Peter Reinhart suggests that the keys to a good pizza crust are delayed fermentation and very high baking temperature. Per his formula, I made my crust with cold water and put it in the fridge overnight to delay fermentation. The next day I took half of it out and let it rest at room temperature for a couple of hours. I put my pizza stone on the bottom shelf of the oven and preheated it to 550F. PR gives instructions for hand tossing so I thought I'd give it a shot, but my dough didn't have nearly the elasticity required and would have torn from simply resting on my knuckles, let alone being tossed and caught. So I just kind of stretched it to where I wanted it with my fingers. I made three small pizzas that day, and since I don't have a pizza peel I just shaped, topped, and baked them for 8-ish minutes on parchment paper. It was easy to set on the hot stone and a little more challenging to slide from the stone onto a pan when baked. The paper became blackened and brittle on the edges, but it didn't start on fire or hurt the pizza. And the pizza was pretty good. The crust was pretty thin in the middle, but the overall pizza was the best I've made. Which isn't saying a whole lot, but I was happy.
The next day I decided to try baking the remaining three pizzas on sheet pans instead of the stone. I had the same problem with my dough not being elastic enough to toss, which wasn't very surprising. I wanted this to work better since it's easier to put all the pizzas together on sheet pans and bake them at the same time rather than doing them one at a time on the hot stone, not to mention having to mess with parchment paper and transportation from the stone to the pan. But it didn't. The crust didn't get done on the bottom until everything was quite browned on top. The bottom was barely done and the crust was crisp like a cracker. My conclusion: the bottom of the pizza really needs the heat provided by that preheated stone.
This one is a work in process, but I feel like I can improve it to get the result I'm looking for, and that's pretty exciting.
1 comment:
I've had the same frustration with transferring the pizzas to the hot stone. My solution: use a lefse board as my "peel" and slide parchment-lined pizzas into the oven with that. It still takes longer than I like because I can only do one at a time, but the transferring is easier.
As for the dough not being elastic enough to toss, I recently discovered that if I separate the dough into however many pizzas I'm going to make (usually 3) BEFORE the final rise, the dough stays stretchier because I don't have to handle it before I shape it into crust. It rises better in the oven, too.
Pizza is my husband's favorite food, so I've had lots of opportunities to work on this one. :-)
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