Scott's Pizza Tour Pizza News

 
Sauce first, then cheese first. Completely different results. Both delicious.

I made these two pies over the weekend with the exact same ingredients yet the first was topped with sauce followed by cheese and the second started with cheese and sauce came last. They look and taste completely different! Starting with sauce makes sense because pizza began as a peasant food and the high cost of cheese made it more of a garnish than a main event. As costs decreased, cheese proportions increased and became what we see today as a typical “New York Style” pizza. But cheese is a great base because it protects the crust from getting gummy.

I love doing cheese first because it melts right onto the crust and you get little to no cheese drag: when your bite pulls a blanket of hot molten mozzarella off the slippery surface of a saucy pie directly onto your clean face and shirt. It also means that the surface sauce is more susceptible to evaporation, so it tends to thicken and sweeten. This order is sometimes referred to as tomato pie, as at Delorenzo’s in Trenton, NJ, but it’s also the preferred method at New York joints like John’s on Bleecker Street, Sam’s Restaurant in Brooklyn, Arturo’s in Greenwich Village and Totonno’s on Coney Island.

RECIPE TIME
600g flour (I used Pillsbury bread flour for this batch)
396g water
13g salt
6g dry yeast

Starting with the water (room temp), add yeast then flour. Mix in salt and fully incorporate all ingredients. Give it a few minutes to rest while you check the mail and then knead it until smooth and springy. Cut into 4 even pieces and round into balls. Store for 1-3 days in sealed container inside refrigerator. I used mine after 2 days and it was lovely but I bet it would last 5 if push came to shove.

PRE-FERMENTATION TRICK
If you want to get a bit more depth, you can mix together 50g or flour and 50g water plus a pinch of yeast (~1g) 10-12 hours before making your dough. I did that before heading out to do a pizza tour, then when I came back 10 hours later the mixture had more than doubled in size. (Room was 71 degrees F so a warmer room will rise faster, cooler room rises slower.) I added this mixture to the remaining ingredients in the recipe (550g more flour, 346g more water, 5g yeast) and continued with the process. This allows for some fermentation to occur in advance with just about a minute of prep time. There’s no salt in the preferment because it slows down yeast fermentation. I did this preferment for the crust you see in these photos. It would be more effective if you could have tasted it. Not as much flavor as using a starter, but still really tasty. 

There she is, a Sicilian pie so good I emailed a picture of it to my dad.

Winter is the perfect time for thick crusts and gooey cheese, so I decided to make it a February project to learn how to make the perfect Sicilian pizza. After purchasing a coated black pan from Bari Equipment, my favorite restaurant supply store on the Bowery, I set out to craft a square pie that wouldn’t be the all-too-common heavy rock in the stomachs of all wide-eyed eaters. Here’s a rundown of my journey thus far.

I made a batch of dough using little bits of leftover flour from several different sources. This probably wasn’t the best idea, but I couldn’t bare to see lonely little bags of flour just sitting there in my flour bin. So I mixed 50g whole wheat with 350g bread flour and 196g all purpose. I did a 66% hydration with 110g Ischia starter. That means there was 650g total flour, 55 of which came from a starter. If you don’t have a starter, just use 650g flour and you’ll be set (but you’ll have to use more yeast). The 66% hydration means I used a water with a weight of 66% the 650g flour weight. That’s 429g, but 55g of water were already in the starter so I only had to add 374g water to the mix. Confused? Just remember that most starters are 50/50 water to flour, so a 200g portion of starter is 100g water and 100g flour. To boost the air content, I added 1g active dry yeast. After mixing by hand and a 30 rest period, I kneaded in about 15g salt. After another 30 minute rest, I loaded the finished dough into a lightly-oiled  container and let her sit in the fridge for a couple days.

My oiled dough prepping for its final rise on baking day.

I ended up baking my pizza about two days after making the dough. Unlike with Neapolitan pizza, square pies require a long rise after stretching and before baking. Getting the dough into the square pan requires a series of short rises inter-cut by delicate stretching. It took about three hours to get the dough from a ball to this square shape. I’m actually going to try a longer rise and a single stretch next time because this pie came out a bit too dense for me. I should note that this dough is lightly covered with oil, so it won’t dry out during the rise.

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Montanara at Forcella in NYC.

Yes, you read that correctly. Fried pizza is real and it’s comin’ to getcha. Imagine a sweet, innocent pizza walking home one night only to be cornered in a dark alley by a dangerous deep fryer. Sounds terrifying, but the confrontation actually results in a flavor mashup the likes of which few tongues have ever tasted. It combines the danger of oil with the familiarity of typical pizza toppings. New York pizza is currently experiencing its first real dose of the deep fryer, but what exactly is it and where does it come from?

I became a big proponent of fryers when I bought one in college. We had parties on Friday nights in which friends would bring over anything they wanted to fry. Yes, we did call it FriedDay. People brought anything from chicken and fish to cookies and Hostess cupcakes. We formulated different batters for sweet and savory items and eventually bought a second fryer to accommodate both genre. Come to think of it, I don’t remember cooking anything else when I was in college - those fryers were pretty much it!

Suffice it to say, I was into frying almost as much as I was into pizza. So when my friend Jeff called me in 2003 to tell me there was a place doing deep-fried pizza in Brooklyn, I jumped on a train from New Jersey and met him at Chip Shop in Park Slope. What we got was a lackluster slice from the pizzeria across the street battered abused by the deep fryer. We could still taste the briny residue from the day’s orders of fish and chips. It was totally gross.

New York Post article about Forcell’s Montanara. The media loves it.

Luckily, the fried pizza hitting NYC today is a completely different animal. I remember hearing about it from Keste’s Roberto Caporuscio, but Giulio Adriani was the first to pull it off at his Williamsburg pizzeria Forcella. The process begins with a stretched piece of dough, opened in the same way a dough would be stretched for pizza. The one major difference is that the dough is punctured at several spots inside the outer rim. This “docking” process eliminates gas pockets that would normally expand when met with extreme heat. The dough is then placed into the deep fryer, where it puffs up and forms a bread bowl that is both light and crispy. After pulling the dough out and drying it for a few seconds, toppings are applied and the whole thing slides into the oven in a small metal dish so the oily dough doesn’t make contact with the brick hearth and send smoke throughout the space. After a quick dip into the oven, the cheese is melted and the sauce is cooked. The result is a complete departure from pizza baked solely inside an oven.

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Ready for the drama? I made a batch of dough last week and gave it the usual 3-day rise, but just a few hours before the baking session began I realized too many people were coming over and I needed (kneaded?) more dough. Not a huge deal, I learned a great recipe for 1-hour dough from Mark Bello at Pizza a Casa, but I wanted to kick up the flavor a bit to better match the depth I was planning on getting from my 3-day batch. Sounds like a potential tragedy, but it was actually the perfect opportunity for me to attempt something crazy.

Regular batch, using Bob’s Red Mill flour and a 3 day rise.

Allow me to explain. A dough develops more flavor with longer fermentation because of bacterial replication. Therefore, dough baked after only a short fermentation will not have as much flavor because of lower bacterial content… unless you add some yourself! I figured I could take a shortcut and add something that derives its flavor from a bacterial culture: yogurt.

Here’s the formula I used:
600g Bob’s Red Mill flour
384g water (100 degrees F)
15g instant dry yeast
25g salt
26g Chobani plain Greek yogurt

Mixed all dry, added wet, mixed and autolyse (just lettin’ it chillax) for 30 minutes. Kneaded for 5 minutes, rested for 5 minutes, kneaded until tight enough to bounce back from a poke. Then split and balled, packed in lightly oiled plastic pint containers for quick room temp rise.

Here’s the result….

Thinly sliced raw potato and red onion with fresh mozzarella.

Caramelized onions and sauteed mushrooms atop a bed of mozzarella and scamorza.

Crust flavor wasn’t as tangy and bright as I had hoped for, maybe I need to add more yogurt. But the pies I made with the short dough did bake up nicely. They were more dense and crunchy than those made with the 3-day rise, but certainly tasty enough to eat. One friend suggested I add a small squeeze of citrus to the yogurt for some extra zing. I’ll try that next time I’m in a bind and need more dough last minute.

My standard formula worked out well, I’m pretty happy with it as a go-to recipe when I know I have the luxury of a 3-day rise.

Fresh mozzarella, garlic and sun-dried tomatoes with grated piave cheese.

Here’s the skinny:
600g All Purpose flour
379g warm water
100g Ischia starter
20g salt
1.5g instant dry yeast

Mixed all dry, added wet, mixed and autolyse for 45 minutes. Kneaded for 5, rested for 5, kneaded until tight enough to bounce back from a poke. Then split and balled, packed in lightly oiled plastic pint containers for 3-day cold rise.

Now back to the drama. Some of my pals had to leave early so I ended up with leftover dough after all. No problem, we baked some bread the next morning! All we did was pull it out of the fridge, let it rise on a well-floured peel (covered with a dish towel) and viola!

I made a batch of pizza on Friday and it came out great so I thought I’d post some photos and current dough formula for those who are interested in trying it themselves. Here’s the scoop on the dough:

380g warm tap water
595g King Arthur All Purpose flour
20g salt
2g instant dry yeast
100g Ischia starter
splash of olive oil

I started with the water, to which I slowly added the flour as I mixed. About halfway through adding the flour, I tossed in the yeast, salt and oil. When everything was incorporated, I covered the bowl and went out to run some errands. This is the autolyse phase, during which the flour gets hydrated and kneading becomes easier. I usually give about 30 minutes for this but errands took longer than expected so I didn’t get to the kneading phase until 5.75 hours later. By that time, the dough was totally ready to rock! I poured it onto my kneading surface and spent about 5-6 minutes working the batch until it felt done. I just split the mass into four 275g chunks, balled, then stored in oil-lined plastic quart containers in the refrigerator. 

Four days later, I took the dough out of the fridge and gave them about 2 hours to rise (still in their containers). The oven took about 1.5 hours cranked on broil in my basic gas oven (the broiler is on the bottom so I get most of my heat this way). Each pizza spent about 4.5 minutes in the oven before a 180 degree rotation and a final minute to finish. The results were pretty even, although my stretching definitely improved over the course of the night. Here are a couple of the results:

Mozzarella, crushed tomato, basil, sun-dried tomatoes.

Spinach, garlic, mozzarella, crushed tomato, black pepper.

I also conducted a quick, completely non-scientific, experiment using tomatoes left over from the tomato tasting I hosted at the Brooklyn Brainery a couple weeks ago. I tried two different tomatoes, one from Paulie Gee’s secretly sourced stash (Italian) and one from a popular restaurant supplier (California).

 
Uncrushed Paulie Gee tomatoes (Italian), hand-crushed tomatoes from Stanislaus (CA).

Both were plenty tasty and the pizzas were a bit different so I can’t report any conclusive findings, but the California tomatoes were definitely saltier. As always, use whatever floats your boat.

And finally, for all the pizza nerds who like looking at the details, here are a couple glory shots.

   
All pies were baked in a quarry tile cave. Check out the video at EconomyBites.

We fired up the grill last night and I had some 48 hour cold fermentation dough ready to rock! I’ve tried grilled pizza a few times before but never got the exact result I was looking for. I used to do the two-zone method, in which you keep a screaming-hot charcoal fire on one side of the grill and leave the other side unheated. You first bake the dough on the coaled side before flipping the half-cooked dough onto the unheated side, then add your toppings, close the lid and finish with indirect heat.

My problem was always that the center would cook so much faster than the outer edge. So last night I tested a method I like to call “Doughnut Style.” You build a hot fire covering the entire floor of the grill space but slide the charcoal out of the center, leaving a doughnut-shaped heat source and dougnut-hole center. This way, the outer edge bakes and the center gets enough heat coming off the outer rim of coals. The result was great, but I still have some work to do before I’m really satisfied.

In the meantime, here are some highlights from last night…

Yup, that’s the prettiest one of the night. It has a base of ricotta, followed by roasted red peppers, low-moisture mozzarella, basil, pecorino and balsamic vinegar. I still want to brown that outer crust a bit more, maybe I’ll make the fire bigger next time.

This one was the strangest, yet most tasty, of the night. Low-moisture mozzarella, ricotta, HOT DOGS and salsa. Don’t be a hater.

This is a photo I took of a guest taking a photo of me holding a pizza with grilled corn, roasted red peppers and low-moisture mozzarella. I call both the pizza and the photo “Pizza Paparazzi (feat. corn).”

I can’t believe it has already been a year. I’ll never forget the day, I had a simple dough (can’t find the recipe - dang!) that was just flour, salt, water and bakers yeast. No starter, no “00” flour, no magical fairy dust — just the basics. I remember mixing the ingredients and letting it rest for about 40 minutes, then kneading and doing a bulk rise while I watched Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter. Perhaps that movie is the perfect length for ambient bulk fermentation! After the rise, I stuck it in the fridge overnight in some plastic containers and that was that.

The next day, I preheated my oven with my favorite quarry tile method  and got the oven up to 650 degrees F in the pie-zone after about an hour. One thing I do remember about the dough formula was that I used particularly cold water that day. I have notes for every batch of dough I make (thanks to advice from my homeslice Jeff Varasano) but I can’t seem to find them at this moment. We’ll just have to rely on my iPhoto library. Thankfully, those notes are pretty solid.

The pies came out faster than ever and the crust texture was perfectly crisp on the outside and soft on the inside. The first pizza was incredible but I was nervous that pie #2 would prove to be a failure and dishonor the entire batch. I was totally wrong. Before I knew it, there were four beautiful Margherita pizzas sitting in front of me and they all looked like this.

Usually my roommates are more than happy to eat the results of my pizza experiments but on this particular night they were nowhere to be found. This resulted in a series of calls to my closest pizza buddies in which I would bite the crust just so they could be witness to the sound of my ultimate pizza making experience. It sounds pretty sad when I say it out loud as I’m typing but what-e-ver.

The night convinced me that high heat is necessary for this style of pizza because it forces a quicker bake and more differentiation between the outer and inner texture of the crust. I achieved lovely charring, perfect crumb structure and crust so soft you could poke it with your finger and it would just bounce right back. The flavor of this particular crust wasn’t 100% but I’ve made a lot of progress int he past year and I think it’s just about there. After all, it is a constant process and I learn more with every batch. The pizza I’m making lately definitely tastes better than the batch I made on May 25, 2010 but I will never forget the leaps I made on that blissful evening exactly one year ago today.

This year my family decided to celebrate Mother’s Day in the most relaxing way possible: pizza party. Come to think of it, we had pizza last year too! That’s right, my mom wanted to get a clam pizza from Lombardi’s. Dang, it was tasty! We decided to keep things a bit more low-key this year so my brother and his fiance had us over to their place and I brought some dough to get the party started.

I made the dough three days in advance (recipe below) so it would have time to develop. After all, this was going to be my first time making pizza for the family so the heat was truly on. I talk big game about pizza so I really had to put my mozzarella where my mouth is. Speaking of mozzarella, we picked some up from Alleva in Little Italy. They make great cheese but you really need to slice it and drain some moisture before you use it on pizza.

Mom loved the mozzarella, mushroom, onion and garlic pizza and I think it was my favorite too. I sauteed the shrooms and onions so they would handled the oven heat without burning or drying out. My brother’s oven isn’t exactly what I have in Brooklyn so I had to take a few chances. He has a broiler on top and I thought that would be good for some sweet top heat but the thing didn’t want to ignite so I had to ditch that idea.  My home oven can get pretty hot with the quarry tile method I use, so I’m used to getting the bake zone up to 650 degrees F within 50 minutes. My brother’s oven got up to exactly 500 degrees F at its max so I had to leave the pizza in the oven for an extra 2+ minutes for each pie. This made a big difference in the end product and dried out the crust a bit more than I had anticipated. Oh well, it still tasted awesome!

The pie above has a pile of post oven arugula, chunks of grana padano, prosciutto di parma, mozzarella and a squirt of lemon juice.

Here’s one of my new favorite pizzas, which covers a layer of thinly sliced potatoes with strings of red onion. I should have put more potato and onion on there because they shrunk up a bit inside the oven. I also failed in topping distribution. Oh well, I guess I’ll have to make it again!

I was pretty nervous about making pizza for my family, but all the pies came out great and we had an absolute blast hanging out together. Hooray for Momma Wiener!

Dough recipe:
600g All Purpose flour
50g whole wheat flour
412g tap water
18g sea salt
1.5g dry yeast
100g Ischia starter

20 minute autolyse (resting period)
short knead, rest, short knead
split into 4 pieces at 291g each, balled and stored in the refrigerator for three days
room temp rise 2 hours pre bake

Bake until crust browns and cheese melts, usually about 8 minutes in a standard oven that has been pre-heated with pizza stone for 60+ minutes.

I had some surplus dough left over so my homeslice Bryan came over and we made a couple pies for lunch. We usually have pizza making sessions at night so this was a nice change of pace. New York was balmy (62 degrees F) so we ate outside!

The dough was a super simple no-frills recipe:

297g flour (King Arthur All Purpose)
196g water (just under room temp)
9g salt (standard Baleine fine sea salt)
3g yeast (regular instant dry yeast)

mixed it, kneaded it, balled it, fridged it overnight, let it rise for 2-3 hours at room temp before baking

If you asked me about making my own pizza around this time last year, my response would have been something along the lines of “I deal exclusively in O.P.P. or Other People’s Pizza.” To be fair, I knew that pizza making would lead me down a strange and mysterious path that would exponentially grow my pizza obsession, for better or for worse. I had plenty of excuses but the real reason was simple. I was afraid. Dough is so simple to make, yet endlessly challenging because of all the variables associated with its production. But once you get your hands on a good batch of dough, you just never go back.

The point of no return for me came in the form of a pizza making class I took at Pizza a Casa in the Lower East Side. It amazed me by simplifying the entire process into a form that was - both literally and figuratively - digestible. Fast forward ten months and now I’m experimenting with different dough hydration and yeast varieties. I have become exactly what I was afraid of and I couldn’t possibly be any happier.

I’ve made good batches and I’ve made bad batches, constantly in search of the perfect crispy-chewy texture and a salty-smokey flavor. Some batches would have the flavor while others would have the texture. I felt like I didn’t have control of anything and my life was in a tailspin — until my pal Brooks showed up with a batch of dough and an Ischia starter. WHAT THE HECK IS AN ISCHIA STARTER? That’s easy. Yeast is a fungus that floats through the air looking for a nice place to live and sometimes people build little yeast traps and put the little guys to work. The “nice place to live” can be a grape skin or apple peel and the trap is a cup half filled with a mixture of flour and water. Once the yeast start moving into their new watery-floury home, they get “put to work” on the fermentation plantation, where they feed on the natural sugars released by the reaction of water and flour and produce carbon dioxide and alcohol.

See those bubbles in the cup? Those are the product of yeast burps! Anyway, this bubbling goo is your “starter” and the particular one I am using came from an island off the coast of Naples called Ischia. Hence, ISCHIA STARTER. You can make a starter anywhere and name it as you wish. There’s an amazing step-by-step guide to starter cultivation on Slice. DO IT!

So what do these yeasty creeps have to do with pizza? Yeast is necessary for fermentation, which results in the gassy leavening of dough as well as flavor development thanks to bacteria and alcohol. It’s very easy to open a packet of yeast and pour it into your dough, but natural yeast forges an even closer bond between pizzaiolo and pizza. It also gives you a unique flavor that is often more developed than commercial yeast. You use this starter in the same way that you use a packet of yeast, but the measurements are not the same. I experimented with a recipe Brooks gave me and ended up making three batches of dough, each having a different amount of dry yeast. Here’s the winning recipe, which gave us a perfectly airy crust with rick flavor and a good dose of crunch.

595 g flour (I used King Arthur All Purpose)
381 g water (I used cold tap water)
91 g Brooks’s Ischia starter
1.5 g dry yeast
12 g salt

Mix those and let it sit for 40 minutes so the flour can fully hydrate. Then knead the dough for about 4 minutes and let it rest for 5 minutes before one last kneading session of roughly 3 minutes. Separate into four balls and store in sealed containers (just like the first picture above) on the counter for about two hours, then refrigerate until you’re ready to bake.

You can use the dough after letting it sit overnight, but I left mine for just over four full days (about 100 hours). I let it rise at room temperature for about 5 hours prior to baking and they were extremely soft and gooey. My pies didn’t come out all looking picture perfect, but the flavor and texture is by far the best I have ever made. Here are a few selections from last week’s pizza session. I just wish you could bite into your screen.