Pizza: Cook-Off 8

[Behemoth]

Nadia, where the hell did you go for pizza in Germany    ?

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You can't make this stuff up, you know.

Click on "pizza" on the top row, then on "Bestseller" to see some amazing ingredients. They've changed them a bit since I was in Hamburg, but I see the "honig-senf-dill sauce" is still available. I usually politely suggest a decent imbiss lahmajun.

What I particularly love is they name them after American cities that make absolutely no sense. e.g., for some reason the Arizona comes with gyros, tatziki and onion Oh, and the curry chicken & pineapple one is the "Kentucky".

Edited May 1, 2005 by Behemoth (log)

[slkinsey]

Nice looking 'za, Behemoth.

Patrick and others, one comment regarding prosciutto. You want to put the prosciutto on the pizza after it comes out of the oven, not before. This is the way I've always seen it done in Italy.

Anyway... if you're like me, you usually have some leftover ingredients the day after making pizza. A little leftover dough, a little leftover mozzarella, a little leftover broccoli rabe, a little leftover tomato, a little leftover sausage... what to do? Why, make a calzone, of course!

[Jason Perlow]

What, no bisected shot?

[slkinsey]

What I particularly love is they name them after American cities that make absolutely no sense. e.g., for some reason the Arizona comes with gyros, tatziki and onion  Oh, and the curry chicken & pineapple one is the "Kentucky". 

I don't see why you think this is odd. Many is the time I've been visiting friends in Pittsburgh who have said, "I could really go for a pizza with ähnchenbrustfilet, Blattspinat, Knoblauch and Creme fraiche."

[albiston]

What, no bisected shot?

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A call for food porn if I ever read one .

[albiston]

Sausage and ramps.

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Sam,

that's probably my favourite among the beautifull array of pizzas you baked. Just wondering what ramps are. Are they in any way related to mustard greens? I ask because your pizza reminds me of "pizza carrettiera" as it is often called in Naples, i.e. tomato-less pizza topped with sausage and friarielli, the somewhat piquant Neapolitan mustard greens.

[slkinsey]

Here is a good picture of some ramps. A ramp is a kind of wild onion that grows in North America from roughly Southern Canada down to the Carolinas. They are completely edible, from the blade-shaped onioney leaf to the garlic-like bulb at the root end. Ramps are very seasonal, only growing for a few weeks in the Spring.

[Patrick S]

Patrick and others, one comment regarding prosciutto.  You want to put the prosciutto on the pizza after it comes out of the oven, not before.  This is the way I've always seen it done in Italy

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Thanks for the tip, Samuel. I'll try it that way next time, though I have to admit that I did not find the crisped edges of the baked prosciutto to be at all disagreeable.

[NulloModo]

I wasn't planning on getting involved in this cookoff, but looking at all these great pies, I just might have to try myself.

Behemoth - a lot of those german pizzas actually looked really tasty to me...

[Susan in FL]

I wasn't planning on getting involved in this cookoff, but looking at all these great pies, I just might have to try myself. 

Same here! This is most impressive, and I have learned a great deal from the discussion.

An aside... I wasn't as excited about this cook-off, because for me pizza didn't fall into the category of a dish that I've "always wanted to make at home (and may enjoy out) but rarely have made, or haven't made successfully." We make it fairly regulary at home, and successfully. But, I see that it obviously doesn't fall into that category for many of the participants, as well. I've probably been taking the cook-off criteria too literally; or maybe, if anybody else has done the same, maybe we want to revise the criteria a little to make it a bit more broad.

In any case, after this, the pizza we make at home will be made much more successfully! The ideas are fantastic, and I especially can't wait to try a pie with eggs.

[Paul B]

Someone asked about barbequing pizzas. I've done it. I make the dough in a bread machine: 1 1/2 cups of water; 3 1/3 cups bread flour; 1 1/2 tsp yeast; 1 tsp salt; a splash of vegetable oil. When the bread machine is done with it, I take it out, put it in a large bowl and cover it with a towel to allow it to rise. Takes at least an hour and I have enough dough for two pizzas. To cook it on the barbeque you have to have cleaned the grill within an inch of its life. I mean super clean. Then you oil the grill. Then close the lid and let the bbq get good and hot. Finally I open the lid, toss the rolled out dough on the grill, and shut the lid. Let it coook for 5-10 minutes, then flip the dough and quickly dump put the toppings on the pizza and shut the lid. Let it regain heat, then turn off the bbq and let the pizza cook with residual heat.

As for unusual toppings, I like to make a (wait for it) curry pizza now and then. I stir-fry some pieces of chicken and some sliced white onion. Add a jar of a good curry sauce and let it thicken. Then add some frozen peas and stir until they thaw. Then take all that and put it on the pizza dough and add small cubes of feta cheese. Cook as you would a regular pizza. Not very Italian, but nice on a cold day. I actually got the idea when I was living in Ireland. The Dominos in that country offers a pizza called the Winter Warmer which has pieces of tandoori chicken on it.

[vengroff]

Inspired by all the great hints and photos I decided to give Neopolitan pizza a shot. I used a modified version of pain a l'ancienne. I made it with AP flour, which was the lowest protien flour I had. Initially, this stuff is wet wet wet. I went a little heavier on the flour to bring it to the feel of the p a l'a I've made with higher gluten bread flour. It still has the consistency of yougurt.

After 24 hours fermenting in the fridge and then another 2 at room temperature, it's a bubbling blob of goo on the bench.

I cut the dough into 6 roughly even pieces. It would have been more exact if I weighed them again, but I just went by eye.

Next came the rounding. It's essentially impossible to apply too much flour to your hands before rounding the dough. I used the standard roll technique, sticking the bottom of the dough to the bench and then spinning it in a cupped hand.

Believe me, rounding the dough with one hand and focusing the camera with the other is no picnic. I gave up, put down the camera, and rounded the other five. I then sprayed them with olive oil and set them aside to proof for another hour.

Meanwhile, I prepped a little Italian flag of chopped tomatoes, garlic, and torn basil leaves.

The tomatoes were San Marzanos. I removed them from the juice they were packed in, and then chopped them to make the sauce. No additional liquid was added.

Once the dough balls had proofed, I dusted the peel heavily with semolina to prevent sticking.

I then rolled out one ball of dough to about 12" (30cm) in diameter, and just a few millimeters thick. I transferred it to the peel with heavily floured hands, and topped it with the chopped tomatoes.

I then added sliced and well-drained fresh mozazrella and the chopped garlic.

Finally, the base complete, I added the one ingredient I had been craving since I first mixed the dough the day before, a single raw egg.

I had been preheating the oven ever since I set the dough balls aside to proof, and it was now blazing hot. The last number on the dial is 550, but it didn't stop turning until it was just shy of where 650 would have been if it were marked. I'm not sure what temperature it finally reached, but my digital remote thermometer tops out at 572 (300 C) and it had long since give up and started flashing "Hi" over and over again like it was trying to greet me.

I slid the pizza quickly onto the stone--perhaps a bit too quickly, as the egg slid forward a bit and was now off center. I knew there was nothing I could do at this point but shut the oven door and set the timer for five minutes.

When the buzzer went off, the crust was crisp, the cheese bubbling, and the egg cooked through. I pulled the pizza and garnished it with a little torn basil and some cracked black pepper over the egg.

Here's the final result, plated and ready to eat. The tomato and cheese had virtually merged in the intense heat of the oven, forming a protective layer two or three times thicker than the crispy crust itself.

This is my Italian variant of the British breakfast standard soldiers and eggs.

[vengroff]

After the egg pie, I still had five more pizzas worth of dough to go. I sprayed four with olive oil, dropped them in zipper bags and tossed them in the freezer. The last one I used to make an anchovy and oregano pie.

It started much like the other pizza, with a thin crust topped with raw ingredients. In this case it was chopped tomato, oregano, mozzarella, and anchovies.

Five minutes in the oven, and the toppings had melded into one bubbling mass, with some nice golden coloring.

The saltiness of the fish over the sweet tomatoes was just fantastic.

Finally, the crust, which I realize I forgot to show much of up to now. It was thin but crisp in the center, and nicely inflated around the edges, with irregular charred patches to bring in an extra smoky flavor component.

[Kokh Leffle]

What a great thread. Kudos, and Bravisimo to all. I’m tremendously impressed with all the jury-rigging in order to duplicate a commercial pizza oven. The level of experimentation to achieve the ultimate pizza base is astonishing.

Having lived in the northeast, southeast and the western US as well as several places abroad I have been fortunate enough to sample various interpretations of pizza. My observation is that the pizza you grew up on is the pizza you love. If you grew up on Pizza Hut than that’s what you judge all other pizza by. My first taste of pizza in Naples has been veiled by the passing of forty-five years. But then again, what did a ten-year-old kid who grew up on falafel know about pizza?

My standard and what I personally judge all other pizza by is your every day New York pie. Just give me a crisp yet chewy crust, a simple sauce, real Mozzarella and a drizzle of olive oil. Fold, blow, bite and chew. As the fat from the cheese slowly drips down to your elbow, you’ve surely been elevated to pizza nirvana.

As a chef at a kosher dairy restaurant, I have tossed more then my share of pies. Allow me the honor of sharing what I’ve leaned.

A crisp, chewy New York style crust is made with high gluten flour. We used a product from ConAgra that was milled from hard winter wheat. To make the dough, we put fifty pounds of flour, five gallons of water that was resting in a walk-in for twenty-four hours and a brick of commercially available fresh yeast in a Hobart with a dough hook and mixed until a soft, elastic and smooth dough was achieved. The dough was turned onto a table and allowed to rest before being portioned out into individual balls. Each ball was stretched and folded under until a smooth elastic skin was formed and placed on an oiled Sheet-pan allowing room between each portion. This was covered with plastic wrap and placed in a walk-in overnight to develop and mature.

For the sauce we used good quality canned crushed tomatoes, chopped fresh basil and a generic dry Italian herb blend (basil, oregano, rosemary, marjoram and thyme).

The mozzarella was a kosher product that was grated (shredded). It had good moisture content, nice taste and mouth feel.

Stretching and tossing the dough is no great secret. It just takes a little practice. Keep a bowl of flour on your work surface. Pick up the dough and drop it into the flour, flip and coat the other side. Slap off any access flour and place your dough on your counter. You are now ready to stretch your pie. Begin by using your fingertips to demarcate a rim around the perimeter of the dough. Slap and use your fingertips to deflate the dough in the center and release any gas. Now, pick up the dough and toss it between your palms in such a manner that you toss and slightly turn the dough as it travels between your palms. Keep your palms about eight inches off the work surface and allow the weight of the dough to do the stretching. When you begin to feel the dough sweeping your counter you will have a disk about eight or nine inches in diameter. At this point, you want to switch your dough so that it is resting on your knuckles while you make a loose fist. Use your fists to stretch the dough, again allowing the weight of the dough to do most of the work. Watch your dough and work it in such a way that it is stretching evenly with no thin or thick spots. As your disk gets larger, go ahead, I know you can’t resist the temptation to toss it in the air with a spin and catch it on your knuckles.

Much has been said here about keeping the dough from sticking to the peel. Using corn meal and making sure your dough isn’t sticking by testing as you build your pie is one solution. Another, easier method, and one used by many commercial pizza operations is an inexpensive screen available in many restaurant supply houses. The usual objection to using a screen is that your pizza won’t come in contact with your oven floor. Or, in the case of a home oven, you’re stone. This is easily remedied by removing the screen a few minutes into the baking. Use your peel to lift the pizza and slide the screen out with a pair of tongs.

The key to making a great pizza is to keep it simple and resisting the temptation to overload it with toppings. Place your dough over your knuckles and gingerly drape in on your peel or screen. Do not pat or play with your dough. Simply stretch it into shape by lightly grasping the edge with your fingertips. If you’re using a screen, you can spin it and shape it with your palms around the perimeter to get a perfect circle. Ladle out a measured amount of sauce and pour it in the center. Use the bottom of the ladle and spread the sauce out in concentric circles. Aim for an even, light coating. Its okay if some of the dough shows through. Spread your cheese out over the sauce, again aiming for an even layer. Keep in mind that the cheese will spread out as it melts. You’ve now got a basic cheese pizza ready to top with anything your creative juices can conceive. Vegetables have a high water content. I recommend lightly sautéing them to evaporate most of the moisture.

Get your pizza into the oven. Commercial ovens are typically cranking at 600 to 650 degrees Fahrenheit or higher. With a home oven, get it as hot as it will go. Every oven has its own eccentricities and has hot and cold spots. You must learn your oven and use it to your advantage. Home ovens tend to run hotter towards the back wall. Rotate your pizza to take advantage of the hot spots to achieve an even bake. It’s inevitable that your crust will bubble during baking. Don’t panic. Simply poke the bubble with a sharp object to release the gas. This is actually a desirable effect as the thin wall of the bubble will bake up crisp and char around the burst opening.

Rest your pizza a few minutes before you cut it. This gives it a chance to cool slightly, allows the cheese to reform and keeps the whole shebang from sliding off the crust. It also prevents the ubiquitous pizza palette.

The best and least expensive investment you can make in your pursuit of the perfect pie is to watch a professional pizzaiolo. The next time you’re in the mood to buy a pizza, don’t order in or order ahead. Get yourself down to your favorite pizzeria, order and watch the pizzaiolo at his craft.

You’ll know you have achieved a perfect crust when you can hold a slice horizontally without it drooping. Keep experimenting, and remember that flour has a different moisture content at different times of the year and under different weather conditions. Learn to feel your dough so that you will be familiar with how its supposed to be and make slight adjustments to keep it as constant as possible.

Elie

[MarketStEl]

I wasn't planning on getting involved in this cookoff, but looking at all these great pies, I just might have to try myself. 

Behemoth - a lot of those german pizzas actually looked really tasty to me...

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Yes, but the cities really don't make much sense.

"Buffalo" pizza with "Bauernschnicken und extra Sour Cream"? (Looks like prosciutto to me.) Where's the chicken and hot sauce?

Mozzarella, tomato and mushrooms on an "El Paso"? How about beef seasoned with cumin and chili powder, tomatoes, onion, garlic and a Cheddar-Jack blend?

Unfortunately, they don't have a picture of the "Kansas" ("peperonisalami" and fresh mushrooms), but again, where did they get this one from? It should at least have barbecue sauce, like the "Texas", and probably beef brisket instead of the "peperonisalami".

Still, this site does offer inspiration for unusual ingredient combinations.

[Busboy]

Pizza inspires a lot of strict constructionism; people have very definite ideas about what constitutes a “proper” or “authentic” or even “DOC” pizza, but I’ve always been more of an impressionist: if it tastes good, do it.

Despite the suggestion on the flour bag that Friday night is pizza night, we had ours on Sunday.

For the sauce, I like Muir Glen’s tomatoes, available from Whole Foods, and prefer them even to the San Marzanos. I also like to work with whole tomatoes. I think – and a friend who was a produce buyer confirmed – that they have a brightness and flavor that more processed tomatoes lack. I also love the few minutes spent crushing them into the pot, on top of the sweating onions and garlic. It’s playing with your food, just like momma said not to, but she isn’t there to step on the mushy glee or complain about the tomato seeds on the stove.

I like a little tomato paste and a little sugar in the sauce, bass notes against the high, tart taste of the whole tomatoes. And my spice preferences are surely more New Jersey than old Napoli – the kind of sauce you see ladled out behind plexiglass after ten or so of those pony beers and a scramble to the edge of the private piers, where the boardwalk noise is far enough off that you can hear the waves and see the ships’ lights on the horizon: basil and oregano, dried, and in quantity.

Pizza dough is one of the first things I ever cooked, under mom’s tutelage – she made pretty good pizza, especially for an Alabama girl. So it was appropriate that when I couldn’t hunt down the old Time-Life Italian cookbook I’ve used as a go-to for the dough recipe for a while now, I went back to mom’s kitchen -- more or less -- using the paperback Joy of Cooking she gave me to replace the hardback that has been seized years ago by a psycho landlady (along with much other gear) which, in turn had replaced the version we’d cooked from together back in the day. Joy isn’t sexy, but it works. It’s basically bread dough made pizza dough by the addition of a little olive oil; I like to let it sit hours longer than the recipe calls for, to up the yeast count and to lighten the crust. Stephanie made her own batch, a Martha recipe that adds butter at the end. Seems a little effete to me, but it rises like gangbusters and crisps up pretty good on the stone.

The one failure: a recipe from an old Italian cookbook that has some great recipes (acquired, according to the price tag on the inner cover, from the Strand in NYC for twelve bucks) but whose “Neapolitan Pizza Dough” recipe still eludes me. You begin by making a sponge with water, yeast and a small portion of the dough and then, after the sponge rises, add it to the rest of the flour. I’ve seen similar recipes for brioche, but have always been wise enough to avoid them. This time, however I took the plunge, but to no avail – even pizza sauce doesn’t do much for cardboard. So I gave it to the kids. [Note to self: reference Albiston’s posting for next attempt]

Everything looks a little flat, as the dough was dumped from the bowls in which they were rising. [L-R Martha, Joy, Old Italian Cookbook]

Like every yuppie, I acquired a Kitchen Aid somewhere along the line, but I loath the dough hook. Unless you’re making bread for a hundred, I believe that God wants you knead the dough by hand, punching, stretching, folding and punching again, adjusting the moisture and the gauging the elasticity every time you lean forward and shove the heel of your hand into the soft mass, until your fingertips tell you that it’s time for the risin’.

I don’t like to eat my pizzas with “the works,” but I do believe pretty much anything works on a pizza, even the oysters a friend brought over once. As you can see below, I’ll settle for Hormel pepperoni if I haven’t made it to the Italian deli, and I like the one-two combo of fresh basil atop the dried-basil infused sauce (hint: Thai basil and chorizo – they have an amazing affinity for one another, and I for them). It’s harder to see that I was also able to score some excellent fresh Blue Ridge Dairy mozzarella. It may not be made with buffalo milk, but it is extraordinary stuff, both in taste and meltability, and is available at the Arlington Court House and Dupont Circle markets.

I once read that the carbon build-up on your pizza stones helps absorb heat and keep things from sticking; I've taken that to heart.

I’m kind of a “more is more” guy when I’m making my own pies, especially if I’m hungry, so you don’t get the kind of modernist simplicity you see coming out of the wood-fired ovens around town. I like a little goo.

Before.

Putting the pizza in the oven is kind of like firing a pot, you have a general idea what the glaze is going to look like but you're never positive until the baking is over. But this one did me right.

After.

I also made a “tria formaggio” (I only had three Italian cheeses in the house; fortunately, one was gorgonzola) with artichoke hearts and sun-dried tomatoes, but the only pictures are too disturbing to post.

The kids have their own disticntive styles.

Cheese and only token pepperoni for the girl.

Pepperoni and garlic, no cheese for the boy.

And Stephanie skipped the whole pizza thing and made a calzone, stuffed with ricotta, spinach, a bit of sauce and pepperoni and lots o’ garlic.

For all the centuries of tradition and years of experience and cords of hardwood master pizza-makers bring to the job, sometimes there’s nothing quite like waking up in the morning and knocking out your custom pie based on random whims, old memories and great cheese. Unless it's waking up in the morning and eating the leftover pie from the night before .

[vengroff]

Here is my recipe for pain a l'ancienne pizza dough. As I mentioned above, it uses AP flour and a bit less hydration than Reinhart's version.

[Behemoth]

vengroff -- try to hand-stretch the way PR describes next time you get a chance. The giant bubbles you get around the perimeter are the best part of the pizza IMO (and usually I am not a big fan of crusts.)

Me, I want to try your l'ancienne recipe next time. I've been using PR's neopolitan pizza dough recipe so far.

[vengroff]

vengroff -- try to hand-stretch the way PR describes next time you get a chance. The giant bubbles you get around the perimeter are the best part of the pizza IMO (and usually I am not a big fan of crusts.)

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I'll give that a try with some of the dough I put in the freezer. As you can see, I'm a fan of super-thin crust and toppings, but I won't knock the bubbly approach until I try it. I'm also curious how much of this has to do with the stretching technique vs. how close you go to the edge with the sauce and toppings.

Anyone planning to go the other way and do a full-on deep dish Chicago style pie?

[Behemoth]

I'll give that a try with some of the dough I put in the freezer.  As you can see, I'm a fan of super-thin crust and toppings, but I won't knock the bubbly approach until I try it.  I'm also curious how much of this has to do with the stretching technique vs. how close you go to the edge with the sauce and toppings.

Anyone planning to go the other way and do a full-on deep dish Chicago style pie?

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I think the idea is that rolling smushes the bubbles. With a rustic dough you are usually doing everything possible to not deflate it, hence turning rather than kneading etc. The toppings cause the middle of the pizza to stay flat & relatively tender, but the bubbles that puff up along the perimeter are wonderfully flavorful, sorta crisp-chewy like good bread should be. God I love pizza.

Not a big deep dish person. I may live in the midwest now, but spiritually I am a philly chick through and through (um, with some other stuff mixed in... )

[Chufi]

I have pizza planned for tomorrow. Chorizo, green asparagus and eggs. Can't wait..

A question about the dough. I only ever made pizza dough a couple of hours before baking (1 rise). Now I'm reading about keeping the dough in the fridge overnight for 'slow fermenting'. What does this do exactly? Or is it just for convenience? If I want to make pizza tomorrow evenning, could I start the dough now and what would be the best procedure?

[little ms foodie]

My husband made the dough using Alton Brown's recipe- in the past we have tried dough recipes from The Best, Food & Wine and James McNair. This one had great taste but was much to 'thick' for us. It used bread flour.

Here are our toppings for our 2 pies:

The first pizza has tomato sauce (we chop the tomatoes and then cook them in a bit of EVOO with garlic, pureed for me), onion confit leftover from Bouchon cookbook cooking, mozzarella and basil (some cooked with, some on after). Here it is ready to go into the oven. It took about 6 minutes (we cranked the oven to 600F)

Here is the second pizza in the oven on our stone. Generally we leave the pizza stone in the oven on the bottom on the element to help our old oven with heating. This pizza has EVOO, fontina cheese, asparagus, parm. Then we sprinkled it with truffle oil and draped prosciutto on it when it came out.

Both pizzas tasted so good! We love making pizza but are still searching for our perfect dough. And we also need lots of practice at shaping/stretching the dough.

[eje]

What a fun cookoff! What great looking pizzas folks have made!

My favorite pizza cookbook is Elizabeth Romer's "Italian Pizzas and Hearth Breads". It's a slim little volume with a lot of great ideas.

One of my all time favorite pizzas is grilled chicken, tomato sauce, preserved artichoke, and mozzarella.

Haven't had great luck with pizza dough the last couple times. I thought maybe that I had lost the knack to kneading or somehow the conditions in our new place weren't conducive to dough. But, reading some of the preceding comments, I think part of my problem may be that I stopped making an overnight sponge. I will have to go back to doing that next time.

edited for spelling

Edited May 5, 2005 by eje (log)

[rooftop1000]

OK kids ya want grilled pizza?....you will now!

first we have the giant ball of dough 24 hours in the fridge....half for today 3 little balls in the freezer.

Knead some spices right into the dough cut into 6 pieces, roll out, grill on one side... see how they Poof up

Now we have the mis en place leftover meatballs, onions, peppers, grilled zucchini, pepperoni, regular mozz, ricotta and nice chunky sauce....

himself went for sauce, mozz, meatball and pepperoni topped with ricotta after cooking

the youngun has sauce, mozz, onions, zucchini and ricotta

and mine was half white with mozz, ricotta and zucchini and half with sauce, mozz, pepperoni and meatballs

boy am I stuffed

tracey

[Grub]

Awesome grilled pizza, rooftop! I feel inspired to have another go at it after seeing this (my own attempt was a little less successful, heheh). Good idea, kneading spices into the dough, btw -- I gotta try that. Always wanted to try a curry pizza.

I'm curious about Chufi's question also... Does leaving the dough in the fridge overnight create a more "fluffy" result, for a chewable pie? Or does it do something else?