What Is Pizza, Ladies and Gentlemen. #superdough

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 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.

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.

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.

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What is #pizza ladies and gentlemen. Have you ever considered that.