General Pizza Info
Source of Recipe
by Millie, from LA Times
List of Ingredients
Recipe
YOU CAN TOP THIS
Don’t let the pizzerias fool you. There’s no mystery to making a great pizza
By Emily Green ~ Times Staff Writer
November 12, 2003
Had Marie Antoinette been American, she would have said,
"Let them eat pizza." So much better than brioche. When you
think about it, pizza's so much better than most things. Slice
after slice, time after time, it's our most reliable pleasure.
No matter the thickness of the slice, everyone understands
the basic architecture: the toasty notes from the outside of
the crust, then the layer of sweet, elastic dough, with its
teasing tug against the teeth. Pit this against the acidic
topping of tomato sauce and caramelized mozzarella, and you
have the national dish.
But there's something odd about our love affair. While most
of us eat pizza, few of us cook it. Pizza comes from pizzerias,
which guard their monopoly with tales of secret ingredients
and high exertions. Real pizza must contain flour from Italy,
or water from New York, and be cooked in ovens fired only
by timber felled along the Appian Way.
It makes a $1.25 slice taste even better, until the realization
sets in that it has to be gastro-hooey. There can't be
pizzerias on every corner because making pizza is difficult.
The ingredients aren't rare, but common, and, it merits
stressing in these hard times, they're dead cheap too. It's
not even like pizzerias spare us drudgery. Making pizza at
home is easy. The biggest surprise is that, for good clean fun,
it's genuinely fun.
Until recently, I was typical: a pizza eater, never maker.
What prompted a conversion, I can't say. Maybe a bump on
the head. As I set out to learn how to do it, this much I knew:
commercial pizzerias use flour that is unusually high in protein,
as much as 14% or 15%. This accounts for the remarkably
elastic doughs. But working with high-protein flour is hard. So
I phoned Sue Gray, director of product development at King
Arthur Flour in Norwich, Vt., to see if I needed to go to the
gym before kneading. She assured me that a good all-purpose
flour was fine and working it would not be difficult. Her use
of "good" merits stressing here. Most flour packages don't
list protein ratios, so go for flour from a reputable producer.
King Arthur all-purpose has one of the highest standards,
with 12.7% protein.
My second question concerned flour age. When overtaken by
the impulse to bake, I tend to forget that I already have
flour, and buy more, meaning I have cupboards full of flour of
indeterminate age. What about that sack that might go back
to last Thanksgiving? Gray assured me that if it hadn't
attracted pests, or absorbed funky smells, it was probably
fine.
White flour is produced only from the milled endosperm of
wheat grain, she explained, and not the seed coating, so there
are no oily constituents to become rancid. But whole-wheat
flour, which contains the milled seed coating and its
protective oils, goes rancid within three months, she warned.
She quickly added that whole-wheat flour wasn't right for
pizza anyway. It's too bitter and the bran interferes with the
elasticity of the dough. If you see whole-wheat pizza on a
pizzeria menu, it's pandering to whole food masochists. Just
say no.
It's all about the five basics
And so to the recipes. Pizza recipes, like most formulas in
baking books, tell us what to do, but rarely why, so I went to
Danielle Forestier, a Bay Area baking instructor
recommended by a wheat physiologist at UC Davis. Forestier
was only too happy to explain how pizza dough works, starting
with the roles played by each of the basic ingredients —
flour, yeast, water, oil and salt.
The flour, yeast and water start fermentation, she said. Flour
consists mainly of starch (along with that 12% to 15% protein).
When you add water and yeast, the yeast will begin to
ferment the starch, forming gas bubbles, which make the
dough rise. It will also convert a certain amount of the starch
to sugar, transforming a dull, starchy taste into the sweet,
wheaten notes that we associate with good bread.
As the yeast works on the starch, it's the pizza-maker's job
to go to work on the protein, she said. We do this by kneading.
The water converts the protein into an elastic, gelatinous
state. As we knead, these protein gels, or glutens, will form
the bonds that make the dough elastic, and then extensible
into pizza shapes. When it comes to kneading, it is just like
bread. We should not knead by pinning dough with one hand
and pulling with the other. This will tear the glutens. Instead,
we should fold it to trap air, then press and roll — fold, press
and roll.
The water and added olive oil also serve to keep the dough
supple. The best way to understand what water does is to
picture what happens as it evaporates during baking, when the
crust becomes firm, and then what happens as bread
becomes stale: Those proteins are heading back to their
original grainy state.
The salt will act as seasoning, but it will also slow the
fermentation so the dough doesn't rise too fast, and the
yeast has time to convert more starch to sugar. A touch of
this sweetness is desirable in pizza crust, she explained.
Unlike sourdough, it stands up to the acidity of tomato sauce.
Forestier doesn't like using food processors to mix dough
because they overheat it. Heat, more than yeast quantity, she
says, will dictate how fast the dough ferments and rises. The
hotter the faster, the cooler the slower.
Most recipes call for dried yeast. The recipe we give here is
for a fast-rising, same-day pizza dough. However, once you
master it, try reducing the yeast slightly (by a third is about
right), then allowing the dough to ferment slowly in the
refrigerator for a day, or up to three days.
"If you let the fermentation go a long time, you begin to
develop organic acid byproducts, and they contribute a lot to
flavor," explained Forestier. "The bakers who are doing
no-time doughs, it comes out looking nice and has nice air
bubbles, but it gets stale very quickly and has a flat one-note
taste."
With pizza, which is eaten right away, a fast dough is no crime,
she added. But allowing it to rise overnight, and making the
sauce in advance, makes it perfect for parties. On the big
night, all you have to do is heat up the oven, roll the dough and
assemble the pizzas.
Once you make the dough, there is the little matter of
twirling it. Next stop: Angeli Caffè on Melrose, where Agustin
Garcia, for eight years the pizza chef there, kindly agreed to
demonstrate his pizza-tossing technique. After flattening a
fermented, aged ball of dough, he deftly began tugging the
dough, then tossing it in circles and using centrifugal force to
stretch the center to an even thinness. The center needs to
be thinner than the outside edge, he explained, because once
you apply sauce, it will cook more slowly.
This brought to mind Forestier's remark that the most
common flaw she sees in homemade pizza is undercooked
dough.
Garcia gave me a dough ball. I stretched too tentatively.
After he tugged it out for me, he showed me how to toss it. I
tried, it fell. He showed me again. I fumbled it again. We left
it with me tugging and him tossing.
It was time to make pizza on my own. I invited a group of
neighbors over for a Sunday night dinner, then mixed the
dough in advance. The flour was easy to work just like Gray
said it would be. And it blended just like Forestier said it
would. I must have been putting on pizza expert airs as my
guests assembled, because as I flattened 8-ounce balls for
tugging and tossing, Garcia-style, one of my neighbors called
her daughter over for a tutorial, as if I were a master. But as
the child tugged at the dough with her little hands, it kept
popping back into a tight ball. I took it from her, as if to
demonstrate how to do it right. It popped back at me too. It
was tempting to call animal control. Instead, I had to confess
to my guests that I hadn't done this before.
Then I remembered Forestier's warning that the protein in
dough, the thing that makes it elastic, can also give it an
"inherent nervousness." The trick then, she said, is to let it
rest, after which it will become extensible. After doing this,
it did indeed submit gracefully to handling. By now, everyone
was hungry. It was approaching the child's bedtime, and there
was no time for more tugging and tossing. I used a rolling pin.
It worked just fine.
Let a stone give you the edge
As we got into the final stage of production, it became clear
that although you don't need special equipment to make pizza,
it helps. There is no crime in baking pizza on a greased and
floured cookie sheet. The American Institute of Baking in
Manhattan, Kansas, recommends this. But it won't help you
overcome the home baker's single greatest pizza-making
obstacle. Oven heat.
A commercial pizza oven will easily sit at 600 degrees. A
restaurant's wood-burning oven will be even hotter, 800
degrees. Meanwhile, even if we preheat home ovens to 500
degrees, they lose at least 100 degrees the minute we open
the door. The result can be a thick, doughy, undercooked
crust.
The trick, then, if using a cookie sheet, is to be sure the crust
is thin in the center. Or use a pizza stone. Set one of these in
your oven and it will help trap the heat that is so easily lost in
small domestic ovens when the door is opened. To bake on a
stone, you'll also need a bread peel (the flat paddle-like
pizza-slider), either wood or metal, to slip the dough onto it.
My first ever pizza was not the occasion to try some fancy
topping. I went for a basic Margherita, albeit with my special
sauce with caramelized onions and wine. As I ladled out
tomato sauce, dotted around mozzarella on my first pizza pie,
and peeled it into the oven, all five guests gathered around
the stove. Relief was palpable. As the crust turned yellow,
then gold, and the toasty smell filled the kitchen while the
mozzarella began to bubble, there was a sort of collective
euphoria.
But as I slid it out of the oven using a spatula and oven mitt, a
dilemma. How to cut it? I did not possess one of those
wheelie thingamajigs, those rolling pizza-cutters. A knife
simply wasn't right. Besides tossing skills, the main thing
pizzerias have on us home pizza-makers is all the gear. Then
one neighbor remembered owning a cutter and bolted to
fetch it. When he returned with it, the trade now had nothing
on us, except a big oven.
Home pizza-making is a pie-at-a-time business. As the first
was sliced, a second was rolled out, topped and put in the
oven. Corks popped. Salad was tossed. And, lo, it was good.
We baked and ate and baked and ate the national dish until
we ran out of fixings.
|
Â
Â
Â
|
member logon
