Pizza dough, take two « Bread and Jam for Frances

Pizza dough, take two

21Jan08

Failure should be a learning experience, so I decided to tackle the pizza dough again. Things went seriously south on the first attempt (weak dough that held no air, general cracker-like result), and I needed to see why. For best narrative results, read about the failure first. Then the story seems more triumphant. Also, you get the recipe.

While browsing on Amazon for other Reinhart books, I went to his tome on pizza. I like to read user reviews. I just do. While paging through the many many reviews for this book, I ran across a description of the problems I had the first time. Same saggy dough, same flatness, and, to top it off, the same thing I’d done– halving the recipe. I’d speculated on this potential problem in the last go-round. The reviewer pointed out that the half-recipe does not have enough dough in the bowl to do more than spin around on the dough hook, resulting in way-under-kneaded bread that will not rise. Aha!

So I tried the full recipe, resigning myself to yet less free space in my freezer (o, tiny cold-box). And, by golly, it worked. Here is a picture of my first attempt at making this dough:

Bleh. Here is the latest attempt:

Much more dough-like. I also ditched the all-purpose flour and went for the higher gluten/ higher protein bread flour. I think that both of these changes made the difference, but honestly, this recipe should not be halved. Don’t just take my word for it, believe the Amazon reviewer.

So once you have this lovely dough on the counter, you divide it up and shape it into rounds:

Then the rounds sit for a couple of hours. Oddly enough, blogging an act of cooking can delay the completion of the act and therefore delaying the dining section of the evening. Reinhart says two hours, turned out to be more like 2.5. I think this is a fine example of the Heisenberg Principle, which states that the act of observing an experiment changes the experiment.

Shaping the dough:

The dough was pretty relaxed, so all of Reinhart’s anxiety about the strength of the dough was for naught (in this case, anyway). Observe the lack of thrown dough; it was still nice and stretched.

I wanted to make two different pizzas: pesto and tomato sauce + mushrooms + red chard. Green pizza and red pizza. I did not want to cook the pesto, so I baked the dough without any topping for that one. Amusing poofiness ensued:

I patted the dough down with the baking peel (no video of that, but it would have been rated P-13 for mild violence), then slathered it with delicious pesto. The red pizza was more normal, although I would not recommend using a lot of toppings with this dough. It will make it in and out of the oven, but it collapses when you try to eat it.