thaiobsessed wrote:Bill, where are you getting your peperoni?

thaiobsessed,

Thank you. The smoked pepperoni is from Vermont Smoke and Cure.

dradeli wrote:Ok, you guys have been posting for years. I want to know what is the best way to start making pizza at home. I have a normal convection oven. I have a stone. Please give me the easiest (best) recipe for a newbie to make a pizza that will make me forgo ever wanted to order delivery again. I have seen Alton Browns pizza recipe, where should i go from there.

I've only started making pizza a few months ago but seeing as you're in Oak Park I would hit up Olive and Well and pick up a bottle of their Tuscan herb olive oil.

I use a KitchenAid Mixer to make my dough from a basic recipe;

3 Cups of flour
1 cup of water 115-120 degrees with a yeast packet activated in it
1/4 cup of sugar
2-? Tbsps of olive oil (the Tuscan herb I mentioned above)

I start with 2 tbsp of olive oil in the mixer with all of the other ingredients but often the dough is still a bit dry so I pour in more olive oil until it reaches the desired consistency. That particular olive oil gives this dough a fantastic taste imo.

I make the sauce from scratch with canned tomatoes cooked down in a pot. I mash them with a potato masher to thin them out a bit. I spice them up with salt, pepper, garlic powder, onion powder and spicy oregano.

At the same time I make an olive oil infusion. 1/2 - 3/4 cups of regular olive oil in a sauce pan with a big slice of onion, 6 - 8 garlic cloves, fresh basil, a cayenne pepper and whatever other herbs you have on hand that you think might work. Heat all of that for about a half hour to infuse the flavors into the oil. Then pour it through a strainer into your tomatoes.

Don't throw away those browned onion and garlic pieces, they are great to munch on.

At this point I use an immersion blender to get a nice smooth sauce.

Roll out your dough after it's risen (about 2 hours) put your sauce, ingredients and cheese on and pop it in the oven. I go 450 on a metal pizza pan and they've been coming out pretty good. I'll get pics posted up here the next time I do it I think.

Double-crust shrimp pizza inspired by the awesome focaccia di Recco:

1) top and bottom crust of thin sourdough
2) sauce was a puree of:
- gigante white beans simmered in a rich pork stock
- roasted garlic
- gravy made from pork stock
3) bacon
4) shrimp, raw, sliced thin
5) green onion
6) queso Oaxaca

Bill, that is a cool idea, wonderfully illustrated. I'm inspired to try to make that too!

My second attempt. Pardon the crappy cell phone pics and crappier rolling job on the pies.

Fig butter, prosciutto, and blue cheese:



Broccoli, mozzarella, parmesan, and homemade hot italian sausage:



Mexican - homemade chorizo, roasted corn, roasted jalepeno, mozarella:

tonight's pizza
creamed spinach, caramelized onions, prosciutto with smoked provolone & mozzarella cheese

White pizza with asparagus and prosciutto. The curst turned out much better than the picture would lead you to believe.

Been making rectangle thicker pizzas lately, and subbing 5-10% whole wheat or 10-15% spelt flour. This was finished w ricotta salata, fresh oregano and EVOO.




Jeff

jvalentino wrote:

Beautiful!

=R=

ronnie_suburban wrote:

jvalentino wrote:[url=http://www.flickr.com/photos/21798709@N07/7107922807/]

Beautiful!

=R=

Thanks, I like that shot too.

jvalentino wrote:Thanks, I like that shot too.

It does a great job of showing the structure of the dough/crust, which looks fantastic.

=R=

I wanted to do something different since I had not made pizza in a couple of months. I wanted to incorporate lard. My husband grew up eating food that contained lard because that is what his mother would cook with. However, as he got older the health concerns of lard made him shy away from lard. I, however, did not have a mother who cooked with lard (just plain ole butter and not really a whole lot of that) so I never really had the lard experience. I was at City Fresh on Devon and Kedzie over the weekend and they make lard that they sell in small containers, so I bought one. It is written in Serbian as to what it is. My husband is not Serbian so he has no idea what the container means so when I decided to make the dough yesterday, I used s bit of the lard and did not tell him. The results? A slightly different crust that tasted like heaven (to me anyway). A nice crispy, buttery flavor and it was pretty thick. Couple this crust with the chorizo from the meat counter at City Fresh and some cheddar cheese, made for a gobbled up quickly pizza. My husband was really impressed. This is my fifth pizza, third on my own without my friend and I thought out of all of our fives, this one was by far the best. Well, it did cause my husband to say, "You're getting pretty good at this." Yep, I am doing this again tomorrow.

Before it hit the oven:


After:

Tackled another pizza today: the alfredo, portobello mushroom, mozzarella and swiss cheese pizza with a lard crust. this one was also very good.

Who needs homemade when there is a vending machine to do it for you? I think i want one of these for the basement (the machine, not the spokesmodel...there is only so much indulgence The Wife will allow me):

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/nati ... 4433.story

After roasting poblanos over a grill a couple days ago, and making a green chili sauce out of them, I hit upon the idea of trying out a chiles en nogada inspired pizza:





It's a poblano chile sauce base, topped with cooked chorizo, diced pears, a walnut-cotija cheese-Mexican crema sauce, and Chihuahua cheese. Finished off with pomegranate seeds after it came out of the oven. The one thing I am proud of here is that crust and the nice charring. Always trying to find a better and easier way to get that bottom charring, I came up with a new method that doesn't even require a pizza stone or cast iron and a half-hour to one hour preheat. I spread out my dough on parchment paper. I preheated the oven to 450 degrees. (I have a conventional oven with bottom heating.) As soon as the oven preheated, I topped my dough, and slid it atop the parchment paper onto the oven floor. After about two minutes, I rotated the dough about 120 degrees. Let it go another two minutes, then moved it to the top rack of the oven, where I finished it under the broiler after giving it another two minutes or so to cook at 450. Broiler time took maybe 3 minutes total, with rotation halfway through. I'm pretty darned happy with the results. I can't wait to try it on a pizza marghareta.

Looks great, Binko. I'm also a fan of the broiler, though I go a slightly different route of putting quarry tiles on a rack as close to the broiler as I can get. Pre-heat for a bit, then slide the pizza on to the tiles. In my oven, that leaves 1-2" of head room between the pizza and the broiler.

What dough recipe are you using there?

-Dan

I've done the quarry tiles, but I'm surprised by the simplicity, speed, and effectiveness of just using the oven floor. Maybe I'm lucky because it seems I get fairly even heating in my oven on the bottom, but it works, and works great. No fuss, no muss, no need to get special tools, no need to wait nearly an hour for the tile to preheat. Before this, heating a cast iron pizza pan insanely hot over the gas range was my go-to method, but this is much easier. The nice thing about your method is you can simultaneously get the heat from below and above, which is closer to what you'd have in a real hearth oven. I'm just an impatient SOB.

The dough recipe I used yesterday was somewhat improvised, based on my Chicago thin crust recipe above. It was the following:

300 g unbleached white flour
150 g water
45 g milk
a teaspoon of salt
about two teaspoons of yeast

and I added a tablespoon of cider vinegar for a little touch of flavor

I didn't bother with autolysing, just threw everything together. Knead on a Kitchen Aid stand mixer for 7 minutes. Gather into a ball. I let it double in size, punched it down, and then put it in the fridge. About an hour before I was going to make the pizza (about 10 hours from start), I took it out of the fridge, shaped it into a smooth ball, and let it rest, covered, on my counter.

Any yeast?

mhill95149 wrote:Any yeast?

It's there, right under the salt. (About two teaspoons.)

Binko wrote:

mhill95149 wrote:Any yeast?

It's there, right under the salt. (About two teaspoons.)

oh yes... time to get new glasses!

Oh, I should add the milk I used was skim. I'll be honest--there's no particular reason I used milk other than I wanted to use up the rest of my gallon.

had dough holding in the fridge for a few days....
pretty simple pizza but I kind of lost track of this batch of dough.

Looks pretty (as do all your pizzas.) Sorry if you've mentioned this before, but what's your dough and technique?

The heat's died down and I have been dying to make some homemade pizza. Hoping to do so tomorrow and incorporate Trader Joe's homemade chorizo. Now when I am using regular chorizo I usually fry it up a little before putting it on the piza to ensure that it is cooked thoroughly. I assume I don't have to do the same for the soy chorizo, right?

This was my soy chorizo, olive and sauteed mushroom pizza from earlier this week.

burrata and squash blossom pizza

mhill95149, I cannot recall but have you mentioned before what kind of dough recipe you use? Because it looks scumptious. I could eat it with no toppings.

Sometimes I make it, other times I buy TJ's or Caputo's when I make it I use a long slow fridge rise.

mhill95149 wrote:Sometimes I make it, other times I buy TJ's or Caputo's when I make it I use a long slow fridge rise.

I seem to have a problem with the TJ dough constantly springing back on me, no matter how long I let it rest. Am I doing something wrong with it? I like the way it tastes, but I find it difficult to work with for some reason. My own doughs don't seem to have this problem.

I've been cooking my pizzas at a little higher temp lately by pre-heating to 550 with a Fibrament stone on the top shelf, then putting the broiler on for 10-15 minutes.
A couple months ago, I saw an interview with an inspirational home pizza-maker on Serious Eats who describes her technique for getting the oven hotter as follows:

My home oven preheats for about an hour at 550 (its highest temp) with a pizza stone on the second to bottom rack. Twenty minutes before I want to bake, I put an aluminum foil tube that contains a frozen paper towel core over the thermostat in the oven. This tricks the oven into getting to about 700 degrees. For a touch more heat, I turn on the broiler and put the pizza on the stone when I see the broiler coils just beginning to glow.

I have two questions about this.
1) Where is an oven's thermostat located?
2) What does she mean about the frozen paper towel core? Just the cardboard tube? It doesn't seem like it would get/stay that cold...
Any ideas about this appreciated

I've also been following Bill/SFNM's lead making pizza dough using the Tartine's folding method. I like this better when I use my standard dough recipe (based on Peter Reinhart's recipe--using oil and a little sugar-- and using tips from LTH/pizzamaking.com). I've also been playing with the preferment pizza dough calculator. This weekend I tried 64% hydration, next weekend I'm pushing it to 70%. I'll post on some results down the line.