To Toss or Not to Toss: Pizza - Part 2

If you made it through my first epic-length entry on pizza making, bravo. What can I say? I’m passionate about the ‘za. I will try to be more succinct here and in future postings. And I promise to never again use the term, "‘za."

So when I left off, I had made a bunch of dough blobs. Feel free to skip that step. It’s a bit of a production that is often hard to justify when you can just go to Trader Joe’s (or wherever) and get a sack of ready-made pizza dough for a buck and change. I will say that the premade stuff yields a harder, denser crust, but it’s oh-so-convenient. Especially when your backyard abuts the Trader Joe’s parking lot (as mine does).

Handling your dough – that’s a not a euphemism for something naughty – is not an easy skill to acquire. For me, it entailed a lot of pizzeria stalking. At Pizzeria Mozza, they have a guy whose only duty is to prep crusts for the toppings guy and I spent many a lunch at the bar parked right in front of his station watching his every move. “Hey, Joe. The creepy dude who stares at you all the time is back.” Honest Abe, my eyes were on the dough the entire time.

But seriously, watching pizza guys is a great way to learn the technique. I’ve also spent meals watching them roll out pizzas at Terroni where they do this weird finger pressing thing that gets the dough super thin, at Bollini's where they use a super fat copper rolling pin to get them to the DOC specifications, and at Lucifer’s where they toss wads of dough in a machine that spits out perfect round crusts. They all make good pizzas but I prefer the hand-tossed crusts that are thin in the middle and a little puffy and doughy on the outside. My experience is that rolling pins squish out the air bubbles in the dough, making a crisper, stiffer and more uniform pizza, so if that’s your thing, by all means do it that way. It’s way easier.

I have to confess that my preference for the tossed crust has less to do with taste and more because it’s so much fun to throw pizza dough into the air. Haven’t you seen that commercial?

The basic idea is to punch the center of your dough down relatively flat while keeping it fat on the rim.

My apologies for the blurry photos

I first squish down a ring with my thumbs

Then I flatten the middle part

When it gets big enough, you drape the dough on your knuckles, slowly working and stretching the outside rim to make it wider while rotating the dough after every pull to keep things even. The dough should feel loose and elastic as you stretch it to a size that’s tossable. I don’t really know what the tossing does – maybe it helps retain a round shape – but it’s really, really cool.

I'm not yet ready to join the U.S. pizza throwing team. Sometimes my dough will get lopsided where I’ll have to dangle and shake it like a bed sheet to even it out. The goal is to work it until it’s fairly translucent in the center part, so whatever it takes to get there, right? A 200 gram lump of dough should make a nice, thin 10-12 inch pizza. Little holes can be fixed at the end with a finger pinch. But if your dough is correct, it should be surprisingly elastic and strong.

Ta-da!

If things do go south and your dough is tearing or lumpy and you want to start over again, I’d advise against it. If you re-wad everything, it won’t be as elastic and even the second time through and you’ll have worse problems. At that point it’s better to bring out the rolling pin and fix your mistakes with it. Or use the rolling pin to start with and quit being such a showoff. Or you can just screw it all and call Domino’s.

Next up: Toppings

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