Mudita Journal

Homemade Pizza, Here I Come

April 2, 2006 · Filed under: Recipes, Reviews
Share

Last week, on the recommendation of a particularly glowing review, I purchased Peter Reinhart’s American Pie: My Search for the Perfect Pizza.

The book includes not only his engaging stories of visiting dozens of the best gourmet pizza parlors around the world, but also the best pizza-making tricks and recipes he discovered along his journey.

The author’s taste in pizza matches my own: Thin crust, please, and great dough gets you 80% of the way to great pizza.

Reinhart also authored the acclaimed bread-baking guide The Bread Baker’s Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread, so there is no doubt this man knows his bread.

He says the trick to truly incredible pizza dough is to let the uncooked dough sit overnight in the refrigerator, which gives the yeast time to do its trick, breaking down the carbohydrates into sugars and delivering a richer, more sumptuous flavor.

I’ve only read the first chapter, and skimmed the rest of the book, but I’m hooked. I’m dying to make my own homemade pizza.

So today I bought a pizza stone and baker’s peel. And thanks to Amazon Prime‘s free 2-day shipping, I’ll have them both on my doorstep Tuesday afternoon.

Hopefully by this time next week I can write up a report on how my first batch of pizza turned out. Stay tuned.

Posted by Joshua Zader · Trackback URL · Link
  • http://tenacity.net Miss Tenacity

    Josh,
    Good luck with your pizza! Making pizza at home is a fantastic adventure which usually only takes a few tries and tweaks before you are swearing off all restaurant pizza for good.

    One additional thing I’ve done to my oven for better pizzas – get 2 of those clay 12″x12″ tiles from your home warehouse store (they usually cost about a buck each) and wedge them on the sides of your oven. Mine fit between the grooves of the racks, but the result is that the rack heights are quasi-permanent at this time.

    Not a big deal, and it allows me (with a 45-60 minute pre-heat) to reach oven temps of about 525 degrees, the best I can do with my consumer oven. However, this cooks a thin crust pizza in about 6-7 minutes. Perfect!

    :-)

    Andrea

  • http://www.zader.com Joshua Zader

    Thanks for the tip, Andrea. My oven already heats to 500 degrees, and the pizzas always seem to be done at exactly 7 minutes.

    Are you saying that the 12″ tiles allow you to squeeze a few more degrees out of your oven, somehow? How high does your oven go without the tiles?

  • http://tenacity.net Miss Tenacity

    My oven says that it goes to 500, so yes it seems that the extra radiance that bounces around with all of those tiles allows me to squeeze an extra 25 degrees out of it.

    Note that this also requires a CLEAN oven, as at that temp things get pretty smoky if there are drips at the bottom! :-)

    I forgot to mention that I also have a 3rd tile that I put on the bottom rack, so with the pizza stone I have FOUR hunks of heat-absorbing goodness in there. Despite the much longer pre-heat time, I’ve found the tiles stabilize the temp of the oven for baking other things as well, so that’s nice. I highly recommend a thermometer for all ovens so you know that 300 really is 300 and not 275 or 342, etc….

  • http://www.muditajournal.com/archives/000298.php Insider’s Guide to Trader Joe’s :: Mudita Journal

    [...] Italian dry salami. Located over by the beef jerky. Made with wine and no nitrates. Worked well on my homemade pizza last weekend. [...]

  • http://perfectradianceuk.co.uk/ Perfect Radiance

    I forgot to mention that I also have a 3rd tile that I put on the
    bottom rack, so with the pizza stone I have FOUR hunks of
    heat-absorbing goodness in there. Despite the much longer pre-heat
    time, I’ve found the tiles stabilize the temp of the oven for baking
    other things as well, so that’s nice. I highly recommend a thermometer
    for all ovens so you know that 300 really is 300 and not 275 or 342,
    etc.

blog comments powered by Disqus