I make pizza when it's hot outdoors. The time involved is also roughly equal to watching a major league baseball game. Just as a good baseball game comes down to, at its most basic, a ball, a bat, and some time on a sunny day, good pizza also needs simple ingredients: yeast, flour, water, salt, olive oil, and -- most of all -- sunny daylight time, about 2 hours or more.
If you've read my other food diaries, you know that I usually emphasize two things:
- Get your hands dirty! Put the laptop in the kitchen and get physically into the work. Cooking is a hands-on experience involving the feel of the dough. This is especially true of pizza.
- Precise measurements don't matter...except when they do. Pizza dough is one of the places where they do. When I say 1/4 C., I mean exactly that.
O'er the Land of the Free, and the Home of the Brave, Play Ball and Start Your Pizza! At the start of the game, proof the yeast:
--1/4 tsp oz, or 1 small package, of yeast. I buy small packages in strips of three at the supermarket. Check the expiration date. The small packages contain 2 1/4 tsp -- thanks, Leo in NJ. --Water at 110 degrees, or lukewarm: this is too cool for a jacuzzi but too hot for a swimming pool, or microwaved at about 10 seconds. You don't want it scalding hot. --A dash, or about 1/2 tsp. of sugar (optional).
Using a large cup, measure out 1/4 C. water at 110 degrees, add the yeast, and add a dash of sugar if you wish (supposed to help the yeast rise). Stir them together and leave them alone for 10-15 minutes. The yeasty water will foam and then poof up. During this time, watch the first inning of your favorite baseball game. When you're done, the yeasty water will look like this:
Second Inning: Make the dough: Use a very large non-metal bowl, and wash your hands before starting.
--Dump 2 1/2 C. flour into the bowl. --Add 3 Tbsp good quality olive oil. --Add 1 C. cold water. --Add the yeasty watery mess. --Add 2 tsp salt, no more, no less. Even if you don't like salt, this is absolutely necessary for chemical reasons.
Stir these together with a non-metal spoon to make a batter. The batter will look like this:
Now, put your hand all the way into the batter (you did wash, didn't you?) and pull it out. Observe that the dough is both elastic (stretchy) and sticky (it sticks to your hand and to the side of the bowl). Your goal is to add more flour until it is still elastic but no longer sticky. You will slowly add 3/4 to 1 cup more flour, 1/4 C. at a time, stirring as best you can, then kneading, pulling, and pushing with your hands, working flour into the insides of the dough blob and not just the outside, until the dough is still elastic but no longer sticky. Looking at photos is a poor substitute for experiencing this with your own hands, but the main difference between the photo above and the one below can be seen in the side of the bowl: in the first, the batter is sticking to the sides, and in the second, what's stuck on the sides of the bowl is flaky bits of flour that simply can't be incorporated any further.
Revert to your inner preschooler! Get your hands dirty! You can't do this part without touching the dough and feeling its stickiness! Knead for about 10 minutes, or until the end of the second inning, or until your arms are seriously fatigued. My recipe calls for adding 1 full cup of flour to the original 2 1/2 cups, but I've found that sometimes after 3/4 C. or so the flour is just falling and flaking off the sides of the dough blob and can't be incorporated any more.
Third Through Fifth Innings: Let the dough rise. Put oil (about 1 Tbsp) into a different non-metallic mixing bowl and smear it all around the sides so that the dough won't stick to the sides of the bowl. The dough needs to rise in a warm place. Ideally, that's outside on a hot day, covered with a towel. However, just as baseball is sometimes played indoors, you can heat the oven to 150 degrees, put the bowl in, and turn the oven off. Leave it alone for about 1 hour, or three innings of baseball.
Sixth or Seventh Inning Stretch and Punch (no, not what you do to the obnoxious Yankees fan next to you): The dough has risen! You can plunge one finger in, and the dough will slowly spring back most of the way, like this:
Wash your hands again, put the dough onto the countertop, and punch it down. Push, squash, knead, and generally take out your aggressions on the defenseless dough. Generally, you are trying to get rid of air bubbles, so the more you squish, the better it will be. Then divide the dough into as many balls as you want. I like golf-ball size balls, which will make about 8 to 12 individual pizzas about 5-7" diameter.
Set the dough balls aside to rise again for the rest of the ball game in the same warm place, or in the refrigerator overnight.
When you're ready to eat, roll out the dough on a floured surface.
Topping the Pizza:
Well, I'm certainly not going to tell you how to top your pizza! If I wrote "shiitake mushrooms and arugula," but you're a sausage, pepperoni, and extra meat kind of pizza person, you'd lose any respect you ever had for me, right? Go top your own. It's a free country. You're old enough.
Cooking the Pizza: Ideally, you cook pizza in an oak-wood-fired oven at 900 degrees F, as required by law in Naples, Italy. In the real world, cook your pizza in one of two ways.
Indoors, preheat the oven first to the hottest temperature your oven can reach (450 degrees on my old oven, 500 on my new one). Put a pizza stone or baking sheet in the oven to get hot. Only after the oven and cooking surface (stone or sheet) are as hot as you can make them do you add the pizza, and bake for about 10-20 minutes depending on the size of the pizza.
Outdoors, grill your pizza! Preheat the grill to a high temperature. Put the untopped pizza on the hot part for a very short time (30 seconds to 2 minutes), then flip it over, add the toppings, and move to a cooler part of the grill for about 3-5 minutes.
And by the way, everything in this recipe may be wrong. It's adapted from Evan Kleiman of the Angeli Caffe in Los Angeles. It doesn't claim to be an authentic New York, Chicago, Sicilian, or any other kind of pizza. I've tried a lot of dough recipes and in my opinion, this one works well, but you might have a better one -- for example, the Neo-Neapolitan pizza dough primer is just as good. So is the one your grandmother brought with her from the Old Country.
Before you smart alecks comment that you'd rather just call the large corporate chain, please keep in mind the health, economic, and sheer fun benefits of making your own. If that does't convince you, try this:
And as a special bonus befitting this week, here are instructions for the proper use of teabags: Make sun tea! At the start of the baseball game or other 2-3 hour block of time, place four cheap (e.g., Lipton) teabags in a 64 oz (orange juice pitcher sized) container and fill with water. Let it sit in the sun for the aforementioned 2-3 hours. Bring inside, chill, add ice, sugar, and lemon to your taste. Isn't that a nice thing to do with teabags? Were you thinking of something else? Do you have a teabag problem?