I’ve read a bunch of pizza dough recipes and I have to thank the Food in my Beard blog for turning me on to recipes that gave more information and though than just “dump, mix, wait, stretch.” The guy who writes that blog also used to have a pizza oven in his yard, so there’s that.
This recipe and technique is a cherry picked set of things learned from these readings (especially Jeff Verasano‘s), but I’ll have to do some more experimenting to figure it all out.
- 850 g AP flour (split into 600 g and 250 g portions)
- 150 g graham flour (it was the only whole wheat flour I had)*
- 660 g ice cold water
- 150 g of Henry (sourdough starter)
- 50 g olive oil
- 30 g salt
- 3 g dry yeast
The first thing I do is the autolyse step from Verasano’s site. I mix together everything except the reserved 250 g of flour. I only mix enough to get it to come together to look like a shaggy dough. Verasano describes the dough as more of a batter, but for me it doesn’t really loosen up like than until after waiting the 30 minutes of the autolyse.
After waiting the 30 minutes for the water and flour do their thing, I start up the mixer (with a dough hook) and kneaded it for about 5 minutes before slowly adding in the last 250 g of flour. This step took an additional 4 minutes, and I may have hit the limits of my mixer bowl for holding and working all this dough.
I let this dough rest another 20 minutes before portioning. It’s a wet and loose dough, so I had to work with a lot of flour to get them into the 200 g dough balls. Another 10 minutes of resting and then into the fridge for a cold fermentation.
This dough was tough to handle. It was wet and a little sticky and I couldn’t get the first ball into a round crust. In the oven, the dough took longer than expected to cook (you can see the cheese starting to take on more color than the crust) and since it was set to 525, the spilled stuff in the oven burnt and set off the smoke alarm. Still, I had to finish making the pizza (I was hungry!)
I took some of the dough out to the grill since I’ve had a lot of success grilling pizza in the past. This worked out really well, although it is a bit odd seeing the grill marks on the top of a pizza.
The grill works great for the dough and crust, but I do wish it cooked the toppings a bit more. This one had pepperoni and some garlic fermented in honey. While on the grill, I got a good shot of the leoparding on the crust.
Another thing I tried for getting a good crust was preheating a cast iron skillet and cooking the pizza in there. This one also got a good looking bottom.
At least this one turned out round!
This one still doesn’t look cooked from the top, so I may need to experiment with how to use the broiler.
*So, what’s with the graham flour? These pizza recipes and sourdough starter recipes all kept mentioning whole wheat, but the only whole wheat flour I had was graham. It didn’t make the pizza weird, but I’m not sure that whole wheat flour is really necessary. I think that there’s a weird obsession with whole wheat being better, but I’m not sure I taste the difference. Maybe if I get some freshed milled stuff from somewhere local, but I don’t see that happening any time soon.
