Passionate About Pizza: Making Great Homemade Pizza (7 page)

Who wants to plan? Planning is a pain, right? Well, I would say that you should spend just enough time thinking out what you are going to do so that you will know what is going to happen. Planning lets you get comfortable with what is going to happen, ensures that you will have what you will need on hand, and lets you consider other things that will help make your pizza making experience pleasant. This chapter covers some of those things that you should consider.

How Much Time Do You Have?

As you make pizza, time can be your friend or it can be your enemy. If you have 30 minutes to mix the dough, let it rise, prepare the pizza, and bake it, then time is clearly your enemy (or is at least something that you must respect). On the other hand, thirty minutes to shape, assemble, and bake a pizza is much more realistic; at least it is realistic if you are making thin-style pizza.

So just how long is this pizza going to take you to make? The entire process should take you two to three (2 – 3) hours. The dough should take you about fifteen to twenty minutes to mix and knead. The dough will rise for about sixty minutes. Basic pizza sauce should come together in less than five minutes and cooks for about thirty minutes so it can be finished entirely during the time the dough rises. Toppings can be prepared while the sauce cooks and the dough rises. Shaping the dough and assembling the pizza will take five to twenty minutes, depending on the complexity of the pizza. The pizza will bake for fifteen to forty minutes depending on the style. Remember, the key is to do it all in the right order!

With a little advance planning, you can turn time into your friend as you make a pizza. The book describes the individual steps involved in making pizza in the order that makes it easiest to create a pizza from start to finish. If you overlay these steps onto the time that you have available during the day, you can usually come up with an arrangement that lets you make a pizza in whatever time you have available.

Plan Ahead

You can use the time-bake feature of your oven to preheat the baking stone for you while you are away. I sometimes set mine to turn on one hour before I am to arrive home, so that I can quickly shape the pizza and pop it in the oven. Alternatively, have your spouse preheat the stone for you.

Pizza on a Weeknight

Many people order pizza delivery or pop a frozen pizza into the oven when they want pizza during the week because there is so little time after work for cooking. Many times, I make pizza on a weeknight using the following system. I try to prepare ahead of time so that all I have to do is shape, assemble, and bake the pizza at dinnertime.

In short, I stack everything in my favor for quickly making a pizza when I am ready to eat. I freeze my Basic Pizza Sauce in one-cup containers when I have extra. I buy shredded Mozzarella cheese and store it in the refrigerator or freezer in eight-ounce packages and I buy sliced pepperoni in the delicatessen section of the supermarket. On the morning of the day I want pizza, I mix and knead the dough before I go to work; this takes about ten minutes. I let the dough rise on the counter and let the sauce and cheese defrost in the refrigerator all day. I put the baking stone in the oven before I go to work and set the time bake feature to turn on one hour before I plan to get home so that it can preheat while I drive home. When I get home, I punch the dough down, knead it briefly, and let it rest. While the dough rests, I pull the rest of the ingredients out of the refrigerator and get my pizza peel ready. After a few minutes of resting, I stretch the dough, assemble the pizza, and bake it. Using this method, I can have a homemade pizza ready faster than Domino’s can deliver!

Other than the advance preparation and the carefully choreographed timing, the only thing that is any different than making a pizza the normal way is the amount of time the dough rises. Since the dough has so much time to rise, it typically rises and falls a number of times throughout the day. This does not cause problems, but I generally use only one teaspoon of yeast and do not add sugar if I am going to let the dough rise for this long. When the dough has risen all day, it is generally a little more sticky and stretches more easily than when it is left to rise for only an hour or two; as a result, it feels a little different when shaping it. I just dust the dough more frequently than normal and take a little extra care while stretching it.

There is a reason that dough that rises all day stretches more easily. As yeast divides, it gives off the gas that makes the dough rise but it also gives off some trace chemicals. These chemicals relax the gluten structure in the dough and make it more slack and easy to stretch. Keep this in mind when you are planning to let dough rise for a long time.

Determining Which Style Pizza You Want To Make

This is really the first choice you must make – do you make thin-style pizza, thick-style pizza, or one of pizza’s close relatives? A Sicilian-style, Chicago-style, or Chicago-style Stuffed pizza takes about five to twenty minutes to rise after shaping and thirty to forty-five minutes to bake. This compares to no time spent rising and twelve to fifteen minutes for a thin-style pizza. If you are short on time, the decision may be easy; make a thin-style pizza. On the other hand, if you love thick-style and are going to be home anyway, maybe the decision falls out that way. In essence, you can make any flavor combination with any style of pizza, so it is just a decision of what you feel like and how much time you have.

Thin-style Pizza
- Thin-style pizza is the most widely available type of pizza. The shaped pizza dough does not rise before baking and that is what keeps the crust thin. In addition, the pizza usually bakes directly on the floor of a pizza oven; this helps make the crust both crunchy and chewy at the same time. Aside from these traits, there are many variations in the specifics of thin-style pizzas. Each pizza chef or pizzeria determines the exact recipe used for the dough, how they shape the dough, how they form rim on the edge of the dough, what type of oven in which they bake the pizza, and exactly how thin is the crust.

Thick-style Pizza
- Thick-style pizza is very popular. The fact that the shaped pizza dough rises before baking is what gives the cooked pizza a thicker crust; hence the name. Pizzerias assemble, rise, and bake thick-style pizza in a pan. You can turn any thin-style pizza into a thick-style pizza by placing the dough in a pan after shaping and allowing it to rise before assembling the pizza. You usually use one and a half times the dough used for a thin-style pizza of the same size and that contributes to the additional thickness in the crust.

Pizza’s Close Relatives
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These are in the pizza family, but are not standard pizza. You can use the same dough and toppings from a pizza and shape it in a different way to get a non-pizza.

Deciding Which Flavor Combination To Use

You will need to pick the flavor combination you want to put on the pizza before you begin so that you can make sure you have the ingredients for the pizza. On the other hand, you might make a pizza with whatever you have on hand; that, obviously, will determine the flavors!

What You Will Need

Equipment you will need:

Measuring Cups
Measuring Spoons
Large Mixing Bowl
Large, Sturdy Spoon
Heavy-duty Mixer (optional)
Plastic Wrap
Rolling Pin (if desired)
Saucepan
Pizza Pan, Stone, or Screen

Ingredients you will need:

Flour
Yeast
Salt
Sugar
Water
Cheese
Sauce Ingredients
Toppings
Herbs

Order of Preparation

This book lays out the recipes in the standard order of steps you should follow when doing the work all at once. You make the dough first. When the dough starts rising, the oven is turned on to preheat it. While the dough is rising, you prepare the sauce and toppings (or fillings), and the oven and baking stone (if you are using one) comes up to temperature. After the sauce and toppings are completed and the dough has risen, you assemble the pizza and then bake it.

This order is straightforward and you will get used to it. Nevertheless, it is not the only way to make a pizza. By now, I only use this method when I am making pizza on a weekend for the family. If I am making several pizzas or if I am making pizza on a workday, I alter the order of the work a bit.

You must perform some steps before others. Obviously, you have to make the dough before it can rise. In addition, the dough must rise before you shape it and you have to assemble the pizza before you can bake it. You cannot change nature. However, you can choose the order in which you do some things; some sequences are better than other sequences. You can even work some magic and greatly cut down the time from starting preparations to finishing the pizza after you get the hang of it. However, since you are the boss in your pizza kitchen you are in charge! So, do what seems natural or right to you and it will be just fine.

Making Things Ahead

There is no need to get in a huff trying to do all the work at once. For example, you can make the sauces and toppings at any time before you need them. You can buy pre-cut or pre-shredded ingredients. You can freeze or can your sauces in convenient portions. You can freeze kneaded dough and defrost it when needed. You can even (sigh) buy prepared sauces, toppings, or even (gasp) pizza dough.

Fitting Things In

You can benefit by taking advantage of the time some of the steps naturally take to reduce the hassle. As you will see, it takes at least an hour for the dough to rise, but you can also let it rise longer. Need to run a quick errand? No problem! You can leave dough to rise for one to three hours with no adjustments. If you are going to let it rise all day, you might want to reduce the yeast by half and omit any sugar in the recipe. Of course, if you have a bread machine with a timer, you can have the dough ready, mixed, and risen whenever you want!

You can use the time-bake feature of your oven to preheat the baking stone for you while you are away. I set mine to turn on one hour before I am to arrive home, so that I can quickly shape the pizza and pop it in the oven. Alternatively, have your spouse preheat the stone for you.

Pizza-making Equipment

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.

Equipment

You can make great pizza using minimal equipment, so use the information in this chapter as suggestions or guidance rather than as a list of things you must have. Having said that, I want to pass on to you the information and tips that I have discovered during my years of learning to make great pizza.

This section covers the following equipment (click to follow link):

Baking Stone
Dough Docker
Electric Mixers
Pizza Board
Pan Lifter
Pizza Cutters
Pizza Pans
Pizza Peel
Pizza Screen
Sauce and Sauté Pans
Serving Tray
Utensils