I made some cracking pizzas at the weekend. Following on from my pizza consultations last year with Scott at RealProjects I believe I have now perfected my pizza dough recipe. Below is the latest cut of the recipe;
This recipe makes about 4 10 inch thin pizzas.
Ingredients for the perfect pizza dough recipe:
1 sachet of fast action dried yeast
400 grams of tipo “00” flour (available from most Italian delis or use strong bread flour if not)
100 grams of semolina flour
1 table spoon of salt
2 table spoons of honey
300 ml of water
Method:
Mix the flour, semolina and salt and place on the work surface in a pile and make a well in the middle. Mix half of the water with the yeast and honey then pour into the well in the flour mixture. Slowly mix the flour into the water well, slowly add the remainder of the water while mixing.
When all of the mixture has turned to dough you have to knead it for ten minutes. Obviously if the dough is too sticky add a little flour or if it is breaking up a bit add a tiny bit of water. After 10 minutes kneading shape into a ball, dust with flour and place somewhere warm for about an hour to proof.
While waiting for the dough to rise you can make your tomato sauce for the base.
After about an hour the dough should have roughly doubled in size. Now simply give the dough a quick knead for about 2 minutes (this process is known as knocking back) then divide into 4 pieces and roll out. The bases should be thin (the true Italian way) and about 10 inches in diameter.
Now simply add your tomato sauce, chunks of mozzarella and toppings of your choice.
Here are my tips that will help you make potentially average pizzas great:
1) Use a pizza stone if you can get one. If not try getting a piece of granite from the local stone merchant. Pre-heat this in the oven prior to cooking to ensure it is as hot as possible.
2) Pre-heat your oven and always have it on it’s highest temperature. Wood fired pizza ovens are far hotter than domestic ovens so to have a chance of getting good pizza you need the oven on max.
3) After you have rolled out the bases, place them onto sheets of baking parchment before adding your sauce and toppings. This will make it much easier to get the pizzas in and out of the oven quickly (helping you avoid either dropping your pizza or losing too much heat from the oven by having the door open for too long.
Interesting Scott – I have been experimenting with making bread over the last couple of weeks and have a recipe that is verging on perfect (i’ll post it in the next few days!). Key to the recipe is a longer proving time to make the bread more glutenous (stretchy). I guess your approach of reproving works on the same theory – i’ll give it a go and report back.
The dough does improve when kept in the frisge for a little while. I\’ve also taken to reproving them by putting them on the stone on top of the oven for a little while before cooking
yes – you can freeze the dough once it has been rolled out. then simply add your sauce onto the frozen base and pop straight in the oven.
let us know how you get on with this!
will the dough keep in the freezer?
I second the idea of leaving the dough in the fridge for a while.
And hi! Am subscribing to your RSS. I just got myself a baby habanero plant, and am looking forward to nurturing him.
I used a tip from Chef Vinny who posted on the blog by putting the dough into the fridge for a few hours. It did lead to a quality result.