Thursday, October 27, 2011

Pizza: Sourdough 2

Once you have a sourdough starter, it's time to make something. One of my favorite breads to make is pizza. Pizza? A bread? Yup, it's just a flat bread covered with yummy stuff. Easy to make, easy to eat, oh so good.
Pizza - adapted from no recipe anywhere, makes 3 pizzas from 10-14 inches.
4 cups flour
1 3/4 cups water
2 tsp salt
Either 1/4-1/2 tsp yeast or 1/4 to 1/4 cup sourdough starter.
The night before you want to make pizza, mix everything in a bowl. This is a pretty slack dough so it will be sticky. You don't really need to knead it per se, but you you want to incorporate all of the flour so you don't have any hard little unincorporated flour chunks left over. Cover the bowl with a plate or plastic wrap and sit it on the counter. Leave it there. In the morning you can turn the dough if you want. Or not. By dinner time your bowl of dough will be bubbly and huge. If it's not, then you need to add more yeast/starter next time or put the dough somewhere warmer. You want you dough quite lively, it tastes better. When it's time to bake the pizza preheat your oven as high as it will go with a pizza stone in it. You can probably make these without a pizza stone, just on a cookie sheet or pizza pan but I don't. I'm a pretty simple guy in the kitchen, I don't need many gadgets, but a pizza stone is worthwhile. Anyway, as the oven is preheating, divide the dough into 3 pieces and set them on the counter to relax. Once the oven is preheated, tear off a piece of parchment paper that's big enough to make your crust. Spread the dough out on the parchment paper to get it into a roundish shape. The sticky dough will stick to the parchment paper and this will help keep it from trying too hard to form back into a ball. Slide the parchment paper on the back of a cookie sheet (or a peel if you have one) and slide it onto the stone. Cook it for about a minute. Pull it out and flop it on a wire rack and peel the parchment paper off, reuse the paper for the other two pizzas. Now put your sauce and cheese and meat and veggies and whatever else you want on the crust. Ease the pizza back on the back of the cookie sheet and slide it off back onto the stone. Bake it until it's done. Everyone knows what a done pizza looks like. Probably 6-10 minutes. Now do it twice more and you have 3 pizzas. From the time I turn the oven on to when I pull the last pizza out, it takes me about an hour. It's not the easiest meal to make, but it's one of the yummiest.
The yeasted version and the sourdough version have a slightly different taste and texture. It's worth it to make them both at some point. 
I realize that this recipe, though it has only 4 ingredients, has quite a few steps and I'm not including pictures of any of them. If anyone ever wants to see the whole drawn out process I'd be more than happy to do that, just leave me a message in the comments and I'll make a bigger post for you. The quality of pizza you can make in your oven at home is worth putting time into. With the exception of the pizza that comes out of my sister's giant wood fired oven, my family doesn't like pizza from anywhere else. That's about the best compliment you can get.

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