Yum yum! The PIZZA thread!

[Skybird]

Why is it that we do not have a thread on haute cuisine after all these years of fighting over trivia, religion, politics and personal animosities? I tell you - all you guys and girls don'T know how to cook, so you are forgiven.

Anyway, being a fan of (Westernised) Chinese and Italian cuisine myself, I cannot leave you in darkness over the best and perfect way how to create the best and perfect, most original truly Italian pizza imaginable! It costed me several months of experimentation and several dozens of mediocre or simply failed pizza doughs to finally find out. Sometimes, I even threw the dough away.

You love Pizza? I love Pizza. Who does not love Pizza? If you don't, get out of the kitchen NOW.

Pizza lives by three ingredients: the dough, the sauce and the cheese. The other things you put onto it, are relatively unimportant.

I have experimented a lot in recent months to finally create a pizza that really is what I want to have when saying "pizza". But maybe - just maybe! - there is room for improvement, or recipes with details that are worth to be considered. When it comes to pizza, I am Borg, and I assimilate everything from other ideas that will increase the experience of joy, taste and happiness. Back to the 60s. Didn't hey have an LSD-pizza back then?

So this is the deal: I'll show you mine, and afterwards you show me yours.

EDIT July 2021: The recipe and all info in this and following posts from 2011 I consider as outdated now, it was ten years ago, and done in a normal (meanwhile replaced) household stove with a pizza stone, and the recipe for the dough is completely scrapped and replaced meanwhile with a totally new dough recipe, a specialised pizza oven, original Italian flour and in general: no stone was left unturned, I do it completely differently now (and could not copy the old results in the new household oven I got meanwhile, since it does not get as hot as the old one anymore). The actual and updated recipees and info is the last pages at the end of this thread, look for post #129 on page 9 from 2019 on, and then it jumps to summer 2021 on.



I tried a lot with different flours, German wheat flour type 405 and 550 for the most, also self-grinded flour. But the simple truth is: for a good, original Italian pizza dough, you need original wheat flour "tipo 00" for pizza (it is also available for pasta). It has slightly more gluten, and a general slightly different taste (almost impossible to taste, but still). I found it almost impossible to get the consistency of "thin Chiabatta" in the baked dough when using German or Austrian flours. The content in minerals also is slightly different, and I once read that it also has a small ammount of protein (which I am not sure of: protein in wheat flour?) However, it makes a difference. I now order tipo 00 wheat flour for pizza from a release specialing in Italian imports. You'd be well-advised to follow that example, or ask your local Italian food trader.

From them I also get durum wheat semolina that is grinded into flour, too. This is something completely unknown to German cuisine, as far as I know. I have never seen it available in German supermarkets and stores, just semolina (which I also like). So I order it from that Italian outlet as well. It looks like light-yellow flour.

I learned to prefer fresh yeast over dried one. When baking bread, which I do myself from grinding crop to the finished bread via a bread baking machine, dreid yeast is absolutely okay and works perfectly. But for pizza dough, fresh yeast is superior, it seems it developes more "power".

I also use Lecithin, a little bit, as an emulgator to further help the dough rising, and also a small ammount of separate gluten. And then beer, German beer of course, and of that german beer: wheat beer, or "Weißbier" as we also call it. Any normal bottle of that kind will do.

I love pizza spinacci, but getting the spinacci right and delicious, is easier said than done. when I do that, with lots of garlic, it simply tastes lame and cannot compare to the ones you get in a good restaurant. I would kill for getting their recipe! You can pay for my secret recipe below by giving me the enlightenment on how to get a pizza spinacci right and originally Italian!

the list below is for two pizzas of 35 cm in diameter. There is no problem with taking one half of the dough, sealing it, and putting it in the refrigerator. It stays okay for several days, if it is cold enough, but not freezing. 4-6 degrees, I would say. Frozen dough I found to suffer somewhat, it does not rise as well as unfrozen dough.

For 2-3 of my "pizza tre stagioni" you take:

280 g Italian wheat flour "tipo 00 pizza"
50 g Italian durum wheat semolina flour
70 ml handwarm water
150 ml wheat bear, room temperatur or slightly warmer
14 g of fresh yeast, that is one third of the qubes you can buy in German supermarkets
1 coffee spoon of sugar (for the yeast)
8-10 g of salt
1-2 table spoons of olive oil (not more, it could effect the dough's rising for the bad)!)
1 levelled coffee spoon (better less) of lecithin
1 levelled coffee spoon (better less) of gluten.

cheese: on that, later.

You mix the water, beer, yeast and sugar in one glas, until the yeast has dissolved. You mix the flours and salt with lecithin and gluten in a bigger case. If you have a bread baking machine with a dough program for pizza, you can safely use it. Fill in the flour, then the liquid, finally the oil, and start the machine. In case of mine (Panasonic), the program runs for 45 minutes. If you realise the dough is getting too hard, stop the machine, add some more beer, massage it into the dough by hand (if you add liquid to the machine with the dough already hard, you will make the machine causing a dirty mess), then restart the machine.

After that time is over, keep the machine closed, and let it rest another hour or so. If you use only one half of the dough and want to save the other for a later festivity, split the dough into to halfs, put one in the refrigerator, knead the other one short by hand, put it back in the (non-active!) machine and give it another 1 or 2 hours of rest. I assume if you are not too hungry, the dough in total is even enough for three pizzas.

Then get the dough formed into a pizza disc. Your business how you do it, it depends a lot on how skilful you are, what you have in tools and working space, and the circumstances of your kitchen. Put it onto a metal form or a plate, cover it with a towel, and put it into a warm place (but not too warm), or use your microwave's grill: 2 minutes upheating via the grill, then switch it off, put the dough into it and close the door. Let it rest another hour, so that it can rise again.

Switch on the oven, get it as hot as you can. In Germany, most stoves cannot go beyond 275°C, most score even less. I am lucky, I get 285 at the bottom. Using a so called pizza stone is highly recommended. Place the grid with the stone as low as you can, best would be just 1 or 2 cm above the bottom. Heat the oven with the empty stone already inside, for 20-30 minutes by using bottom heat and fan-assistance, if you do not use the fan and just use bottom and upper heating, you don't get enough heat (in German ovens).

The dough should be around 2-3 mm in the middle - not more! It will grow a lot! While the oven gets heated, you prepare the sauce. For one half of the dough, you need 2-3 cherry tomatoes, a table spoon of tomato purée, 1 coffee spoon of oregano, 1/2 coffe spoon of thyme, 1/2 coffee spoon rosemary, 1/2 garlic clove, and salt to your liking, maybe 1/2 a spoon. Smash it all into a paste, be gentle with adding olive oil, else it gets too liquid. Also be careful with garlic, I love garlic and when having pasta I have 3-4 cloves for one portion of tomato sauce, but on pizza it not only is no must, but it can even ruin the taste. For pizza spinacci, however, you cannot have enough.

On cheese. Mozarella comes to our mind immediately, but - fresh mozarella usually tastes almost of nothing, because it is made of cow-milk, original buffon mozarella however is very expensive - and tastes different, but imo not better. I say: it's not worth it.

I mix cheese like this. In Germany we have 200g packages of ready cheese rapée, one such mixture is "dried" mozarella, and the other often is sold as "pizza cheese", meaning a combination of two types that we call Edamer and Tilsiter. I mix these three. The mozarella is for the material consistency, and keeps the cheese soft and smooth, the other two are for the taste. What imo ruins ever pizza immediately is using peccorino or parmesan on it, or on cow-milk mozarella. Parmesan is wonderful for many spagetti sauces and other delicous Italian meals - but on pizza I find it terrible. - Of the total mixture of cheeses I described, per one half of the dough I use not more than one third of the total cheese.

You have the dough. You put the tomato sauce on it, not all of it, just as much as you need to thinly cover it. Do not make it a tomato soup on a dough bed! Wet pizza dropping with moisture is distasteful, and is never crossy.

Onto the sauce, you strew the cheese, as much as you like it. And on top of the cheese you put the things you want as a covering. Sometimes I use Thuna, but most of the time, I make it "tre stagioni": one third with fresh champignon slices, one third with pickled paprika and mild pepperoni, and one third with salami.

You then put it into the oven. If possible and if the stone is really damn hot like yelling hell, try to not use baking paper, if you used it so far for easier handling, but if you cannot separate it from the dough because it is like glued to it, then it is okay, too. when closing the oven, switch the fan to upper and bottom heat. The covering lives slightly longer that way, giving the dough slightly more time to get ready. Druing the minutes of baking, the temperature will likely fall by 10-30°, due to the fan not working anymore. That is okay. The bottom needs to be hot, not so much the air above the pizza and its covering.

Normally, pizza gets done at temperatures of 400 and more degrees. In your household kitchen, you will need to do with the maximum of what you can get. That is why you should put it low (close to the heating element), and onto a stone. You bake it for not more than 5 minutes. The dough gets golden with mild brown spots, next the sauce gets somewhat dry, and you see small lakes of oil appearing. when the cheese starts to get crusty, be careful, you do not want to get a gratin, but a pizza with softer cheese covering than a gratin.

That's it! Key to a good pizza dough, is time and - love! I have tried shorter times for the dough, yes. But never did I get as perfect results than with what I described above, and with that kind of flour. It makes the difference. when I do pizza, I plan the working steps over the full day now. It's worth it. I claim you would be unable to differ the dough from that of any favourite Italian restaurant. If you make the dough thick and have no maximum temperature, the pizza tends to turn into that kind of thick and swollen but soft American pizza you get at Pizza-Hut. Make the dough thinner, and use more heat, and you get it more Italian-style, and original. The baked thick dough should compare to chiabatta in consistency, with the outer side of the bottom having a very thin golden and medium brown crust. If it is like this, then you did it right.

Not before this weekend it also came to my mind that I could try to remove the baking paper after the first minute of baking. That is an attempt worth to be tried, it could be that the dough gets crustier, because the paper isolates the dough from the stone, and the stone cannot pick up the moisture as easily therefore.

Now show me yours! What is your favourite pizza recipe?


P.S. Anyone putting noodles on his pizza will get shot immediately and without further warning!