Passionate About Pizza: Making Great Homemade Pizza (6 page)

Part one of Passionate About Pizza:
Making Great Homemade Pizza
focuses on the basic information and skills you will use to make pizza.

The Passionate About Pizza System

You will make great homemade pizza every time you try if you ignite your passion and follow a systematic approach to making pizza. Plan your pizza-making activities, use the same equipment and high-quality ingredients each time, use proven preparation techniques, rely on your recipes, and work to make continual improvements.

Passion for Pizza

The best pizzerias exude
passion
! The owner or pizza chef of a family run pizzeria is passionate about pizza, no doubt about it. This passion flows into their pizza and their customers taste it. It keeps the chef making great pizza year after year and it keeps the customers coming back for more of their pizza. The
Passionate About Pizza System
will help you develop and focus your passion into repeatedly making great pizza!

Put your passion into your pizza! The fact that you are reading this book means that you are willing to put effort into making a pizza rather than ordering one from a pizzeria or buying a frozen one from the grocery store. Go one-step further and put your
passion
into your pizza! Your pizza and all the things you do to turn it from raw ingredients into a finished pie are an expression of you. Your friends, your family, and you yourself will be able to tell when you make food with passion, so express yourself with gusto!

Systematic Pizza-Making

Pizzerias use the same ingredients, preparation, and baking time for every pizza they make to ensure that all pizzas come out alike. This
system
brings consistency, uniformity, and repeatability. A very good system will help make very good pizza.

A
system
is more than just a recipe; it is a complete plan for how to make a pizza from scratch. The
Passionate About Pizza System
will help you make each pizza better than your last. You will be able to create a mouth-watering taste sensation with every pizza you make.

Planning

A pizza made at home takes time to prepare. There are two facets to this time. There is the time you must spend actively working on the pizza and there is the time that some steps require without your direct involvement. By understanding these different activities and fitting them into the time you have, you can plan for them in your routine activities to produce homemade pizza in a seemingly effortless fashion. You must also decide which recipes you are going to use in advance so that you allow for a sufficient amount of preparation time and to ensure that you have all the necessary ingredients on hand. You will find general information about planning your pizza on
page 17
and further discussion about planning and executing a pizza party on
page 226.

Equipment

You cannot really blame a bad pizza on your equipment but the equipment you use does have an impact upon the pizzas you make. You need the right kind of equipment to use for each task. Above all, you must be comfortable with the equipment you use. You cannot expect to become familiar with new equipment immediately but you will acquire new equipment as you progress. This book will help you through the transition and keep you making good pizza all the while. The chapter on equipment starting on
page 21
describes my equipment experiences and tips.

Ingredients

High-quality ingredients are necessary for making good pizza. Consistently good pizza requires the use of the same good ingredients each time you make it
and
a continual search for better quality ingredients. You can balance these two seemingly disparate goals. If you are happy with an ingredient, keep using it; if not, try to find a better brand or type. By making everything from scratch, you control the whole process. Some brands or types of ingredients work better than others do. On the one hand, a tomato is a tomato and flour is flour, but different types of flours and tomatoes have characteristics that affect the way the pizza turns out. If you decide to use prepared ingredients, use only those of the highest quality and those with which you are completely satisfied. There are tips based on my practical experience in the chapter on ingredients found on
page 31.

Preparation Techniques

In its most basic form, pizza dough is as simple as flour, water, and yeast mixed together with a little salt. Good preparation techniques are the magic that turns these components into a wonderful-tasting pizza crust. As with many things, what seems simple about making pizza to the casual observer has subtleties that can cause downright fear and trepidation when facing a mass of dough alone in the kitchen.

It took me years to develop my goof-proof preparation techniques. Thorough discussion of the how and whys of preparation techniques will lead you through the fear and uncertainty until the techniques become second nature to you. The chapter on preparation techniques, from mixing the dough through serving the pizza and on to handling leftover pizza, describes the techniques in detail starting on
page 39.

Recipes

A recipe describes the proportions of the various ingredients and the methods used to combine them to create the finished product. As such, a recipe provides a blueprint to success. If it is someone else's recipe, you can be sure that at least one other person used it with success. If it is your recipe, you can reuse it and fine-tune it so that you
know
that you will be successful. Do not look at a recipe as confining you; rather, look at it as a framework of known success that you can modify to suit the occasion.

There are really two parts to a recipe for pizza. The first part of the recipe defines the form (or style) of the pizza. For example, all Thick-style pizzas share certain common equipment and procedures for preparation. Similarly, all Thin-style pizzas share certain things, too. The other part of the recipe describes the flavor combination that makes up the taste. The form (or style) of the pizza is mostly independent of the flavor combination and vice versa. You can generally create any flavor combination with any style of pizza. You will get to the point where you can easily combine the two parts of recipe into any number of wonderful, custom combinations. You will find all the recipes in Part Two: Recipes starting on
page 85.

Continual Improvement

“Practice makes perfect” is true in making pizza, as it is in any part of life. Actually, the quote should be “Perfect practice makes perfect” and this is understood by many professionals. You need to perfect your techniques if you want perfect pizza. That way, every pizza you make will be better than your last, no matter how long you make pizza, because you become more familiar with the system and fine-tune it to your own tastes. If you find a better way to do something, write it down so that you can do it every time. If there is something that you do not like by all means do not settle for it! Adjust what you are doing to avoid the problem and make things better. You will know your ingredients, recipes, preparation techniques, and order of preparation better than anyone else, and soon you will have your own
system
!

I encourage you to write notes to yourself about the way you do each step. Writing things down helps you remember them better (remember what your teachers used to tell you) as well as ensuring that you can refer to them again when you do not remember.

In addition, the last chapter entitled “Troubleshooting Guide” found on
page 235
focuses directly on continual improvement. You will find a listing of some of the problems that you might run into when making a pizza along with some suggested solutions. Ending the book with this topic helps put you in the habit of reflecting on what you have done to look for improvements to make the next time you cook pizza. I suggest that you get in the habit of looking for one or two such improvements each time you cook a pizza.

Why Use A System?

Why should you want to use a system? Is the system going to constrain you? Cannot you just wing it when making pizza? These are good questions and you need to be comfortable with the answers. What I call the
Passionate About Pizza System
is really just the habits that I now have for making pizza. I developed these habits over my years of pizza making. I wrote them down as a system for a number of reasons. Soon anything that you do frequently becomes somewhat systematic. I am just encouraging you to start systematically to shorten the time it takes you to learn and so that you learn better fundamentals for making better pizza. If you look carefully at what great pizzerias do, you will see that they use their own system to help keep things running smoothly and to turn out consistently good pizza.

The
Passionate About Pizza System
offers a framework for organizing this book as well as for discussing making pizza. In addition, it helps make you aware of what you are doing (or need to be doing) when making pizza so that you can change some part of your actions or habits when you need to in order to make better pizza.

Finally, it turns out that it works! The people who eat my pizza continually tell me, “This pizza is great! You ought to open a pizzeria!” Well, I did not want to give up my day job, so writing down what I do was the best way for me to share my passion with you!

Please do not feel restricted by the system. In the end, you get to pick what you do and how you feel about it. Use Passionate About Pizza:
Making Great Homemade Pizza
as a guide like you would any cookbook; follow it when it helps you make better pizza, modify or ignore it wherever it suits you, and even thumb your nose at it when you want!

The Passionate About Pizza System
Throughout The Book

The order of the chapters in the book follows the order of steps in the
Passionate About Pizza System
. Not surprisingly, this order is pretty much the same order you use when you are preparing for making pizza and then making it. At the beginning of each chapter, you will see the
Passionate About Pizza System
repeated with highlighted text showing the areas of the system covered in that chapter. I hope that this will help you keep things in perspective as you learn about them. You will also find in-depth discussions of each part of the system. You might find more information than you ever wanted to know about planning, equipment, ingredients, technique, and more. However, I wrote it all down in case you can benefit from it!

Further, explore the
Passionate About Pizza System
(click to follow link):

•
Planning
•
Equipment
•
Ingredients
•
Preparation Techniques
•
Recipe Basics
•
Dough Recipes
•
Sauce Recipes
•
Thin-style Pizza Recipes
•
Thick-style Pizza Recipes
•
Pizza’s Close Relatives Recipes
•
Pizza Recipe Compendium
•
Troubleshooting Guide

Planning Your Pizza

The
Passionate About Pizza System

You will make great homemade pizza every time you try if you ignite your passion and follow a systematic approach to making pizza. PLANyour pizza-making activities, use the same equipment and high-quality ingredients each time, use proven preparation techniques, rely on your recipes, and work to make continual improvements.

Planning