Wednesday, October 14, 2009

First Night


I delayed writing this account of my first official attempt at pizza making on Monday because my day job called. But the bottom line is that the dough was largely a failure, while the sauce was amazing.

Even before I tried to make the pizza, I noticed that my dough didn't seem to be rising at all (the conventional wisdom is that balls of pizza dough should rise by 1.5 to 2 times). I thought that maybe I was mistaken and that all would work out to be fine, but it sure didn't. First, when I attempted to stretch out the dough, it started to fall apart. This I was able to mostly rectify by using a can of tomato sauce as a rolling pin at the suggestion of a friend (and later merging two dough balls into one so I had more dough to shape), although I still ended up with some oblong pies. Then when I cooked the pies (I made five small pies overall) the dough still didn't rise, leaving the crust way too thin. While I'm a fan of a thin crust, I also like for it to be tasty and chewy, but this one was more cracker like.

So what went wrong?

The main recipe that I used called for mixing the yeast in with the flour first and slowly adding cold water. But everything else I've read about yeast since my mishap has said that you have to dissolve the yeast in warm water first (just over 100 degrees) and then add it to the flour. While I did make a second batch of dough in which I added yeast to warm water, that recipe called for brewer's yeast, and also the flour to water ratio was way off, so I ended up having to add more and more water arbitrarily until the dough felt right, and that may have messed up all of the other ratios. As I noted in a previous post, according to the official rules of the Associazione Pizzaiuoli Napoletani (the Association of Neapolitan Pizza) pizza should be made with either natural or brewer's yeast rather than instant yeast. But I've decided that in my next attempt I'm not going to focus on flavor or fancy yeasts as much and instead just use the most basic, dummy-proof, fast-acting yeast I can find to ensure that my pies are at least functional before I move on to tweaking the taste.

The one bit of good news is that my sauce was amazing -- exactly what I was looking for. Just crushed San Marzano tomatoes with two cloves of minced garlic, olive oil, and a pinch of salt and pepper. The perfect pizza sauce. As I mentioned, I decided to use cheapo shredded mozzerella cheese while I'm experimenting so that I don't waste really good stuff on substandard dough. Once I'm satisfied with my dough, buying better cheese is easy.

A friend of mine also brough over some turkey pepperoni she had in her fridge, so I added that to a few of the pies as well.

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