Pizzer Dough- Making, Shaping, Baking

Our family friend Brian who was a great carpenter managed to escape the Vermont school system without mastering spelling. Doing a job for us once, he was in a clandestine and long distance relationship with a girl who was email savvy. To stay in touch since he couldn't call, he decided he would learn how to use a computer and send her email. Unfortunately that put pressure on his spelling but he was keen to learn. He would routinely write her about the days events. But he was self conscious and didn't want to come off like a bumpkin so he'd run the text by me first. This created an awkward situation for me as I didn't want to sanitize his work so much that he was no longer the charming back woods thick accented Vermonter that she would need to know if that relationship were ever going to work. One evening I made pizza which he happened to like enough to write about. After he'd finished typing a while he called out "Cleo".  "Yeah" I replied. "Tell me if I spelled pizza right". "Okay" I said, waiting. "P" "I" "Z"  (is he going to get the second Z, I wondered) "Z" (awesome) "E" "R". Pause. "Yeah Brian, you spelled it right the way you say it".

This recipe was stolen from the Cusinart cookbook that ships with the device.

Critical Equipment
Cuisinart, Pizza Peel and Pizza Stone


Key to success:
Good Dry Active Yeast - get dry yeast from the fridge section of a health food store, it's worth it. Next best, Fleishman's in a jar. Last case, Fleishmans packets. Always keep the yeast in your fridge. It lasts a long time.

 

 

Lots of corn meal under the dough to keep everything sliding.
Don't put on a lot of tomato sauce, barely scrape it across the surface.
Hot oven - 500 if you dare

Quantity:
Crusts for two 14" pizzas

Ingredients:
2 1/4 teaspoons yeast (one package if all you can get is the supermarket kind)
1 teaspoon sugar
2/3 cup very warm water (120 degrees)
1 2/3 cups flour
3/4 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons olive oil
1 1/2 Tablespoons cornmeal for stone & board

Process:
Preheat oven to 500 degrees with the stone on the middle shelf. Remove the top shelf so you have enough clearance to maneuver the pizza peel.

Stir yeast and sugar into 120 degree water and let stand until foamy, about 10 minutes.

 

  

 

Insert metal blade in the Cuisinart, put flour and salt in work bowl and turn on machine.

Pour yeast mixture through feed tube and process about 45 seconds, until dough pulls away from sides of bowl.

 

 

Add oil and process 60 seconds longer.

If dough sticks to sides of bowl, add more flour, 1 tablespoon at a time, processing 10 seconds after each addition, until dough leaves sides of bowl but remains soft.
 
Put your dough ball on a clean surface. I have an old piece of marble from my grandmother. I was going to say roll out the dough with a rolling pin or swing it around in circles over your head  until it's a perfect circle. Both techniques work, the first always; I've never done the second. Okay, that's a lie. I've tried the second and ended up with dog hair pizza. Here's a technique that's somewhere in-between, it will get you away from the sissy rolling pin technique but save you cleaning the floor with your dough.

 

Press out the dough with your hand.

  

Pick it up and let gravity start to stretch it out. Keep turning it around. You will notice that the middle stays the same initial thickness but the edges are starting to get a little thinner where your grabbing.

  

Make two fists and stretch out the middle a little, turn it often. The dough reacts slowly, let it take its time, stretch and recover. Of course, like glass blowing you can't stop or everything is overcome by gravity.  It's easy to tear a hole at this point, so be gentle, you don't have to do this much. I tend to do more of the hanging stretches.

  

Going back to the edges, I start to stretch out the edge while it's hanging in the air. You'd think this would dramatically miss-shape the thing but the dough is very elastic and doesn't like to stretch too far at a time. 

  

Alternate between the hanging, edge stretching and occasional two fist stretching. If you get a hole, it doesn't really matter, when you put it back down you can repair it by pinching it together. Nobody will really see this part, they will be too busy eating.

  

Get your pizza peel ready with a lot of corn meal. I use a course grind but any corn meal will do.

  

Quickly pick up your dough and lay it on the board. It will be less than perfect when it lands so straighten it out and make it look like a perfect circle again.

 

 Make a little rim so the sauce and any juices from toppings won''t spill out onto the hot oven.

 

Confirm that the crust will slide by giving the peel a little shake. You absolutely need the crust to slide around on the corn meal, especially when you load on pounds of toppings. Even when I'm adding toppings I shake the peel just to convince myself that it's still free.

Now your ready to put on some toppings. These pictures are lifted from the Portabello pizza recipe. Start with a smaller than you think glob of sauce.

 

Spread it around with the back of a spoon. It should graze the surface, not be a solid coat. This keeps the pizza from being soggy.

 

Add the topping in the order that makes sense to you. Or wait for poll results on the pizza topping order question and either go with the most or least popular.

 

  

  

Make sure your oven is ready. Checklist:

- stone on middle rack

- racks above removed

- oven temp 450 - 500

Open the wicked hot oven and position the front of your peel at the far edge of the stone, slide the pizza onto the stone pulling the peel forward as you go. You'll get the hang of it. Some toppings may fall off and incinerate on the stone. You can ignore these or flick them off to avoid setting off every smoke alarm in the building.

 

 

Bake between 10-15 minutes or until it looks like what you already know a pizza should look like.

Now do the dishes. My mother always told me to clean up as you go along. Her mother told her that. We don't have a record of the previous generation. This was good advice.

When it's ready pull it out using the peel again. It may try and slide off the back of the stone but you can shimmy it onto the peel. The crust will be nice and crispy so it will slide very easily. Cornmeal is just left over from before.

 

 

Slice with the roller, lots of back and forth to carefully cut through crust and any tough vegetable matter. Test on someone's kid before serving yourself. Technically you should wait an hour for signs of food poisoning but Tris looked like he was going to finish the whole thing by then.