Welcome back to my (now) ongoing series where I gush about the greatest food of all time: pizza. It’s really just bread with an assortment of various accessories. The argument over what constitutes proper pizza is both endless and fucking pointless. Pineapple, potatoes or chutney - as long as it’s on top of pizza dough then it's probably pizza. There’s a whole episode of David Chang’s show Ugly Delicious that focuses on this debate, which I highly recommend.
Bread itself is already great, I mean there’s evidence of 14,000 years of bread making, so one could assume that it's probably preferred by most human beings. But pizza dough is a specific kind of bread and it’s the key to good pizza, both at home and eating out. You can buy pre-made pizza but if you have the right tools then making it at home is probably less effort than physically getting it. It just requires a bit of planning.
Most of this planning involves how long you are letting the dough rise for and what temperature. Room temperature is quicker and can be made a few hours ahead of time and makes an all-around decent dough. But the real key to fully developing the flavour of your dough is to let it rise in the fridge for 24 hours. The cold helps keep the delicacies of the sugars intact - or something like that. I don’t really know, its just fucking good and there is a clear flavour difference between the two methods.
The other two things that help this process is a good stand mixer that can handle making bread dough and an oven. You could also invest in a pizza stone which takes things to a whole new level, but it's not necessary; use a cookie sheet/baking steel/cast iron pan - whatever you got really as long as it is flat and conducts heat. Now you could mix and knead the dough by hand but it is very laborious and takes a bit longer than the ten minutes in the stand mixer.
Now I start with a basic bread dough recipe which I got from Michael Ruhlman's book Ratio. To make pizza dough, you simply use half the yeast that you would for regular bread and then add olive oil.
Get yourself a copy of this book. Dog ear the pages, bend the cover - use it often and use it well.
Pizza Dough Recipe
4 cups of flour
1.5 cups of water
2 teaspoons of salt
½ teaspoon of instant or active yeast
2 tablespoons of olive oil
Put all the ingredients in the mixer and turn it on with the dough hook attached. Or get your hands ready for a fuckin' workout bud. In the mixer it usually takes about ten minutes for the dough to come together; by hand - it's all on how hard you want to work.
Knowing whether or not your dough is done kneading is if it stretches without tearing. Nothing crazy, just a few inches is a good barometer; it will become more malleable during the leavening process.
Next let the ball of dough rest in a bowl covered in plastic wrap for about an hour and a half or until the dough has nearly doubled in size. This is the first rise.
Take the now risen dough and separate it in either two or three balls. Take each ball and place in a plastic bag; lightly coat each dough ball in some more olive oil. Put them in your fridge for a full 24 hours for maximum flavour.
The next day, when you’re ready to make pizza, take the dough out of the fridge at least two hours before so it can come to room temp. The dough will be much easier to work with. Also don’t roll your dough you animals! Rolling the dough crushes all of the beautiful air pockets that have been forming for the last day in the fridge. You must stretch the dough by hand.
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