Fat Guy's Low Effort Low Mess Pizza
Source of Recipe
Fat Guy at eGullet.org
Recipe Introduction
This method is not for fancy, perfect pizza. What it is is a method that produces really good pizza with easily aquired ingredients with a short amount of prep time. I have done it one time and am a convert. I've never had success with home made pizza dough - I'll probably try it again sometime and see if I can get it right, but in the meantime, this works very well. You don't have to use these exact ingredients (I used purchased pizza sauce, because I already had some), but it gives you a good guideline. The only thing that I would do differently is to place the pizza directly on a pizza stone after it has 'set' - the crust was a little droopy. Don't pile up the toppings on this pizza - a couple of toppings is fine, but the best is your basic cheese pizza.
List of Ingredients
1 lb. store-bought pizza dough (he says it's better if it is a few days old)
cornmeal
about 6 oz. Pomi Strained Tomatoes
about 6 oz. Mozzarella *, rough diced
a handful of Parmesan cheese (or Romano or Locatelli)
Recipe
Set your oven rack to the lowest level and preheat your oven to it's highest setting for 40 minutes. No less. Your oven must get really, REALLY hot.
Sprinkle a bit of cornmeal in a half-sheet pan. Get your dough out and start to work with it. Roll the dough around the pan so it will pick up some of the cornmeal. Fat Guy's instructions: "In terms of dough-stretching, patience is key. If you try to go from a ball of dough to a pizza in one session you need skill. But if you take three breaks of about two minutes each, you'll have no problem. First, stretch the dough to about half the size of the pan -- that's easy. (Just pick up the dough and, with both hands, start pulling, first from the center and then from the edges -- the weight of the dough will do a lot of the work for you if you just kind of make a wheel with it and hold it with your fingertips from the top of the wheel and rotate it around like your fingers are gears.) Then leave it for about two minutes. Next, pick up and stretch to about three quarters the size of the pan. Easy again. Two-minute rest. Finally, pick it up again and you should be able to stretch it to the full size of the pan, or close. From there, you don't need to pick up the dough again. You can just kind of manipulate it out to the edges and corners if there are still gaps.
If you've used enough cornmeal, you don't actually need any oil on the pan. The finished pizza will release without too much struggle. However, if you want to make life easier, when you do your last stretching you can drape the dough over one arm and spray the sheet pan with a little olive oil spray (or any nonstick cooking spray)."
Top with the mozzarella cheese and any toppings that you want (go easy - they weigh down the pizza and can demolish the crustless middle slices) and the Parmesan cheese.
Bake until the pizza is starting to look almost burned. You want a really, really deeply colored crust. It should take somewhere around 10 minutes. Lift the edge and make sure that the bottom is browned properly.
Let sit for about 5 minutes - slicing will be easier.
*Mozzarella - Fat Guy says, "I've found that the typical store-made fresh mozzarella is too wet and just doesn't make particularly useful pizza cheese unless you have a professional stone oven. At the same time, I've found that Polly-O and the like just don't taste very good. What I've had the best luck with is something in the middle: "fresh" mozzarella that's not actually fresh. As in, packaged fresh mozzarella. It will say "fresh" on the label, but it was packed in some factory somewhere and has a shelf life so it's not the same as the store-made products. It has lower moisture than real fresh mozzarella but has good flavor."
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