Wow, it's been 4 months since my last post. During that time, I've improved my pizza making. I stumbled across www.101cookbooks.com, on which a recipe claimed to be the best pizza dough ever. It certainly isn't bad. Anyway, let me recount some experiences I had in pizza making.
1. My kitchen balance is wrong! It's no wonder why my pizza dough always seems so dry. I always weighed out too much flour, and so it was too dry! I only realised this when I read the recipe on 101cookbooks, which said that the dough should be sticky enough to stick to the bottom of a bowl, but still dry enough to clear the sides of the bowl. The doughs I made before didn't stick to anything! The funny thing is, the balance I use is actually for weight watchers... and since the balance underestimates the amount of ingredients you weigh, losing weight could be pretty hard...
2. Pizza stones! Got a pizza stone for my birthday, and it worked pretty well. It works by holding a lot of heat, so that when you put the pizza on it, it cooks the pizza from bottom up, resulting in an improved cooked crust. Parents got me another one, so now I have two! The recipe on 101cookbooks suggested that the oven should be preheated to like... 300 degrees I think? At the moment I'm only heating it to 200, because our oven starts 'leaking' when it gets any hotter than that. Might need to replace the seals on the oven. Alternatively, I could stick the pizza stones on my barbeque, which can double as an oven. My bbq oven can get much closer to 300 degrees, so that might be worth a try in the future. Without using pizza stones, I found that it's better to slightly cook the pizza dough first before putting sauce and toppings on, so that the pizza crust is sufficiently crunchy.
3. The recipe on 101cookbooks requires slow rising. So, the dough is left at 4 degrees in the fridge overnight, resulting in very slow rising. Then its allowed to warm to room temperature for 2 hours, then left for a further 2 hours after that, before baking. The pizzas certainly turn out very nice, but I'm not convinced its due to the slow rising. It might simply be due to my increase in experience, and that I've finally realised that my kitchen scale is wrong. Need to do a control experiment I guess.
4. Blue cheese on pizza is really nice! Well, that's if you like blue cheese. It imparts a very strong and characteristic flavour to the pizza, and goes well with the tartness of semi sundried tomatoes.
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2 comments:
Hey Jeff! you're finally blogging again!
I'm glad you find the stone useful!
woah, 300 deg sounds so high - i think most recipes state a temperature of ~200deg; but I suppose if it's preheated to a higher temp, it'd take a shorter time to cook through (if thin), and will have a crispier crust (not too sure if it's such a good idea if the base is thick though).
and LOL at the weight watcher scale! I'm more interested in why you have one in the first place :P
I, too, have read that a slow rise in a cold place will help to develop the taste of the dough, but I think that's probably more applicable to flavoured dough, coz the prolonged time will allow flavours to mingle. You can subject bread doughs to a cold slow rise too - very useful if you don't have time to wait around and bake the bread on the same day. :)
Joanna
oh ok, so cold slow rise isn't something comletely from left field. the scale is not mine... my parents got it, and they don't really know what's good and what's not.. they just get anything... i think ive finally taught them now that spaghetti is actually round and not flat... phew! thx for the stone :)
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