Food Blog:
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Miss Tenacity.
New Mexico.
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Wednesday, January 5
Higher Plane Pizza
Slowly, I'm figuring out the home pizza "thing". Here are the bare minimum of rules:
1. The hottest oven you can manage. For a home oven this means 4 stones in the oven (2 clay tiles on the sides, one on the lower shelf, and a pizza stone on the operating shelf) and a preheat of 45 minutes or more at 500 degrees. All that heat bouncing around will bring the temp up to 525+. This is the best one can do when a wood-burning pizza oven is not at hand.
2. A pizza peel, and semolina to roll the pie on and off. Semolina grains are round, so they act as ball bearings, making the pizza easy to slide off the peel onto the stone.
3. Decent dough, whether homemade or purchased at the store. Trader Joe's pre-made dough is pretty good and costs $1 per ball, in regular or whole wheat. The slower you let the dough rise, the better its flavor will be.
4. Light glaze of oil on the naked dough right before the sauce goes on. This helps keep the crust from getting soggy under the wateryness of the tomatoes.
Everything else is negotiable.... Obviously the better the toppings, the better the pizza. I make my own sauce using canned tomatoes and adding spices, olive oil, and S&P. Last night the pizza I made had tomato sauce, fresh basil, fresh mozz from Relish, and pepperoni (on half). The dough I used was made the night before and allowed to rise very slowly in the fridge, then on the counter for 3 hours before making the pizza. Mixing the flour types seemed to help with the flavor, and I ended up with 1/2 bread flour, 1/3 whole wheat flour, and 1/6 corn meal. The corn meal made for an extra crunchiness to the finished crust that was nice, and I just like the taste of whole wheat anyway.
Now I have 3 more dough balls in the freezer, just waiting for the next round of pizza experimentation.
Time posted: 09:27 [permalink]
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CONTACT ME: tenacity -at- gmail.com
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