Pizza

I live a stone's throw from three different pizza places, all with free delivery, and all of which have received enough phone calls from our domicile to have our address computerized. Mostly I was fine with this, except for the fact that occasionally the pizza would arrive with the cheese pooled in a corner of the box, or undercooked, leading to disappointment all around. And the money issue kind of bothered me. Though there's one cheapish option--Ray's Original, about $16 for a plain large--it's not our favorite. I should clarify--it IS the favorite of our three-year-old, Henry, but Paul and I prefer something with a tad more of the brick-oven about it. Ordering in a pretty basic pizza from Pizza 33, a nice little pizzeria nearby, costs us about $25--without the tip. At my parent's place, in Connecticut, you can order an outrageous large pizza from a place down the block for something like half the price.

At some point, I thought, hell, I oughta try this at home. After one demo from Paul's father (a great cook) that involved storebought dough, a cookie sheet, and merely some shredded mozzerella and a can of crushed tomatoes I thought YEAH, I AM going to try this. If this makes me sound like a culinary nerd, you've pretty much got me pegged.

 I started with store bought dough, because, frankly, the idea of working with yeast scared me. I've played around with baking bread before, but it was eons ago, and one episode with a loaf of whole wheat bread that refused to rise particularly put me off. I tried some frozen packaged stuff from the grocery store--about $5 for two mounds of dough. And I tried Whole Foods, which has regular dough and whole wheat dough, frozen or refrigerated, for less than $2 a mound. I also tried ordering some frozen dough from Fresh Direct, a grocery delivery outfit that operates in NYC.

The frozen grocery stuff and the frozen Whole Foods variety were fine, though it took a lot of experimenting to get the timing right--was it better to defrost it in the fridge, and how long would that take? Or on the counter? (Ditto the questions.). Could you go ahead and stretch dough that had been refrigerated, or was that a mistake? The Fresh Direct stuff was a disaster--tiny (it must have been meant for one serving pizza) and sticky. Horrid. Ick. Never again. And I had enough misses, or near misses, with the other stuff that I just got irritated. I'd try and stretch it when it was too cold, and it would resist, get overworked, and end up flat and hard.

A few things I learned from this early experimentation:

-If you're going to use a cookie sheet, oil it first with a little olive oil, and sprinkle some corn meal on after that. It'll help prevent sticking.

-You might do a little better with sauce flavor than good quality crushed tomatoes out of a can (I like Muir Glen), but not much. I just spread some sauce--not too much or the dough gets soggy--sprinkle on some oregano, and add the cheese. The pure tomato flavor reminds me of the pizza we got in Milan.

-If you're making this for a picky child (hello, Henry!) it's best to grate the cheese, rather than slice it. This will lend the ultimate product more of the visual effect of the pizza from the pizzeria down the street.

Eventually I started reading about pizza dough, to try and figure out what the deal was with the refrigeration/cold dough issue. I didn't learn a whole lot about that from reading (though I think, ultimately, room temperature dough is easiest to work with), I did run across enough recipes for pizza dough to make me think, I oughta try this.....I was particularly inspired by a recipe by Mark Bittman, who flat out said it was easier to make the dough than go out and buy it. I adore Bittman, so I decided to take his word for it. There are tons of recipes around, but I've been using his (for now). Here it is:


3 cups flour (all purpose or bread flour...I'm having more success with bread flour)
one packet yeast
2 teaspoons sea salt
2 tablespoons oil
one cup cold water, with the option to add up to a quarter cup more if the dough is too dry

Throw it all in and mix it into a ball--takes less than a minute. Bittman advises using a food processor. I use my KitchenAid with the dough hook. Works fine. Then you knead it into a ball, cover it, and let it rise for one to two hours. He says you can let it rise more slowly for up to 8 hours in the refrigerator, but I prefer to avoid the cold dough issue.

This, spread out in a pizza pan, was working decently for me. But all that reading around kept mentioning pizza stones, i.e. you really can't make a decent pizza at home without a pizza stone (basically a tile that absorbs heat, makes the oven hot as hell, and gives you a real pizza crust). I tried one suggestions--putting my pizza, in its pan, on top of another cookie sheet I'd left in the oven as it pre-heated (temperature 500, or as hot as your oven will go). But the results weren't impressive.

So eventually I ordered one. And a peel. Now I leave the stone in the oven all the time, preheat the oven to 500. I put cornmeal on the peel, put a piece of parchment paper on top, spread my pizza dough and add the toppings, drizzle a little olive oil over the entire affair, and slide it, on it's paper, onto the stone. Within ten minutes, I'm getting a pizza that is darn near as good as the ones we used to order--far cheaper. And yes, I am embarrassingly proud of myself. The picture above incidentally, is not one of mine, but it's about what mine look like. I have to take a picture next round.