What is pizza? This is more than a #rhetorical_question or some sort of philosophical question.
No, this has practical application in the real world...
The
Dough.
Superdough is handmade pizza dough. The product is
frozen. When using the dough, we take it out of the freezer the night before,
thawing it in the fridge where it stays below the danger zone for food safety
purposes. By morning it can be taken out, left in the bag while preparing other
ingredients including all the favourite toppings. It rises a little in the
thaw, but the greatest rise in actually in the oven.
This is important. Where there is sauce and the weight of ingredients, it will not rise. This is why we take the toppings out to the edge so far and no more.
This is important. Where there is sauce and the weight of ingredients, it will not rise. This is why we take the toppings out to the edge so far and no more.
This is where timing comes into play, for the centre should be dry and crispy enough underneath for the slices to be handled and enjoyed rather than falling in someone's lap and all of that sort of thing.
A twenty-ounce dough-ball can be cut cold, into two ten-ounce portions. Re-wrap the one and put it back in the fridge where it will keep for a day or two. This makes for a thin crust pizza, twelve inches in diameter and with a crunchy ring of crust on the outside.
A twenty-ounce dough-ball can be cut cold, into two ten-ounce portions. Re-wrap the one and put it back in the fridge where it will keep for a day or two. This makes for a thin crust pizza, twelve inches in diameter and with a crunchy ring of crust on the outside.
Put a small handful of flour on the countertop and
take the half dough-ball and basically just make it round and flat. Roll that
with the typical rolling pin. Go different directions in turn.
Four or five
inches in diameter is about the usual. Sprinkle flour on top, flip it once or
twice and then begin with an initial heavy roll. This is for home use, assuming
not a lot of experience. Is the dough cold or cool? Let it sit for a while, and
then roll it multiple times, in multiple directions. The dough is quite
elastic, and by changing direction, the irregular shape of the dough can be
pushed into something more circular.
Once the dough has been thawed and warmed up a little,
worked out as best one can, we pick it up. We really don’t ‘throw’ pizza dough
like in popular imagination, but rather holding it by the edges, rotating
around the circle and letting gravity pull the dough out sufficiently to bear
putting it in the pan.
A #superdough pizza before baking. With genuine parsley flakes... |
The
pan.
Our experimental, quality control pan is twelve inches
in diameter, a simple pan of pressed sheet metal.
We spray that liberally with butter-flavoured
non-stick cooking spray.
Once the dough is in the pan, we work it into position
by flattening and pushing from the centre, rather than attempting to pull the
dough into place. With normal elasticity and oil on the pan, the tendency will
be for the dough to pull back from the rim, but with fingertips and thumbs, the
dough can be worked until it stays in the classic round form.
Push dough around to thicken any thin spots, easily visible
with the typical blackened pan.
The
sauce.
We just use regular tomato sauce, although there are
many fine pizza sauces available, usually in a pretty small tin. Considering
that we use as little as two or three really good table spoons of sauce on our
typical twelve-inch pizza, having some plastic snap-lid containers for freezing
is essential. Any ‘heat’ in our pizza flavour-wise comes from the ingredients
and not necessarily the spices in a commercially available sauce. Even tomato
sauce has herbs and spices as well as other ingredients.
Once we have the dough in the pan, we put an initial
spoonful of sauce in the middle and then tilt and rotate the pan, using a
round-bottomed sauce or gravy spoon to take that out to the edges of the pizza.
More on that in a moment.
Okay.
The
Ingredients.
We can purchase pizza mozzarella, blended and shredded
cheeses, sliced pepperoni, fresh mushrooms, peppers of various colours and
heat, onions, other ingredients at any local grocers. If you want bacon on
there, you have to fry that up ahead of time. You want to let that dry and
de-grease it on paper towels.
The typical 500-600 gram bag of cheese or pepperoni is
good for three lavish or four to five rather sparse pizzas, however, other
ingredients can make up for any deficit. Let’s be honest: some people like
arugula and goat’s cheese. They don’t even need pepperoni.
(And that’s okay too.)
So, in terms of an attractive outer ring of crust, a very thin swipe of tomato sauce and a bit of raw white flour adds colour and makes the mouth water because we can see what we are about to eat...it's kind of hard to explain but just believe me.
So, in terms of an attractive outer ring of crust, a very thin swipe of tomato sauce and a bit of raw white flour adds colour and makes the mouth water because we can see what we are about to eat...it's kind of hard to explain but just believe me.
Let’s be honest, ladies and gentlemen, you have to
slice them mushrooms pretty thin, the onions have to be diced just so, any ham
has to be shredded properly and the peppers have to be cut rather small or they
just don’t cook in time. Any sort of other ingredients have to contend with
that nine to eleven minute cooking time in our crummy little apartment electric
oven/range. The best that thing can do is about five hundred degrees.
It’s the typical galley-type kitchen.
Right?
Right.
***
What is #pizza ladies and gentlemen. Have you ever considered that.