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I love pizza.
I have eaten many pizzas, in many pizza venues, in many
pizza-loving countries. I also try to make pizza. I'm OK at making OK pizza, but
it turns out making good pizza is harder than it looks.
This is not a blog. This is a lab notebook for a series of pizza experiments, as
I quest for the perfect pizza.
This is also not a recipe site. I don't actually know how to make good pizza -
yet - but if I figure it out, I'll add a link at this point taking you straight
to the definitive, canonical, most awesome pizza recipe.
I encourage readers to send me messages pointing out any mistakes.
Experiment date: 6th February 2021
Objective: baseline the base
Abstract: An attempt to quantify flour and yeast ratio. The focus on ratio lead
to a disastrous failure of quantity management, but an acceptable result in the
end.
My pizza technique - of slinging unmeasured flour, yeast and water together in a
bowl with the occasional dash of salt and oil - has reached a local maxima. I
now realise that baking is not just about flavour combination, but also features
some interesting chemistry and biology.
My theory was always that pizza is basically just SWOFTTY:
Find the right SWOFTTY combination, make the perfect pizza, right?
Aside from recipe websites generally being garbage piles of advertising, I find
them mutually contradictory and full of hand-wavey terms that might make total
sense to the author, but leave far too much room for interpretation.
I want to take an engineering approach to optimal pizza. I'm going to start with
quantified SWOFTTY, then measure and iterate.
My first experiment is just a baseline - to record quantities for my traditional
ingredient-slinging recipe, so that I have something to improve upon.
I began with good intentions, but made a fatal mistake right at the beginning:
the water for yeast activation wasn't warm enough, so I added more. I'm not
convinced the yeast ever properly activated, and I had to add more flour to
match the increased quantity of water. By the time I had recovered the batter
into a dough, I had used nearly a kilo of flour - more than twice as much as
usual, and surely throwing the ratios way off. This was a disaster. Still, this
journal publishes negative results too.
I kneaded the dough for 10 minutes, transferred it to a clean bowl, covered it
with a damp teatowel, and set a timer for an hour and a half.
Aside - how does one properly dampen a teatowel anyway? I ran it under the tap
for half a second and squeezeruffled the moisture through.
An hour an a half later, great disappointment set in. Almost no rise. Perhaps the
dough realised that it was already an insane size. I gave it a squish down and
tried to extract it - still goopy.
At this point I set the oven to 230°C - its maximum setting.
I divided the dough into two halves, then one of the halves into quarters, then
placed the shaped charges back under the teatowel for another 30 minutes.
After 30 minutes, my great disappointment turned to mild disappointment - a
slight rise!
I stretched the dough balls out over the foiled and oiled baking trays, and
pre-baked them for 5 minutes. This is something I started doing to help make
sure the dough cooks through regardless of the weight of toppings above.
Toppings on, then 10 minutes in the oven.
Heat the oil in a pan, flash the garlic for 30 seconds, add the passata, simmer
for 20 minutes to reduce.
Mozzarella, smoked mozzarella, and pepperoni.
Astonishingly, the pizzas had risen to an acceptable springiness, despite the
mad quantities! They might have been more than an inch thick, but that didn't
seem to bother my customers.
~lab6: 7/10 Far too thick, passably tasty dough, great toppings, great sauce.
Mrs ~lab6: 9/10, slightly soggy bottom, but nice.
Little Miss ~lab6: 10/10 Love it
Littler Miss ~lab6: nom
What can I say? Even when pizza is bad, it's good. And this monster is going to
be breakfast too.
Despite wanting to measure everything, there's a lot I didn't measure:
I intend to do more research on recommended ratios, and try to get those right,
before looking into increasing the quality of the ingredients.