Pizza wrap-up: finally a dough which doesn't suck

Ok guys, lets talk dough, pizza dough.

Over the years I have learned a few things about food, and even fewer things about baking, but one lesson which keeps cropping up is that simple ingredients, and well thought out processes produce some of the most mind-blowing dishes. Pizza is simple, or at least it should be, and is therefore subject to this rule.

By all means, make your pizzas as complex as you are capable of. Ingredients piled inches thick, sauces which take days to simmer, meats spaced just so as to be perfectly symmetrical. Do all that, as it is the american way with pizza, but do it knowing that your missing something truly magical. 

I had an epiphany with pizza several months back, and have been working on the process to get it just to my liking. Pizza making should be simple. Few high quality toppings, prepared in an instant and thrown into a blisteringly hot oven. But few dishes are quite that simple. No, if you want to make the best home made pizza you have ever tasted (and have it stand up as a reasonable facsimile to those fond memories of your last visit to naples), then realize that it is the dough which requires the complexity and the time consuming processes. 

Think of the Japanese and real Italian philosophy for noodles for a moment. There are, of course, toppings and sauces and the like, but every aspect of a noodle dish from either of these cultures is designed to showcase the noodle. Entirely backwards from the North-American standard of whatever noodles highlighting a bottle of sauce, I know. 

Now lets think about pizza, as that is the topic of this article. Any pizza dough will not do. The dough has to be able to be stretched by hand, which produces a crust that is at once light, crisp, and with just enough bite (forget the rolling pin). It has to have flavor, which comes from long rises which allow yeast to do its yeasty thing. Finally, pizza dough has to crisp up quickly, otherwise your pizza will fall apart, and the crust will get soggy. 

The recipe I use is taken directly from Alton Brown's Good Eats (season 3, episode 9 - Flat is Beautiful)

Ooh look, some clever web designer put the recipe online, how handy.

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/pizza-pizzas-recipe4/index.html

For those of you who watch tv, I would hope that you saw Heston Blumenthal's show, In Search of Perfection, where he cooks his perfect pizza. Heston goes out of his way to make the pizza simply complex, thats what Heston does, but in the process he came to the same road block any aspiring pizza chef will come to, the heat! The best pizzas are cooked in a wood fired brick oven, and the best wood fired brick ovens can reach temperatures of 900 degrees!  You could scour the internet for brick oven plans (or, I could just save you the trouble and direct you here: http://www.fornobravo.com/pompeii_oven/table_of_contents.html ), or you can come to the same conclusion that I had been mulling over, and which Heston recommends, which is to forgo the pizza stone, and cook on cast iron. 

Cast iron stores a great deal of heat, heats quickly, and transfers heat to foods better than stone, and as such it is the preferred cooking surface for pizzas. Heston cooks on an upturned enameled frying pan, which leads to tiny pizzas. I cook on an upturned rectangular griddle. My pizzas are bigger than Hestons. Who would you trust?

Set your oven to full broil with your cast iron surface in place and close the door. It needs to be as hot as possible in there, your oven can handle its self clean cycle, it can handle having the door closed on broil. Then start stretching out your pizza dough. The oven and the cast iron will take time to heat up fully, and by the time your first pizza is ready, so to should be the oven. 

Making sure your pizza can still slide on the peel, send your first pizza into the inferno quickly, and close the door behind it. I place the cast iron cooking surface about 6 inches away from the broiler element in my oven. When the pizzas top is browned, the crust has some blackened marks to it around the edges, and the bottom of the crust sounds crispy when tapped on, your pizza is done. You will, however, have to experiment with how far from the broiler element your cooking surface has to be in order to ensure that your crust and toppings reach perfection at the same time, as ovens apparently vary. 

Finally, adorn the top of your pizza with a sprinkling of parmesan, cured ham, fresh basil, and a grind or two of good salt, and allow your pizza to rest for a minute or so on a cooling rack before you cut into it and eat.