5 hours ago, weinoo said:While your pizza (and @Chris Hennes's) look good, many of the recipes appear (or sound to) work better when both of you have played around with them.
With such an expensive set of books, well-researched and documented, that is a bit disappointing, in my opinion.
It also (to me, at least) means they're full of baloney about what pizza is good and what pizza isn't, on their taste tour of America.
First, I don't disagree with what you think. Totally valid opinion.
I can't speak for @Chris Hennes, but apart from using my previous knowledge of sourdough pizzas, I haven't played around with any other of their recipes (apart from messing around with flour choices which one time actually screwed me because I went against the book). The two pizzas above is their Neapolitan Dough Master Recipe to the letter and they were fantastic.
The Artisan Dough and NY Dough are PERFECT. I'm not sure I'll ever need another dough recipe for those styles. They've also converted me away from Neapolitan I think. I'm looking forward to going deep into the Artisan pizza making game.
The only thing I find that can be different is possibly the RT proof times. My kitchen runs cold so I need to go a few hours longer than what they recommend.
With so many variables in baking it's tough to follow any recipe exactly and get proper results unless you are in a professional kitchen. Thomas Keller's Bouchon Bakery would suffer from the same problem. Just gotta use your intuition. Fortunately it's usually just a matter of extending a proof time here or there.
In terms regards to their pizza rankings, I mean, who cares? It's just one more list of pizza rankings. I really appreciate their thoughts as a starting point, but whatever. I live in CT. I've had New Haven pizza a lot. They are completely right about the burnt crust they complained about. It's still awesome pizza.
Aren't you the guy who said nothing green belongs on a pizza? ; )
