gooey to be right," then you're probably there. Now let me explain that my method is one that I sort of made up (as opposed to all my other meticulously researched recipes). I’m pretty positive that this is not how they do it at Domino’s, but it’s yielded me consistent Neapolitan-ish crusts. I take a plastic tub and add about six cups of flour. That’s enough for about eight 10” pizzas, which is a lot, but you can keep the extra in the fridge where it will get more flavorful as the yeast autolyzes or you can also freeze the extra balls. Then, I take a cup and a half of hot tap water – about 100 degrees – and add a tablespoon of dry yeast and a teaspoon of sugar and let that proof for a few minutes on its own. If you’re not using bread flour, which has more gluten in it, then you’ll want to get some wheat gluten from the market. It’s the gluten that gives bread its chewy texture whereas cake flour has very little gluten, thus making delicate and tender cakes. I got a bag of Bob’s Red Mill at Whole Foods for like seven bucks. A 22 ounce bag will last for a zillion pizzas. That's right, a zillion. Back to the plastic tub: pour in the yeast, add two tablespoons of kosher salt (only one if it’s table salt) and stir it with a big spoon until it’s uniformly mixed. It should be wet and sticky. You might have to get a hand in there to get the dry bits at the bottom but you don’t need to knead just yet. Once it’s mixed, put a towel on top and let it sit for a couple of hours. A word on kneading: I heard this guy on the radio a few months ago going on about no-knead bread and how kneading is totally unnecessary. I tried it. It kinda sucked. But then as I’m writing this, I'm noodling around the Internets thinking that maybe I didn't do it right. I’m seeing that even the great Harold McGee subscribes to this method. Wow. And they even say that the secret is “to make a very wet dough.” I was just about to go into what bull crap this is but I guess I’m wrong and I’ve kind of been doing this method all along except with extraneous kneading. Huh. Wonder what I did wrong the time I tried it? I’m a jerk. Before After (forgot to rotate camera. Doh!) Back to me and my stupid kneaded dough. After a couple of hours on the counter, the dough will have more than doubled in size. Toss this lump into the mixer (or not, apparently), slap on the dough hook, add around three tablespoons of olive oil and let it knead on low for about ten minutes (or zero minutes. Damn you, McGee!). It should come together into silky skinned blob. Before needless kneading Beautified by superfluous dough swirling Pull it out, roll it into a fat worm shape and cut it into eight pieces. Each should weigh around 200 grams, which will give you a modestly sized, thin crusted pizza. Look out for that knife! Oh, the humanity! At this point, you get to the storage phase. I will just toss each lump into its own sealed plastic container and then stack them in the fridge and have pizza every day for a week and a day. Just make sure the container is big enough to accommodate the dough’s expansion as it ferments. As the days go by, the dough develops a more yeasty, bready flavor, which is a good thing. I just pull a ball out of the fridge, give it a couple kneads to make it uniform and then let it sit for a couple of hours with the container inverted on top of it so it doesn’t dry out. If you want to toss the dough in the freezer, that works, too. I use Ziploc bags so they will expand if the dough expands. I also suck out all the air (yes, with my lips) to help prevent freezer burn. Who needs a sous-vide machine? So that’s the first part of the pizza making process. Your results may vary. Heck, the crust is the most important part, as far as I’m concerned. Just like the Sushi Nazi insists that the rice is the most important part of sushi, a pizza with a bad crust sucks no matter what you put on it. Which is why I don’t understand the appeal of Casa Bianca, which many hail as the best pizza in L.A. It’s literally a block from my house and I almost never go there because the crust is like stiff cardboard. I eat it maybe a couple times a year and even with their excellent homemade sausage on it, it's kinda meh. Yet people line up every night for hours. I just don’t get it. If only they made it with New York water... Also how serial killers store body parts