Pizza!

So I mentioned my own pizza technique in another thread and a few people asked me for the method so here goes. This makes enough dough to cover two Pampered Chef pizza stones like these.

This is one of my early efforts. You'll get better with practise too!

https://pic.armedcats.net/m/mi/mineworksfine/2011/08/10/Pizza.jpg

It's actually a lot more complicated to describe than is actually is to do! ;)

Base

Put your oven on at its lowest setting (around 80C/180F) or a bit lower.

Boil some water in your kettle.

Weigh out 10oz (285g) of strong white bread flour and 2oz of polenta (aka maize meal or corn meal) and seive together in a bowl or your food processor with a dough blade if you have one.

Put 3 fl oz (80ml) of water from the kettle into a jug with 4 fl oz (120ml) of cold water then add a teaspoon of sugar and half a teaspoon of salt. Whisk together until the sugar and salt dissolve then add a sachet (1/4oz or 7g) of dried yeast and whisk again. Add this to your bowl with a lug of good olive oil and combine together with a blunt knife before turning onto a floured surface, gathering together with floured hands and rolling/folding until the dough comes together and is nicely elastic. Same goes with the food processor method.

Pat the dough into a nice ball, place in a floured bowl with a damp tea towel over the top and stick in the oven BUT DON'T FORGET TO TURN OFF THE HEAT AT THIS POINT or you will dry out the dough and kill the yeast. Leave for 40-45 minutes for the dough to rise.

In the meantime make the sauce

Tomato Pizza/Pasta Sauce

Wide pan screaming hot. Add generous lug of olive oil then a 140z/400ml can of chopped tomatoes. Keep stirring the tomatoes until they reduce to a consistency of bubbling volcanic mud. Turn off the heat and allow to cool a while before transferring to a jug or deep bowl.. Add a teaspoon of sugar, half a teaspoon each salt and freshly ground black pepper and a roughly chopped clove of garlic and a couple of stalks of fresh basil. Blitz until smooth with a hand blender (or you can crush the garlic and chop the basil stalks and leaves and leave the sauce a tad chunky).

Dust your pizza stones with flour, remove the dough from the oven and set the ven to 160C/320F. Divide the dough into two, roll into balls, flatten as much as possible by hand on the pizza stones and then roll out as flat and thin as you can. Prick the whole surface of each base with a fork and bake for 5 minutes. Remove from the oven, whack the heat up to 220C/430F and spread the tomato sauce over the bases.

Then top with generous quantities of grated mozzarella (or sliced or half pearls) and add other toppings of your choice (two different types is good). Finally drizzle with good olive oil and sprinkle with dried oregano and more fresh black pepper to taste and bake for about 8 minutes depending on the depth and quantity of toppings.

And once sliced take the stones to the table so that people can help themselves while the remainder stays warm.

Buon appetito!
 
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Looks really, really good.

The only thing I would do different would be to tip the garlic into the pan and cook for 10 seconds before you add the tomato.
 
I can vouch for the tomato sauce, having stolen the recipe earlier this week and used it tonight.
 
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Looks really, really good.

The only thing I would do different would be to tip the garlic into the pan and cook for 10 seconds before you add the tomato.

NOOOOOO!

This is a tip I share with everyone I discuss food with. For any dish that you want to flavour with garlic add at the last possible moment and once what you are cooking has come off the boil. This gives a much better flavour, prevents bitterness and also stops that horrible garlicky smell seeping from your pores and making you unfriendly to your friends and colleagues the next day.

Trust me, try it. ;)
 
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Worst. Pizza. Ever. :(
 
if it says microwave on the box, you know in advance it will be crap...
 
Ordered pizza at Domino's yesterday... Pretty decent pizza's actually. But the best pizza's ever are about 500m away from me in a little Italian restaurant called Piccola Venezia. I'll remember to snap a picture the next time I go there :)

The best pizzas are always to be found either in restaurants or dedicated non franchise pizza shops.

As for MWF's recipe, looks good mate, I'll give it a try next time!
 
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My dad vacationed in Italy this summer and he went to the establishment that invented the Margherita pizza. He said it was one of the worst pizzas he ever ate. Too thin, the tomato sauce was not sauce but tomato pur?, so it was acid, very little mozzarella, a disappointment.

Never meet your heroes?
 
Ate this quattro fromaggi in a little restaurant in the south of France, it was delicious despite being a bit burned around the edges.

IMG-20110804-00106.jpg
 
I wanted to try a new pizzeria today.....asshats were closed, FUCKERS! I drove 25 miles because the business hours posted on their website conveyed otherwise. Fortunately an old favorite of mine was only a few miles away.

hk4uJ.jpg


Bonus points as this pizza joint is right across the street from my favorite bakery.

fSV0P.jpg
 
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Pizza looks lovely and the lighting on the second picture is interesting.
 
So I mentioned my own pizza technique in another thread and a few people asked me for the method so here goes.(...)
Buon appetito!

Great recipe!

I need to make some adjustments since my pizza trays are a little bit bigger and therefore they came out a little too thin for my taste, but other than that the texture was GREAT!

Thanks a lot!
 
I wanted to try a new pizzeria today.....asshats were closed, FUCKERS! I drove 25 miles because the business hours posted on their website conveyed otherwise. Fortunately an old favorite of mine was only a few miles away.

hk4uJ.jpg

That looks delicious.

I had one of my best friends here desert me and move to Nashville for her job about 3 months ago. Like me, she is a pizza freak. What places would you personally recommend? Feel free to PM if you don't want every Tennessean on the forums to go to your favorite spots.

She lives in the Cane Ridge/Antioch area, but is willing to drive some for really great pizza.
 
That looks delicious.

I had one of my best friends here desert me and move to Nashville for her job about 3 months ago. Like me, she is a pizza freak. What places would you personally recommend? Feel free to PM if you don't want every Tennessean on the forums to go to your favorite spots.

She lives in the Cane Ridge/Antioch area, but is willing to drive some for really great pizza.

That pie can be had at Hard Knox Pizza in Knoxville, TN.... but from Antioch we're talking a 360 mile round trip. I bitch about the 30 miles I have to drive for it.
 
Made my own homemade BBQ Chicken Pizza two nights in a row as it was soo gooood. Next time, I will not be using Trader Joe's pre-made dough. It didn't seem to rise enough after kneading it. Is it possible to over-knead the dough and make it tougher? I've never played with dough with yeast in it. :dunno:

qUz3P.jpg
 
Chels, just try my recipes above. It's been refined over the last 3 years and the method described is pretty much foolproof. You can add a little more water if required but the trick is to make sure the dough is slightly sticky to start with and give it a good knead before allowing to rise.

And the sauce blows anything you can buy pre-made into the weeds for a fraction of the cost. You can add half a chopped red chilli before blitzing it if you want to make it more interesting, the use goats cheese, red onion and roasted red peppers for something more authentic and rustic (and healthier/lower in calories). Just make damn sure you have good olive oil or all your efforts will be for naught.
 
Made my own homemade BBQ Chicken Pizza two nights in a row as it was soo gooood. Next time, I will not be using Trader Joe's pre-made dough. It didn't seem to rise enough after kneading it. Is it possible to over-knead the dough and make it tougher? I've never played with dough with yeast in it. :dunno:

not that i know off, normally the mroe you knead it, the better
on the other hands, i've never heard of pizza dough that needs to rise though?
 
MWF: I'll look in to your recipe but it may not work for BBQ Chicken pizzas as you use a BBQ sauce for well, the sauce.

bone: I kneaded the dough then let it rest for 5 extra minutes and it did seem to rise a bit more than when I took it out of the packaging; also I watched a YouTube video on pizza dough (I wanted to see how to properly knead and roll the dough) and the lady made hers from scratch, let it rise 2-3 times then kneaded it some more.

Either way I will for sure be making my own dough for the next pizza. Making pizza at home was quite enjoyable! :)
 
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