Passionate About Pizza: Making Great Homemade Pizza (10 page)

I do want to point out one thing. I have found that if you purchase cheese that has been shredded or grated before being packaged, it has less moisture in it. This fact can be used to your advantage. When baking a pizza with a lot of moisture in it (such as one with diced, fresh tomatoes), you might want to use pre-shredded cheese. When baking a pizza with little moisture, you might prefer to grate the cheese yourself.

Fat

I do not mean body fat; I mean fat in your food. Everyone is fat-conscious these days and the idea of pizza with cheese and sausage or pepperoni on it can turn off some people.

Well, I refuse to give up pizza even while I cut the amount of fat in my diet and you do not have to give it up either! If you look at it, a slice (one eighth of a pizza) of New York-style Pizza (cooked using my recipe) has just slightly over one ounce of cheese; this is the only significant source of fat in the recipe other than the optional toppings.

The way I see it, you can tailor your recipes to your low fat diet by not adding any oil to the dough, making toppings that use little or no oil, and reducing the amount of cheese on the pizza. You can even find low-fat or non-fat cheese and cheese substitutes to use. By the way, you can choose to use high-fat ingredients; you hold the key to your own destiny!

The amount of oil or fat in pizza dough does have an effect on the dough. Oil in the dough helps to soften the gluten somewhat and makes dough with oil slightly slacker and easier to handle.

You will see some recipes in this book that have a lot of fat and others that have very little. Feel free to reduce your fat intake by not making pizzas that you feel have too much fat. Keep in mind that you can probably reduce the fat in any pizza recipe to a level you are comfortable with by only slightly modifying the recipe. After all, recipes are only a guide, not a mandate!

Flour

You might think that flour is just flour; however, not all flours are created equal. You
can
use almost any type of flour to make a pizza, but the type of flour you use can make a difference. Different flours have different amounts of
gluten
. This is the protein in wheat that helps hold in the bubbles of gas produced by the yeast. It also allows the dough to stretch as you shape the pizza. Different flours with varying amounts of gluten will behave differently; you can see and feel the difference in the dough as you mix and knead it. You may have seen flours labeled All Purpose, Unbleached, All Purpose Unbleached, Cake Flour, Pastry Flour, Bread Flour, High Gluten Flour, etc. Manufacturers formulate each of these flours to have a different amount of gluten in the flour. Many of the recipes in this book call for All Purpose Unbleached Flour. You can use this type of flour with success in almost all types of baking, so it is widely available. You generally have a few brands to pick from in your local supermarket. Pick your favorite. Please read the rest of this section before substituting other types of flour for the type of flour specified in a recipe.

Choosing Which Flour to Use

My favorite flour to use for making pizza is a mix of half All Purpose Unbleached Flour and Bread Flour. This mix provides a good balance between the extra strength of the Bread Flour with the ease of use that comes from All Purpose Unbleached Flour. I have a flour bucket that will hold about 10 pounds of flour. When it is empty, I fill it with one package of each type of flour and mix them together. I do not worry much about how completely they are mixed. Each time I take out a cup of flour, I fluff the top layer of flour in the bucket so I get a good measuring cup of flour and this helps the mixing. Most of the recipes in the book call for All Purpose Unbleached Flour because it is less hassle and it works very well. You can substitute Bread Flour or the mix I use in the same quantity as the All Purpose Unbleached Flour listed in the recipe. The dough handling (especially stretching) will behave just a little differently but it will work just fine.

I have found that the amount of time you need to let the dough rest until it gets to the desired slackness or stretchiness depends on the brand and type of flour you use. I have found that some of the common unbleached all-purpose or bleached white flours require a fairly long rest (up to twenty minutes) before they loosen their elasticity and become easy to stretch. I have found that specialty flour brands’ unbleached all-purpose flours require a much shorter resting time (about five to ten minutes) to reach the same consistency. As a result, I prefer to use high quality, specialty brand unbleached all-purpose flour. I have not used all flour brands and the brands found in each region vary greatly. You may prefer a specific brand of flour and you can use almost any all-purpose flour successfully.

Gluten in Flour

High gluten flour or bread flour is not necessary for making pizza; in fact, it may not work as well as all-purpose flour. Too high a gluten content may cause the dough to be too springy to shape even with a long rest. Each time you stretch it or roll it out, it jumps back! High gluten flour can result in pizza dough that is virtually impossible to shape, so I recommend against using it for pizza unless you mix it with other lower gluten flour.

Unfortunately, I learned this the hard way! I was making pizza for several couples at a friend’s house. They had heard about my pizza and wanted to try it. My friend only had high-gluten flour, so I used it. I spent 20 minutes fighting with the dough to get it stretched into a pizza. I never did get it stretched very thin and the pizzas were not up to my normal standards. My friend later told me that he had the same problem the previous time he made a pizza, but he thought it was he! No high-gluten flour for my pizzas; that is my rule! Whole-wheat flour has lower gluten content than all-purpose flour. This can make whole wheat dough tend to tear when being shaped. When using whole-wheat flour in dough, you can use bread flour for one third to one-half of the total amount of flour in the recipe; I call this half-wheat dough! The extra gluten content in the bread flour counteracts the lower gluten content of the whole-wheat flour thereby making the dough easier to handle. Alternatively, you can make whole-wheat dough easier to handle by adding vital wheat gluten. This directly increases the gluten content. You can find vital wheat gluten in many grocery or health food stores near the flours. I use vital wheat gluten in my whole-wheat dough.

Bread flours or high gluten flours also may require longer kneading to develop the gluten or a longer rest before they loosen to become easy to shape. Even after a longer rest period, they may retain a stronger elasticity that makes them produce stiff dough. This can be good when you want it but it can be a surprise if you do not expect it! As you develop preferences about how your pizza dough behaves, you can change your flour choices to match your preferences. You can adjust the amount of gluten in the flour you use by mixing unbleached all-purpose flour with bread flour (or even with high gluten flour) in various proportions. Given that more gluten in flour tends to make dough stronger and that adding oil to dough makes it looser, you can balance the amount of these two ingredients as you tailor your dough to meet your needs.

Semolina flour has a higher amount of gluten. It is frequently ground more coarsely than all-purpose flour. Because of this, I have not found it to work well when making pizza.

Specialty Pizza Flour

Specialty Italian-style pizza flour can be found in Italian grocery stores or specialty baking suppliers. One specific brand of Italian flour stands out due to being well suited for pizza baked at high heat in wood-fired pizza ovens. Caputo™ 00 Pizza Flour is the name of this flour. Dough made with Caputo™ flour will not burn as quickly when baked at 700 to 800 degrees Fahrenheit. Due to these properties, it will also not get brown when baked at the normal 500 degrees Fahrenheit temperatures obtainable in home ovens. As a result, pizza does not turn out well using Caputo™ 00 Flour in most of the recipes in this book.

Flavored Olive Oil

Flavored olive oil brings a nice addition of flavor to a wide variety of pizzas. I frequently use garlic-flavored oil or basil flavored oil as an ingredient for making dough to give just a little extra flavor to the dough. When used as a pizza topping flavored oil adds extra seasoning to the taste of the pizza. I typically use flavored olive oil but you can use any type of flavored cooking oil that you favor. Just make sure you choose one that neither you nor your guests are allergic to!

To make garlic flavored oil, take ten to twenty peeled garlic cloves, place them in a small saucepan, and then add enough olive oil to cover the cloves. Cook over the very lowest heat setting you have on your stove, stirring frequently to prevent burning, until just tender and golden. This will usually take about 20 – 30 minutes. By cooking the garlic very slowly, you take away the bite of the garlic and impart a sweet, nutty garlic flavor to the olive oil. You can save the oil for use in dough or for brushing the center and edges of the crust before or after baking. You can place the garlic cloves on a pizza whole, mashed with a soft cheese like goat cheese, or served with cheese and crackers as an appetizer. If you prefer, you may leave the garlic cloves in the olive oil, add your choice of herbs, or add re hydrated, sun-dried tomatoes to give it even more flavor.

You should strain out any impurities and then store the olive oil at room temperature because olive oil coagulates when stored in the refrigerator. If you leave any garlic cloves, sun-dried tomatoes, etc. in the olive oil, make sure that the oil completely covers them, or they may get moldy.

Herbs

Use dried or fresh herbs, whichever you prefer. Many of the
Italian
or
pizza
herb blends are very good. Most of the recipes in this book call for dried herbs due to their wide availability. You can certainly substitute fresh herbs; they can add a nice dash to a recipe because of their fresh, robust taste.

Since dried herbs have more concentrated flavor, you need two to three times as much of most fresh herbs to get a similar flavor as the dried herbs listed in the recipe. In this book, unless the recipe has specifically said to use a fresh herb, the quantity listed gives the amount of dried herbs to use.

Liquids

Most of the pizza dough recipes in this book call for water as the primary liquid ingredient; it works well without imparting any extra flavor to the dough. If you think this is boring or too limiting, you can really use almost any liquid in the dough, so go ahead, and experiment. The liquid you choose may have some effect on the yeast. You should try out new liquids when you can afford to have the yeast fail so as not to have an unpleasant surprise when serving company!

You can bring some flavor, color, and vitamins to the dough by making it with water that you used to cook vegetables or potatoes. Strongly colored or flavored vegetables will impart some of these colors and flavors to the water and therefore to the dough. Together with the coloration, you get vitamins. It is your pizza so it is your choice!

Non-stick Cooking Spray

Non-Stick Cooking Spray, especially the Olive Oil variety, is useful for coating the mixing bowl and surface of the dough before letting the dough rise. Just spray a light coating on the inside of the bowl, flop in the ball of dough, and then spray a little on the top of the dough – there you have it!

There is an alternative to purchasing aerosol non-stick cooking spray. You can fill a device called the Misto® with whatever type of liquid cooking oil you desire. A pump contained within the device pressurizes the container so you can spray the oil in a fine mist. Using this device allows you to choose the type of oil you spray. I really like mine and use it often.

Salt

Some people do not like adding salt to foods; I am one of those people. I almost never add salt to cooked food. However, I do put salt in pizza dough and recommend that you do as well.

The small amount of salt that you use making pizza dough greatly improves the taste of the pizza dough, so go ahead and add it. It sounds surprising, and it surprised me when I started making pizza, but that little bit counts. You
can
make pizza dough without salt and you should go ahead and do it if it suits your fancy or meets your dietary requirements. If you must limit salt intake, try to reduce the amount of salt rather than eliminating it.

Tomatoes

Tomatoes are available in a wide variety of forms; some of these are great on pizza and others are not so good. Feel free to use canned crushed tomatoes and canned whole tomatoes as well as any type of fresh tomato. If you do use fresh tomatoes, you might want to squeeze out the seeds before putting them on the pizza to keep the pizza from getting soggy. Similarly, you generally want to drain canned whole tomatoes and only use the tomatoes; you might even want to squeeze the liquid out of the inside of the tomatoes because it can make the sauce too watery.