Tag: pizza

A Post-Holiday Pizza

by A.J. Coltrane

The holidays are past, and that means one thing:  It’s now time to empty out the refrigerator before stuff turns.

A very fast weeknight pizza:

160111 pizza

The dough:  400 grams bread flour, 120 grams water, 120 grams beer (the beer was a holiday gift — for reference, the water and beer combine to create a very normal ~60% hydration in total, if you don’t count the beer solids), 1 tablespoon dry oregano, 1 tablespoon sugar, 1 tablespoon “garlic infused olive oil” (another holiday gift), 8 grams kosher salt, 1 tsp instant yeast. Mix on low speed for 10 minutes, lightly coat the bowl and dough with oil, cover, and let rise for up to two hours. I only let it go an hour since we were hungry.

The Topping Ingredients:  Garlic olive oil (that same gift as above), TJ’s “Bruschetta” sauce (mostly tomatoes and garlic), SeaStack cheese, herbed goat cheese (both cheeses left over from entertaining guests), diced Boar’s Head salami (another gift), crumbled cooked bacon (we bought too much bacon for guests). The outer crust got Penzy’s “Brady Street Cheese Sprinkle” (another gift — finely grated dried romano cheese with dried garlic, dried basil, and green peppercorns.)

The Process:  

  1.  Preheat a pizza stone to 500F
  2.  Lightly oil a pizza pan. Form the dough on the pan, leaving a lip around the perimeter.
  3.  Lightly oil the entire top of the pizza, including the rim. Spread ~1 cup of the “Bruschetta sauce” on the dough.  Top with diced salami. Dust the “Cheese Sprinkle” around the crust.
  4.  Combine the cheeses and bacon, set aside in a bowl.
  5.  Bake for 10 minutes.
  6.  Top with the cheese and bacon.
  7.  Bake 4 minutes.

There are a few good “weeknight cheats” this time. Substituting beer for the water creates flavor when there’s not enough time for flavor to happen naturally. The addition of sugar adds flavor, somewhat helps the dough rise, and promotes browning. The flavored oil can be thrown around liberally, and that helps too.

The ingredients were excellent. The Penzy’s Sprinkle and flavored oil both added interest to the crust. I’m sure the Penzy’s thing is overpriced, but it’s really good. Romano cheese on the crust may be my new not-so-secret weapon.

Finally… bacon.

Everything exuded some liquid, so the pizza wasn’t crisp. Still, it was very tasty, and made for a good way to Use Things Up.

I’d be ok with eating like that all the time.

A Tale Of Three Pizzas

by A.J. Coltrane

I recently received a Baking Steel as an early holiday gift. The Steel is 16″ x 14″. It *just* fits in our undersized oven:

151119 baking steel

It’s pretty tight against the top of the oven too — the directions call for placing the Steel on the 2nd rack from the top.

I wanted to start with some small, simple, and very manageable pizzas to get a feel for how everything was going to behave, and to ideally introduce as few variables as possible. I was targeting pizzas 8-10″ in diameter to keep things from getting too interesting.

The Recipe:  450 grams AP Flour, 270g water (60%), 11g kosher salt (2.4%), 9g olive oil (2%), 1 TBP of “Italian Seasoning”, and 1 tsp instant yeast. Combine all ingredients and mix on low speed for 10 minutes. Lightly oil the bowl and dough ball, cover and let rise 1.5 hours. Divide the dough into 3 roughly equal pieces, shape into balls, cover with a towel, and let rise 30-45 minutes or until “poofy”.

I stretched each dough out by hand, trying to take care to preserve the gas bubbles around the edges. (The remaining doughs hid under the towel until it was their turn for shaping and baking.) The pizzas were topped with pepperoni and a Roma tomato sauce from the garden that was doctored up with garlic, onions, “Italian Seasoning”, diced bell peppers (from the garden again), and kosher salt. I used a floured peel to slide the pizza onto the Baking Steel, in an oven heated to 500F. The Baking Steel instructions call for a 9-minute bake. I went 9 minutes on the first pizza, 10 minutes on the 2nd, and I-don’t-know-because-I-failed-to-set-the-timer on the 3rd.

Some cheap pre-shredded parmesan was tossed on top of the pizzas shortly after they came out of the oven.

The Results:

Pizza One:

151119 pizza1

Pizza One Crumb:

151119 pizza1 crumb

Pizza Two:

151119 pizza2

Pizza Two Crumb:

151119 pizza2 crumb

Pizza Three:

151119 pizza3

Pizza Three’s crumb wasn’t “all that”, so I didn’t bother with a picture.

———-

I selected AP Flour because I wanted to use some up. I think the color and structure would have been better had I used Bread Flour instead. Alternately a little bit of sugar might have been a good addition.

Even so, the pizzas were all fairly airy, especially so considering the AP Flour. They were really easy to eat without realizing how much had been eaten — the small, savory slices went away fast.

Conclusion: The Baking Steel seems to perform as advertised. It’s definitely an improvement over the pizza stone, and as an added bonus it’s basically indestructible. At $80, it’s not a cheap toy, but I’ll think we’ll get years of value out of it. It might be the right answer would have been to spend $100 and get the unit that’s 3/8″ thick, rather than the 1/4″ of the regular version, but $100 seemed like too much to throw at something that I wasn’t totally sure about.

Still, I’m happy with it.

(I think Pizza Two was the most attractive.)

“00” Chili Pizza

by A.J. Coltrane

I think it’s fair to say that the results I’ve had when using “00” flour have been… uneven. Each time the dough has been stretchy to the point of barely manageable, at best.

I did a little looking around online — it sounds like “00” flour is supposed to be really stretchy, and it doesn’t absorb much water… I’ve been using too much water in the dough. Evidently “Official” VPN pizzas use either 58% or 58.7% hydration. (The actual quantity quoted varies by source. I didn’t look that hard.) (That, and in Reinhart’s “American Pie” he says that in Italy, Bread Flour may be included at 25% of the total amount of flour. Sneaky.)

Also, oil isn’t used in a VPN pizza. However, while searching for the “proper” hydration I found sources that recommend 1-2% oil for home bakers using “00” flour, due to the temperature differences between a home oven and a professional or wood-fire oven. So…

This time I kept it as simple as possible:  240 grams “00” flour, 57% hydration, 1/2 tsp salt, 1/2 tsp instant yeast. Knead on low speed for 10 minutes. I gave it a stretch and fold after an hour, then let it rise for another 45 minutes before shaping. A baking stone was preheated to 500F in the oven, the dough was formed on a pizza peel, and:

151022 Chili Pizza

The chili carmelized and sweetened somewhat in the oven, but it was still tasty and not too dry. The crust had a nice snap that in places was almost reminiscent of tortilla chips. I thought it worked. I know my mouth was watering before I dug in.

(The rest of the recipe:  10 minutes in the oven with the non-meat component of the leftover chili, then the reserved meat pieces and a “Mexican” cheese blend were added and allowed to heat through for three minutes.)

Other notes:

1.  57% hydration seems to be a good starting point for getting the hang of “00” flour. It behaved in a fairly similar fashion to a higher hydration bread flour.

2.  My shaping needs work. The dough was too thick in the center, and the seams from the stretch and fold are clearly visible in the finished product.

3.  I may try adding 1% oil next time, or brushing the rim of the pizza with oil, or both. A little more color would have been nice.

4.  240 grams is plenty for a small diameter pizza. 200 grams might be more appropriate next time.

—–

Overall all it was a good learning experience, and I used up leftover chili in the process. I enjoyed eating it, so win-win-win.

It might be just me, but I think maybe chili is a less “weird” topping on pizza than some other things are.. Like pineapple.

A Quick Pizza

by A.J. Coltrane

In between watching and recording 30-something college basketball games over the last few days — a two-hour pizza happened:

Goat cheese, roasted red pepper, and soppressata.
Goat cheese, red sauce, roasted red pepper, and soppressata.

50% bread flour, 50% “oo” flour, 60% hydration with a splash of white wine. 2% kosher salt. Baked on a stone preheated to 500F.

The “oo” flour continues to be super extensible. I thought maybe cutting in some bread flour would make it more controllable. It didn’t seem to have much impact.

As for other possible improvements — I think maybe I need to be slightly freezing the meat before slicing it. It would benefit the pizza if the soppressata was even thinner than I’ve been able to get it.

Overall though, I feel like I’m really starting to get the hang of the pizza peel and stone. It’s resulting in better pizza crusts. The pizza peel isn’t now as intimidating as I used to think it was.

Pizza alla DiGiorno

by A.J. Coltrane

We had guests last night and I figured I’d make what might be most strongly identified as “normal pizza”.

Actually, two pizzas. The recipe:

Ingredient Measure Baker’s %
Bread Flour 600g
Water 318g 53
White Wine 60g 10
Salt 15g 2.5
Sugar 1 TBP
Instant Yeast ½ TBP
Olive Oil 15g 2.5

Directions:

1.  Mix all ingredients on low speed for 10 minutes. Cover and let rise two hours.

2.  Divide the dough and shape into two balls. Cover and let rise one hour.

3.  30 minutes into the 2nd rise, place a baking stone in oven and preheat for 30 minutes at 500F.

4.  Lightly coat a baking peel with semolina. Shape the dough, and place onto the peel. Top the dough (sauce, then cheese, then pepperoni).

5.  Bake the pizza for 12 minutes.

Pizza one:

141221 pizza 1

Pizza one crumb:

141221 pizza 1 crumb

Pizza two:

141221 pizza 2

Pizza two crumb:

141221 pizza 2 crumb

Pepperoni, shredded mozzarella, home made red sauce made from home grown tomatoes (with garlic, oregano, minced onion, salt. And butter! Ssshh! Thanks, Marcella Hazen!)

Overall they were nice, light pizzas. The cornicione (crusts) were especially airy, with large pockets running through the perimeter of each. (The blackened areas show the location of the air pockets.) The first pizza came out somewhat wet. The liquid had been exuded by the cheese. We corrected that, and the (drier) 2nd pizza had much more concentrated flavors, in addition to not being wet, so… double bonus. In the future we’ll do a more thorough job of drying the mozzarella on paper towels.

From a technique standpoint, the biggest change is the use of the baking stone. I think that a long time ago I had trouble transferring the dough from the peel to the baking stone and then avoided using the peel for years.

I think that’ll be a new “thing” for a while.

 

Pizza Shaping

by A.J. Coltrane

I think the weakest part of my pizza-making process is the last part — shaping the final dough. Here’s the last one:

141213 pizza

It’s a 62% hydration bread flour dough with peppers from the garden, onions, goat cheese, and a jarred marinara. (300g bread flour. 62% water, 4% oil, 2.3% salt. Baked on a perforated pizza pan.)

In this case I floured the counter and patted/stretched out the dough, never lifting it from the surface. The crust came out crisp and crusty. The cornicione (edge) was only slightly poofier than the rest of the crust.

My suspicion is that after patting the dough out on the counter it might benefit from being picked up and stretched.

Which is a good excuse to make another pizza.

Arugula and Goat Cheese Pizza

by A.J. Coltrane

The arugula is going nuts right now. It looks like it’s trying to bolt, so we did what we always do when something may be threatening to bolt – we whacked many of the plants’ leaves and consumed them. “Let’s see you go to seed now!” (It does seem to slow the bolting process. Maybe.)

140607 pizza

Pizza with arugula as the star of the show. I think it’s relatively photogenic:

140607 pizza slices

The Very Loose Recipe (I initially dumped in too much water, so I added more flour to make a 60% hydration. Hence the weird math.):

240g AP flour, 144g water, 5g kosher salt (2% of the flour weight, which is normal), 1 tsp instant yeast, 2-3 TBP olive oil.

I was pretty careless during production I guess — the large amount of oil was a screwup as well. (And no, I wasn’t having any beverages at that time.)

Preheat the oven to 500F.

Stretch the dough was very thinly over a pizza pan. (I used a perforated pizza pan for baking.)

Spread red sauce very thinly over the dough.

Cook for 7 minutes.

Add the goat cheese and cook another 6 minutes.

Remove from the oven and top with the parmesan and arugula.

—-

I was pleasantly surprised at how good arugula is on pizza! I never thought – “Salad greens on pizza, what a great idea!” But really, the peppery bite of the arugula with the salt from the parmesan, fat from the goat cheese and acid from the red sauce — it was really pretty good. The extra oil in the very thin dough made for a very crackery pizza.

The is the 24th “pizza/flatbread” post. Whew. I got to looking back through them – the photography is always… what it is. A couple of previous favorites:

The March 2011 “Pizza Dough” post. I scaled nine different recipes to a common denominator of flour volume. That was fun to do, if a little tedious at times. (No photos on this one, though Google loves it.)

The February 2013 “Heart Shaped Pizza“.  Awwwww. I gave the post the evocative name – “Another Six Minute Pizza”. I’m such a romantic.

July 2012 – “Leftover Calzone Ingredients? More Pizza!”  Featuring one “ok” pizza picture, one that’s better than that (the lower picture, in my opinion is the better one), and one very good picture of “the princess”.

And finally, the Super Bowl “Pizza Bianca – A Sizable Super Bowl Sendup“. It’s a 16″ x 22” grilled flatbread that was served at our Super Bowl party. It was a “big” hit.

Ugh. I always feel like I need to wash my hands after puns like that.

Mythcrushers – The NJ Edition

By Iron Chef Leftovers

A friend recently posted a link to an article titled “11 Things Only People from New Jersey Understand.” Being a long-removed Jersey boy myself, I thought it was an interesting list, but one, alas that definitely had some misconceptions, even if it was written by a Jerseyite. What does this have to do with a blog on food, sports and games, you might ask? Well indulge me a minute.

2. There Are Certain Foods You Can Only Eat When You’re In New Jersey

The list of things I have to eat when I’m in New Jersey, and try not to eat anywhere else are:

  • Bagels
  • Pizza
  • Corn
  • Tomatoes
  • Salt Water Taffy

I’m a total Jersey food snob because the rest of the country just doesn’t make them the same. And then there’s the ultimate NJ dish that doesn’t even exist anywhere else…

Ok. I want to bust this myth completely since I have heard it all of my life and it is simply not true. First off, corn and tomatoes make no sense. Yes, NJ is called the Garden State for a reason, but you can get stellar corn and tomatoes IN SEASON just about anywhere these days. The in season label applies to NJ also. Let’s face it, unless you spend half your year in the southern hemisphere, there is about a 2 month window for getting good tomatoes, and rarely they are from the local meagmart. Any farmer’s market will carry great produce in season, or just do what Coltrane and I do – grow them yourself.

Anyone that says you can’t get great pizza or bagels outside of NY/NJ is just being a snob. I actually know people who would laugh at the idea of eating pizza and bagels outside of NYC as a silly concept, so there are levels of snobbery here. Everyone who grows up in NJ has their favorite pizza place, most likely one that is currently being run by the 4th or 5th generation of an Italian family. I can think of at least a half-dozen excellent, non-Neapolitan pizza places in Seattle that make a pretty good version of a NY/NJ pizza.  I have had some truly terrible pizza also, but that is another story. Is it exactly the same, no, but I never expect that someone is going to make a pizza exactly like Pompeii Pizza in Bayonne, NJ. Heck, none of the other pizza places in Bayonne (and there are a ton of them) make a pizza exactly like Pompeii. I guess what I am trying to say here is that, while pizza in NJ may be the best on the planet, there are plenty of excellent versions of it in other cities, you just need to spend time looking.  The same thing applies to bagels.

I will just skip salt water taffy – it isn’t something I particularly love to begin with and I have had equally uninspiring versions of it elsewhere.

3. The Mere Mention Of Taylor Ham, Egg, And Cheese On A Roll Activates Four Different Regions Of Your Brain

Taylor Ham is the single best brand of pork roll available on the market. Taylor literally invented it. For this reason, it is not appropriate to call it pork roll–you must call it Taylor Ham in homage to John Taylor. Calling it anything else is disrespectful to the master.

Taylor Ham is definitely something that you will not find at a restaurant/deli anywhere else in the country. Heck, you are hard pressed to find anyone outside of the NYC/NJ/Philly area that even has any idea what Taylor Ham is. It is, for lack of a better description, a bastardized version of Canadian Bacon (the meat, not the movie). Strangely, while I can’t remember seeing it on any menu anywhere I have ever been outside of NJ, I can occasionally get it and scrapple (a hyper-local Philly specialty) at Ballard Market in Seattle. I have no idea why, but I can if I want to make it at home.

9. The Best Time To Eat At A Diner Is 2 a.m. When You’re Drunk With Your Best Friends

There’s only one type of non-chain eatery that has consistently good food at any time of the day and that’s a New Jersey diner. I remember going to the Chester Diner at 2 a.m. after working the late shift at the Chester Movie Theater and meeting friends for a gyro and pancakes. And you know what, they would taste exactly (amazingly) the same if I went at 2 p.m. on a Sunday after church. It’s a marvel of modern Americanized Greek technology.

Diners are just the best. Period

I grew up a half block from a diner and yes, there were many drunken late nights with friends eating really crappy food at 2 AM. Diners don’t seem to exist much outside of the east coast and are pretty much non-existent on the west coast and I do miss them, especially when I want breakfast for dinner. Like pizza places, everyone in NJ has their favorite place that has been there forever and still probably has the 40 year old personal juke boxes mounted to the wall in the booths.

10. Worshiping Bruce Springsteen And Bon Jovi Is Just A Natural Part Of Growing Up

Ok, this has nothing to do with food and maybe things have changed in the 25 years since I moved from NJ, but Bon Jovi was always considered to be a bad joke, not an idol. The Boss however, that is a different story. Springsteen is just about as close to a god as you can get in the state. I have seen The Boss play in 7 different cities, and none of those concerts came close to the energy of the 4 hour marathon he played in 1993 in NJ on the Human Touch/Better Days tour in front of the home crowd. Did I mention that the show I went to happened to be the 8th of 10 shows in 12 days he played in NJ, and he played for 4 hours? Yep, it was the most energized concert I have ever seen. Either way, it should tell you where Springsteen ranks in the NJ idol list – he is The Boss. When you say The Boss in NJ, everyone knows who you are talking about. I can honestly say that I have never had a conversation with anyone in NJ about how great Bon Jovi is.

Pizza With Basil Pesto, Goat Cheese, And Boar’s Head Calabrese Salami

by A.J. Coltrane

Last night’s pizza. 200g AP Flour, 65% hydration, 2% Salt, 3/4 tsp instant yeast, 1 tsp honey, 1 tsp EVOO.  2-1/2 hour rise at room temperature. Baked on a perforated pizza pan for 10 minutes at 500F.

pizza raw 042913

No need for red sauce. The basil, goat cheese, and calabrese salami were tasty by themselves. The crust was cracker thin in the center, it had a nice crunch.

pizza 042913

If I were to change anything on this one it would be to add even more pig.