Pizza

Pizza Dough

These quantities are per pizza.

200 grams white flour (00 flour is traditional and best)

133 grams water

1/4 t yeast

1/3 t salt

Ideally, make the dough the night before you're baking th pizzas. Mix and kneed with a machine. Because the dough has a relatively high water content it will be hard to kneed by hand, but you can do so.

Poolish - This is an optional part of the recipe. Poolish is a starter used in a lot of bread baking to improve flavor. It's not key to pizza, but I usually use it. To use poolish, mix 200 grams of flour, 200 grams of water, 1/8 tsp yeast. Cover and let sit for 6 to 24 hours. Then subtract the 200 grams of water and flour from the recipe. This only works for two or more pizzas. 

Let it rise for an hour or so, or it can be allowed to rise overnight. Allow the dough to rise for 2 or more hours, folding it about every hour. Folding simply means to take the dough out of the bowl stretch a little then fold it in half, repeat 3 or 4 or 5 times each time you do a fold.

Divide into balls for each pizza. Fold and refold to "tighten" the dough. This is done by rolling the dough in on itself. Think of the dough as a small disk. You roll the edge into the center while rotating the disk. Do this until you feel the dough strongly resisting the stretch. Then finish by pinching the dough closed into the ball. 

Place into small bowls or containers that have been lightly oiled. Don't use too much oil, you just want to slick up the inside of the container. cover and put into the fridge over night and until you are ready to make the pizza the next day. I now use some storage containers than are perfect for the purpose and stack. In Alpena they have red tops.  If your plan changes the dough should still be good a couple of days later, maybe as much as a week.

Recipe for gluten free dough here

Now it's time to make the pizza. If you're using the wood oven, read below, you need to get it started 2.5 to 3.5 hours early. Home ovens vary, but I start preheating the oven 1.5 hours ahead of when I plan to cook. Get all of the ingredients ready before you start to shape the dough. 

In general, we have been reducing the quantity of toppings on the pizza, shooting for a faster cook and a crisper better balanced pie.

Bruno's Sauce:

28 oz can of Dei Fratelli or Hunts crushed Italian tomatoes. The brand is preferred because of the consistency of the tomatoes, other brands may work, but I have not yet found any as good. An alternative is to crush your own tomatoes. 

2 T oregano (it's a lot, which I like, but down from my original 4T)

2 t garlic powder

2 t pepper

Mix the spices in.  The defining pizza spice is the oregano.  All kinds of other variations of spicing would be possible.  This sauce is not cooked in advance of the pizza

This amount of sauce is sufficient for 6 pizzas. You want to thinly spread it, but cover reasonably close to the edge. Heidi’s gluten free crust takes a double portion of sauce. 

Cheese

175 grams cheese per pizza. We have now decided on  this amount per pizza.  More cheese is too much. Grate all the cheese and then mix together in a large bowl. This allows you to put all the cheese on at one time. The mix here is reasonably flexible. Use about 60%  mozzerella. The remaining cheese can be made up of swiss, parmagiano and/or pecorino, sharp cheddar. Only the mozzarella and parmigiano are truly Italian, but the others area nice addition. 

Toppings - as you like, but not too many. 

Toppings like sausage and bacon should be precooked before going on, although you can leave them a little short of done.

Some traditional italian toppings go on after the pizza has cooked. Prosciutto, basil and arugula are all in this category.

Assembly:

To shape the dough, flour the ball well and flatten it to a thinkness of 1 to 1 1/2 inch. then press around the edges depressing the dough just in from the edge of the crust.  Now press the dough again spreading the pie. After this further flattening, stretch the dough by putting it over your hands (knuckles up fingers slightly spread) and moving your hands apart to stretch the dough. Continue to flour the crust generously. As you finish you will want to be stretching the outside of the disk instead than the center. One person said you're looking for a thickness about like a credit card.

For home oven, place the dough onto parchment paper.  The dough and the parchment paper will go into the oven together.

For the brick oven, we are testing the use of parchment paper. It seems to be working (unless it is responsible for a lack of crispiness). Before putting the pizza in the oven, trim the parchment paper to about jsut 1/2 inch around the edge of the pizza.

For brick oven, parchment paper will not work (burns up, sticks to pizza).  So instead put the dough on wood pizza peals dusted with corn meal,  You should rub your hands over the peal and feel it be "lubricated" over the entire peal.  But don't use more corn meal than necessary to achieve this.

All the dough can be tossed/rolled before assembling any pizzas.  But if you are not using parchment paper, you need to redust the dough with flour and flip it periodically to keep it from sticking to the counter. I think the key here is to be very generous with the flour dusting while stretching the dough.

Cover the dough with tomatoe sauce, cheese, other toppings.  It is important to be sparing in the toppings.  Good to spread toppings within a  third inch of the edge. There is a tendency for the toppings to pulll toward the center during cooking, so you want to start with the edge well covered. But you actually don't want to cover the last 1/3 inch.  That edge is going to rise during cooking.

Home Oven

A home oven should have baking stones in the oven.  Then preheat the oven (stone should be in first) as hot as possible.  550 is the right temperature. I have tested 500 and it just doesn’t do as well on the crust.  Place the pizza with parchment directly onto the stone.  At 550 degrees, they should be done in 10 minutes or so, but watch.  The cheese should be bubbly, the outer crust a light brown.  If you want to cook two or three  at a time, you should have a stone for each rack. It’s also possible to cook these on screens. For cooking in the home oven, the pizzas can sit on the counter on parchment for some time without a problem.

Wood Oven

The wood oven in Alpena is our up north option for cooking pizza. This is the traditional way pizzas should be made and features temperatures much hotter than a home oven can achieve.

Making a pizza will require about as much wood as fits on the shelf under the table next to the oven. The wood needs to be split finer than ordinary fire wood. You will need some small splits, about 1 to 1.5 inches on a side and some larger, about 2 to 2.5 inches on a side. We each have our own ways of making the fire, but generally start with some small sticks as kindling on top of some newspaper with your smallest split wood on top of that. As the fire progresses, use the hoe to push it further back in the oven and shift to the larger split wood. We then reach a point where we push all of the burning wood to the very back of the oven, then create a herring bone weave of wood from the back to the front. The fire will slowly move forward. Sometimes we go to a U shape around the sides of the oven. 

Start the fire 2.5 to 3.5 hours before you plan to cook. The oven will reach heat before this, but you need to get the heat well into the bricks, particularly the floor before you start cooking.

The temperature you are aiming for is 800 degrees try not to be below 750 or above 900 on the floor when you put the pizzas in. There are two ways to know you've reached the right temperature. The oven will "whiten", which actually means the soot that has been deposited on the walls and ceiling will burn off showing you the bricks themselves. The second way is to check the temperature with the digital laser thermometer. Before cooking the fire should be allowed to burn down to just coals, which should be spread for 10 or 15 minutes over the entire floor.

When you are ready to put the pizzas in the oven, push all of the embers either to the back or to one side of the oven. Then use the brush to clean up the exposed floor of the oven. There will still be a thin layer of ash on the floor of the oven. We used to use a wet rag (on a stick) to mop it, but it compromised the temperature. So now we live with the ash, and no one complains about the crust. Put 2 or 3 small split woods on the embers and wait for them to flame up if you can. This helps with cooking the top of the pies.

 Slide the pies onto the floor of the oven off the wood peels. There will be room for 2 pies at a time. After a minute and a half, use the long handle metal peel to loosen the pizzas from the floor and turn them so all sides of the crust are cooking evenly and not burning. The pizzas are done when the top is bubbling and the edges of the pies are brown, or even a touch burned.

If you've pushed the fire to one side of the oven, you can now move it to the other side for the next batch, so you can expose a new part of the floor for cooking. If you pushed to the back give the oven a few minutes for the floor to come back up to temperature. We haven't got this all down to a science yet.

When done, let the oven go overnight. Then clean the ash into the bucket below and close up the oven again.