Tag: pepperoni

Weeknight Pizza Thoughts

An easy weeknight pizza with tomato sauce, pepperoni, and mozzarella:

The formula: 350 grams AP flour, 220 grams room temperature water (63% hydration), 11 grams honey (3% by weight), 11 grams olive oil (3% by weight), 7 grams kosher salt (2% by weight). 1.5 teaspoons instant dry yeast.

The steps: Mix at low speed for 8 minutes or until smooth. Coat a bowl lightly with oil (it only takes a teaspoon or a little more). Ball the dough and swush it around in the bowl to coat. Cover. Let rise one hour, then fold the dough 2-4 times and cover.

Place a baking stone onto the oven – middle rack. Preheat the oven to 500F.

Let rise another 90 minutes then remove to a lightly oiled workspace. Gently stretch the dough into a circle, taking care not to smash the outer rim. Dimple the center all over with your fingertips. Transfer the dough to a screen or pizza peel. Top with the tomato sauce and pepperoni.

Bake for 8 minutes. Top with the mozzarella and bake for another 3-5 minutes until melted.

Other thoughts:

Our weeknight pizzas are 12-14″ in diameter. For crackery thin crusts we use 300 grams of flour. For “poofy” style pizzas we use 400 grams of flour. Today’s pizza was 350 grams and it was more poofy than crackery.

Today’s pizza was made with AP flour. Most of the time we’re using bread flour for pizzas. Either of those will work for this pizza, we just happen to have more AP flour in the pantry, so..

We also did a taste test of two (supermarket available) low moisture whole milk mozzarellas. It was Belgioioso vs Galbani. We baked a cheese-only pizza with equal amounts of the cheeses on each half of the pie for the test. The consensus was that they’re pretty even. I felt like maybe the Galbani tasted slightly creamier/milkier, but I don’t know that I could tell the difference in a blind test.

Pepperoni Pizza

We really enjoy Salt Blade’s cured meats. The business is small and local and we like to support local artisans. Salt Blade is distributed in the Seattle area through Haggen’s, Met Market, and many other outlets. They also ship through their website. Tonight it was Pepperoni Pizza:

200629 pizza

The full pie. It’s 1/2 really cheesy and 1/2 with sparing amounts of cheese:

200629 full pizza

The Salt Blade package:

200629 salt blade

The pizza was topped with the pepperoni, a Roma tomato sauce from the garden by way of the freezer, and mozzarella.

The pizza dough recipe is simple: 300g bread flour, 160g water, 6g kosher salt, 9g olive oil, 1 tsp or less of instant yeast, depending upon how long you want to wait for the dough to rise. I used 1/4 tsp of yeast, let the dough rise for a couple of hours, then put it in the refrigerator until the next day.

The pizza was baked at 450F for about 15 minutes on a pizza screen. The cheese was was added at about the 11 minute mark.