Leigh and Chris'

Pizza Cookbook

Four years later, here's the Web version. The book, imho, was rather nice, with lots of white space and decorations; I'm afraid the Web version isn't quite so pretty.

Introduction

This book is pretty rambly, but I didn't try to give you a set of plug-and-play recipes so much as my feel for the process. The book presents this as a static entity, but my sauce recipe, for example, tends to drift. While the basic form seems pretty constant, I'm always fiddling with times and proportions.

Now, for all I know, you may be a much better cook than I am - you sure are around Mom more! - but I figured it couldn't hurt to be very explicit, and try to write on the basis of ability but not knowledge. If nothing else, this may serve as the basis of a couple chapters of the cookbook I want to write someday - and I've certainly had fun putting this book together.

Basic Overview

I've seen pizza recipes that call for rolling right after you punch the dough down, but I haven't tried that yet. The second rising may make for a thicker, chewier crust.

When the pizza is ready and the oven is warmed up (usually I can make a pizza before the oven warms up), sprinkle some corn meal on the stone, slide the pizza on, and cook it until the pieces you snitch off the outside of the crust taste done. When you have a lot of toppings, it can be hard to bake the top of the crust without the cheese starting to char. A possible solution to this may be to put at least some toppings on top of the cheese.

Dough

It's so easy to make dough with a Cuisinart that (except for a modicum of 'finishing') I've never really bothered with the ritual of hand kneading. The basic procedure is the same for all doughs (that I've made so far, at least): Dissolve the yeast with half the sugar in a cup of hot tap water. You'll probably find that yeast doesn't dissolve as easily as, say, sugar - and it's even harder to dissolve yeast in milk than in water. Once the yeast is dissolved, set it aside until it starts to bubble, and mix the flour(s) with the salt and remaining sugar (using the metal blade), then grease a big glass bowl and set the oven so it just goes on. (Ideal dough rising temperature is ca 80º to 90º.) When the yeast is bubbling well, turn on the Cuisinart (still using the metal blade) and add the dissolved yeast gradually. When this is mostly mixed, add a little olive oil. (Too much oil and the dough will roll easily but cook up flat and biscuity.) Mix some more, until the dough forms a ball and stops sticking to the sides.

If you get the proportions right, it should be pretty impossible to over- knead the dough. On the other hand, if you start with a little too much flour, and have to add more liquid, over- kneading does become a real danger. An over-kneaded crust is stiff to roll and tastes hard and crunchy, not soft and chewy.

I tend to do a little hand kneading on a floured board, especially when the dough seems a little wet in the Cuisinart. This both gives me a feel for the dough and probably makes for a more stretched than pounded dough. Mostly, I guess I like the way kneading dough feels.

Once the dough is kneaded, put it in the greased bowl; cover it (with plastic wrap, say); and put it in the warm oven. Let it rise for at least an hour and a half, then punch it down (to break up gas bubbles) and let it rise again for at least twenty minutes while you do the prep work. If the dough doesn't rise, the oven was too cold, or the water was too hot; if the dough looks 'foamy', the oven is probably too hot.

My basic dough

2 cups wheat flour, 1 cup barley flour, 1 cup hot tap water, 1 tbs. yeast, ca 1 tbs. oil, 2 tsp. sugar, 1 tsp. salt.

On my stone, this tends to make for a relatively thick crust when rolled out as far as can fit on the stone; you may have to scale the recipe up by a third or half for a large, thick-crust pizza.

A 'French' dough

Instead of using hot tap water, heat a cup of milk in a small sauce pan until it just feels warm. (I have an electric stove and iron pans; the milk will keep getting warmer for a little while after I turn off the burner. If the milk is too much above 90º, the yeast will die.) It will be even harder to dissolve the yeast in milk than in water.

Since whole milk has plenty of fat in it, I don't add any extra olive oil to the dough. With non-fat milk, you will probably need to add some olive oil.

Other grains

The local supermarkets seem to think they're being complete if they offer whole wheat and stone ground wheat flour in addition to bleached and unbleached "all purpose" flour - I buy rye and buckwheat in bulk at the health food store. Similarly, while you can buy packets of yeast in the grocery store, a health food store may have it in bulk, at a much lower price.

Making Pizza

Rolling Dough

Once the dough is rolled out, I crimp up the edges by rolling them over twice, flattening them down, crimping them back up to a roughly triangular cross- section, then flattening that to a roundish edge. This seems to do an adequate job of making the edge a single piece of bread, not just some thin layers wrapped around each other.

The pizza can be a little wider than the stone without disaster, but no more than a quarter inch or so. The pizza can similarly stick a little beyond the ends of the stone; I find I often have to scrunch the pizza up a bit lengthwise to get it to fit. Your pizza stone is significantly bigger than mine, so you might not have any problem.

A simple pizza as big as my stone will feed two adults with reasonable appetites, while a pizza with a lot of toppings can be stretched to four, with salad or bread. Since your stone is bigger, you may be able to make single pizzas that will feed four.

Construction

Having rolled the crust, I put on a little sauce. (For a "white" pizza, I just 'wet' the surface with a little (maybe a tablespoon of) olive oil.) If you put on too much sauce, the toppings slide off, so I generally use just a bit more sauce than is necessary to (more or less) uniformly cover the dough.

I add the toppings on top of the sauce, and then I put the cheese on top of the toppings. Anything that I'd grate or chop anyway, like garlic and basil or oregano, I chop into the cheese: I chop the additives in the Cuisinart, grate the cheese (I usually use a mozzarella- romano blend) onto it, then chop it all together until it looks like commercial grated parmesan.

Hint

Hint

Tomato Sauce

Canned Tomatoes

Three or four 28-oz cans of peeled tomatoes in juice; one 6-oz can tomato paste; one or two average sized bulbs of garlic; from four jalapeno peppers (for a mild sauce) to twelve serrano peppers (for a rather hot sauce); lots of fresh or dry oregano; maybe a half cup of olive oil; maybe some red wine; maybe some basil, mint, celantro, anise seed, black pepper, and/or cumin.

Chop the garlic and peppers in a Cuisinart; add the oil, and puree. Add a can of tomatoes, the oregano, and the optional flavors (if any), and puree some more. Add this to a pot over medium high heat. Stir occasionally while you puree the tomato paste with a can of tomatoes and the liquid from the other can(s), then stir in the paste/tomato puree. Chop the tomatoes from the remaining can(s) rather coarsely, and stir them in. Bring to a simmer over medium low heat, reducing the heat gradually.

When I'm having noodles, I will often start the water for the pasta as soon as the sauce comes to a simmer. (Sometimes I make a very fast, one can variant where I start the pasta water when I put the tomato-garlic-pepper-oil in the hot pot.) In any event, I rarely let my sauces simmer even as long as an hour, with two hours being about the limit. More simmering tends to make for a thicker sauce (as does refrigerating it at least overnight) but it doesn't taste as 'fresh' - this is especially important with volatile herb flavors, like basil, celantro, mint or (to a lesser extent) oregano. Especially with volatile herbs like fresh basil, I often bring the sauce to a simmer and only add the herbs a few minutes before the sauce is done.

Fresh Tomatoes

I haven't had a lot of opportunity to experiment with sauce-less pizzas as 'real' fresh tomatoes have just started appearing at the farmer's markets, but you can, in effect, make the sauce right on the pizza by mixing coarsely chopped tomatoes with finely chopped garlic, peppers, and lots of fresh basil and oregano. One problem here is that it ends up very watery: I think I'll try draining the chopped tomatoes in a colander before putting them on the pizza.

Pizza Suggestions

Garlic, extra cheese

I use one to one and a half normal size bulbs (I mean the whole thing, not individual cloves!), a pound of mozzarella, and maybe three ounces of romano. As per the Construction section, I chop the garlic and the (one or two half cups of fresh) oregano, grate the cheese, then chop these together. A few leaves of rosemary will give the pizza a richer, more complex and subtle flavor. I put sauce on the dough; the cheese and garlic on the sauce; and that's that.

Sliced fresh tomatoes between the sauce and the cheese go very well with this, as do sliced mushrooms and/or jalapeno or serrano peppers.

Basil Pizza

Red Clam

White Clam

You can try to get away with a single can of clams, but that makes the clam taste a bit too subtle for me. I've tried using a can of clams and a can of oysters, and I don't recommend it: Canned oysters are even less assertive than canned clams!

'Geek Salad'

Calzone

Roll the dough out as big and rectangular as you can, then put the stuffing on one side, leaving about an inch of crust on the outside edges, then fold the other half over, and seal the edges by crimping and squeezing, just as if you were making a raised edge on a pizza. Bake at a slightly lower temperature than normal, perhaps 400 - and don't forget to cut a few slits in the top for steam to escape! If the stuffing goes a bit over the center-line, you may not be able to crimp the edge - but you should be OK so long as the top comes down to the inch-wide border and you can fold that up over the top.

My favorite commercial calzone is just ricotta, mozzarella, and basil leaves. On the other hand, I've enjoyed calzones made with sauce, mushrooms, garlic chopped into the cheese, and even a variant of the 'geek salad' pizza. In general, you can't put quite as much in a calzone as on a pizza.

Cleaning the stone

After baking a pizza, let the stone cool down with the oven. When you can handle it with your bare hands, scrape off any spills with a knife or spatula, and rinse the stone in warm water. I wrap mine in a light cotton towel (an old "receiving blanket", actually) to keep it clean and protect it from scratches.

Encouraging words