Yum yum! The PIZZA thread!

[Skybird]

Oh you lucky ones! Blessed art though that the flying pizza monster is hovering amongst you and soaring above your kitchen roofs, knowing of your hungers and reading your craving tongues' most desperate desires! Your beloved pizza master today gives you -

Pizza Margherita!

(Roman Legions applauding while marching down the Via Appia, one hand on their stomachs, tongues hanging out)

This one's a hit, if done right, and this is the way how to get it right.



Did I earlier say no parmesan on my pizza? I feel like an idiot these days...

Take the dough recipee from earlier. Per one 30 cm pizza, you need

3-4 tomatoes
fresh Basil
Salt
black Pepper
a bit Oregano
1 marble of Mozarella (around 125 gr)
a small ammount of cheese mixture I described earlier (Tilst, Edam, dry Mozarella)
Parmesan

The tomatoes you ijust check,m in this recipe they really will be tasted intensely and thus should taste good and have a nice arome. Do not use canned tomatoes, I tried four different types, and all tasted inferior to frsshly smashed tomatoes.

Also, the covering will be very wet, due to the fresh cheese and the tomatoes - you need to work fast once you started, and get that thing into the vwery hot oven as fast as possible, else the moisture turns the risen dough into a greasy mess. If you work fast, it will nevertheless will become probably one of the finest pizzas you know. Since I have put together this recipee, it is my favourite of all pizza recipees.

First, the tomatoes. You must not skin them like they often write, but you cut them into quarters, and with your fingers you work the wet core out, leaving you with essentially the fleshy shell of the fruit. Work the watery parts out as good as you can. The fruit you are left with you then smash with a mixer, using a bit of salt also. But do not turn it into cream or a liquid, but smash it shortly only, leaving you with many small pieces and a paste alike. Use a colander (or is it sieve?) to put the tomatoes into it and filtrate the water. The water you do not need anymore.

Assuming you have bought cow-milk mozarella, a marble of around 120-150 gr, cut seven slices of it. Put them one by one into a cup with parmnesan, and cover them from both sides. Use plenty of parmesan on them!

Cover the pizza disc with the smashed tomatoes. Use a very little bit of Oregano and then black pepper, then use the Mozarella slices to bild a 6er-star with the seventh in the centre. Yiou can strew even more Parmesan on them, too. The areas of the pizza not covered by the Mozarella, you strew with the ordinary Edam-Tilsit cheese mixture, but only a bit, do not use as much of this cheese as in the earlier recipes! Again some pepper on top -



- and into the oven. Stone, 250°+, around 5 minutes, it depends on how the dough is doing.

When done, get it out at put plenty of basil leafs on it, twice as many as on the photo, else you do not get sufficient arome from it. Do not press them into the hot cheese, because they will become dark and start to crumple then.

The dough on the bottom should be crispy, but since the covering is very wet, it nevertheless becomes soft sooner or later, so do not waste time when eating! You should have just an occasional wave of basil arome on your tongue, and also just an occasional taste of pepper. Ther arome from the tomatoes should be always present, though, making this a very freshly tasting pizza, like springtime in pizza-format. I personally love it. As I said, it now is my favourite.






Could be even darker, but I forgot to switch off the fan, and to save the copvering I had to take ther pizza out a bit early.

[Biggles]

Am currently enjoying a pizza with jalapeño, sour cream, Tabasco, Bearnaise sauce, ham, and the usual stuff (tomato, cheese). Great to be alive!

[Jimbuna]

Are these actual photos of your own creations Sky?

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by jimbuna

Are these actual photos of your own creations Sky?

Yes.

Actually I currently put together an illustrated step-by-step guide of how to make the perfect pizza dough, with plenty of pictures for every step, which will be posted in some or several German cooking websites. Call it Skybird's Little Pizza-Almanach. Or think of it as the Steel Beasts Review of Pizza Recipees.

It is in German, of course. But everybody wanting it could get it. I need to re-do two more pizzas (Thuna, and Tre Stagioni), for the pictures, then it is finished and will be posted. The rest of the document is already done.

[Jimbuna]

Originally Posted by Skybird

Yes.

Actually I currently put together an illustrated step-by-step guide of how to make the perfect pizza dough, with plenty of pictures for every step, which will be posted in some or several German cooking websites. Call it Skybird's Little Pizza-Almanach. Or think of it as the Steel Beasts Review of Pizza Recipees.

It is in German, of course. But everybody wanting it could get it. I need to re-do two more pizzas (Thuna, and Tre Stagioni), for the pictures, then it is finished and will be posted. The rest of the document is already done.

I am impressed sir

[Skybird]

Time for a little zombification.

After having become lazy the past years, i have not made pizza that much the past three or four years, only bought frozen ready-to-eat ones, some of which (if you know which ones to choose) have become surprisingly good, even using real yeast dough and being topped by hand. The sad truth is you cannot buy a good pizza in my hometown, the restaurants and delivery services all do exotic things and dysfunctional, disavory experiments, using no salt so "to make them healthy" (I could get mad when hearing this nonsense on salt), and clubbing the Gluten (no gluten and protein - no good dough behaviour, that simple the formula is, since the dough has a bad W-value - baking power - then and cannot hold sufficient moisture). German grade 405 and Itlaian grade tipo 00 flour IS NOT THE SAME, its worlds apart. I have checked pizza in so many places and restaurants. No herbals used. Lousy, really lousy doughs, bad toppings. Expensive. I do not go to any of them anymore. Although I LOVE pizza, still.

And so I went back to do two things myself again: I bake my own bread again, and I make pizza fully manual again.

The flour for baking bread I grind myself, but for pizza I use original Italian flour, by Caputo who probaly makes the best pizza flour in the world. Use it once yourself, and you believe it, promised. They have three flours, a red package for longer dough times 24-48 hours, a blue one for shorter dough times 2-3 hours minimum, and a relatively new lilac one I still must try, said to create an icrcredibly fluffy, "cloud-like" dough. I will try that soon, its ordered. I can only recommend with utmost seriousness to pay attention to use Italian tipo 00 flour of good quality. It beats EVERYTHING when you make pizza dough. I provide a link below. Germans: you cannot hope to get these results with German 405 or 550 fliur. The ingreidnet sin it are such that it just doe snto work as well. Thats no imagination - that is simple chemistry.



I also tested the new vogue of not using pizza stones, but pizza steel plates. My results with that are not impressive, however. The thing gets not hot enough in a normal household oven, no matter how I set it up, low or high, with or without grill on, and then when it is not hot enough, the moisture in the dough cannot escape through the plate, and so the dough gets cooked, yes, and it rises, but it builds no crust, stays soft, remains too moist. These plates are expensive and cost several times as much as a stone, your risk them to ruin the thermostate in your oven, and the theory behind them, that they store more heat than a stone and radiate it back into the dough faster, for me simply does not work. Instead of using a steel plate high in the oven, I return to my proven stone placed low in the oven. No air frying of course, just maximum upper and lower heat, passive. I reach 250° - 270° in my oven, and on a stone that works perfect for me, cooking time is around 4.5 minutes.

This is the best flour I know, I now use it for everything when I do not grind my own flour, I do not buy German flour anymore. Its different wheat, grown in different places (Italy...), with different mixtures of minerals, proteins and Gluten, and that makes all the difference. Wheat is not wheat, there have been hundreds of kinds of wheat. I pay a bit more, but via Amazon in packs of 6 or 10, I can reduce the price

https://www.gustini.de/molino-caputo.html

The red package has a w-value of 300-320 and a gluten content of 13-13.5%. The blue has a w-value of 200-230 and gluten 10-11%, the lilac coloured pack has a w-value of 250-290, and a gluten content of 12-12.5%. The more gluten, the higher the w-value, the more stable the dough rises, but the more time it takes. the softer doughs with less gluten are more "liquid" and a bit more tricky to handle. But you can work faster with them. If you use the blkue flour, you will need to vary your water aml8nt a bit while using the same amount of flour like with the red one. Both flous need slightly different amounts of water.

Healthier are longer dough times, the yeast then processes more of the critical encymes your digestion can negatively react to. Thats why so many people have so many problems with industrial bread, these are packed full with up to two hundred chemical agents allowed in the EU that make ingredients better to store, to handle, and reduce the processing times of doughs. That is good for the industry, and bad for your health! All the chemical toxins wheat has build in defence to its eating enemies - us - do not get neutralised that way and end live in our digestion system - and there they cause more and more problems. Its better to have doughs given longer times, even days. True for bread. True for pizza. True for anything related to cereals and corn, wheat etc. etc. Taking your time is healthier!

It sounds unbelievable, but many restaurants over here serve their pizza without dough or topping salted. No salt, NONE. Despicable, it has become an obsession. Also, vegan eating. No animal fats. Not that much interesting with pizza, yes, but with other kinds of food preparations. It just does not taste, it is lame on your tongue. I do not save on fats and salts. I just look at good quality of both and avoid certain types. See my health thread.

My dinner tonight was this. Salami I use rarely on pizza, but I was in the mood for it. Pickeld paprika, the onyl tpopping I really use often on pizza beside spinacci or champignons, I mostly use only several cheese, do variations of Margeritha.











My last try with the pizza steel plate, I will now sell it. As you can see in the thir doicture, almost no crust on the bottom outside, the dough had baked up, it was done, but not crispy, no crust. On a chamotte stone this would not have happened, not in my oven at least! The dough in the centre of the disc stays too soft, and no crust on the centre bottom. Maybe it works as they say in much, much hotter ovens, but not in mine. Porose chamotte stone it must be. Crust gets perfect in no time with that.

[mapuc]

Forgot we had this Pizza thread.

Some weeks ago I got my new gas grill with it I bought a Pizza stone and other pizza equipment.

Now should a make my own pizza dough or buy a couple prepared pizza dough round in shape. I decided to buy two of these pizza dough.

And of course things to put on the pizza.

Started the Gas grill waited until it had reached 250 degrees-Could not get it up to 300 degrees as recommended.

Placed my pizza on the metal Pizza spade, added what I liked and went out to my grill. The dough had to say it simple glued itself to the metal surface-so trying to let the pizza slide of was a real mess.

So what I'm going to do next, is to buy one of the pizza spade made of wood and make my own pizza dough.

Markus

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by Skybird

Did I earlier say no parmesan on my pizza? I feel like an idiot these days...

There's a big difference between the powdered parmesan that comes in cans and the real shredded kind (but you already knew that). I'm not much of a cook, so I usually buy a self-rising store-bought pizza and add the stuff I like (mainly ham and mushrooms). I re-top it with a bag of cheese labelled "Six-Cheese Italian Blend" - Mozzarella, Provolone, Parmesan, Romano, Fontina and Asiago.

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by Sailor Steve

There's a big difference between the powdered parmesan that comes in cans and the real shredded kind (but you already knew that). I'm not much of a cook, so I usually buy a self-rising store-bought pizza and add the stuff I like (mainly ham and mushrooms). I re-top it with a bag of cheese labelled "Six-Cheese Italian Blend" - Mozzarella, Provolone, Parmesan, Romano, Fontina and Asiago.

Parmesan needs to be pulverised freshly. Also, it is quite a health hazard in long-stored powder form, because some chemical reaction of oxygene with some of the ingredients, that'S why it is better to pulverise it freshly. It also tastes better.