Pizza 2
The pizzas from Friday ultimately came out sort of triangle shaped, because I wasn’t very good at shaping the dough into classically round pies. Some of the dough was also undercooked, because I wasn’t very good at making a uniform thickness. I suppose the two problems are related: they both concern rolling out the dough properly.
At the end of the day, I used this dough recipe I found on a rec.food.cooking thread, which called for making a sponge to aid the fermentation, and then a period of overnight refrigeration for retarding further fermentation. I also used AP flour, and wound up using about 5 cups by the time the flour came together.
Make the sponge
===============Mix together the following.
1/2 t yeast
1 3/4 C water
2 C bread flourLet it sit at room temperature until it bubbles up but before the bubbles begin to fall, about 4-6 hours depending on temperature.
Mix the dough
=============To the above sponge, add the following
2 C bread flour
3 T extra virgin olive oil
2 t salt
1 3/4 t yeastKnead the dough until smooth, about 5 minutes. Let it sit covered at room temperature for 15 minutes, then refrigerate for a day, at which point it’s ready to use. Remove it from the fridge 30 minutes before you roll it out so it warms up a bit and is easier to handle.
Toppings were:
Sauce
====
1 28oz can tomatoes
1 6oz can tomato paste
3 cloves chopped garlic
2 T Italian seasoning
1 T sugar
Stew this for 30 minutes or so. There was plenty of leftover sauce for use at other opportunities.
Cheese — a mozarella and provalone mix
Brocolli — blanced
Red Onions — sliced, raw
Italian chicken sausage — sauteed to about done and then broken up
Shape the dough, put some sauce on — not too much — followed by cheese and other ingredients. With the oven well-preheated at 475F, bake for about 12 minutes, checking often. The dough was on the Silpat, supported by a cooking tray. The pies were easy to get off the Silpat with a large spatula. Though the second pie did leak some tomato sauce over the side, it was easy to clean up and didn’t interfere with the non-stickiness of the Silpat.
The end result was not the best pizza evah, but serviceable on a first try. I did get some browning on the bottom of the crust, but, as noted, the dough wasn’t of even thickness and undercooked in parts.