Pizza is everybody’s favorite including my princess. If you
ask her what you want for dinner, her answer will be pizza or pasta. Until my
marriage I used to eat only frozen pizzas. After marriage I found a pizza
loving hubby, and when we are staying in Utah there was a
5 dollar pizza joint, hubby buy pizza
from every alternate weekend. Once we moved to Houston, we have lot of pizza
places nearby, our neighbor is “
Pappa
John’s, and if I take a 2 minute drive I will reach
Pizza hut, then there is
Cicis pizza,
Dominos
pizza etc.
If you ask me which pizza do you like the best I will vote for
“
Papa john’s followed by
Cicis’s
cheese pizza. I found
Pizza hut’s pizza
salty to my taste buds. I haven’t tried Domino’s
pizza yet. Hubby tells me it is okay. I will try one day and let you know. My
order of pizza is always a veggie pizza with tomato, onion, capsicum, mushroom
and black olive substituted with pineapple.
For my princess birthday we had cheese pizza, pepperoni and veggie, and
among the adults pepperoni was a hit. Of course I did not make it, but Papa
John did it. So for this month baking partner challenge, we decide to try
pizza.
Pam of Living Rancho Deluxe,
Archana of
Tangy Minds and Priya of Ennveetu Kitchen suggested three
recipes of New York style Thin crust
Pizza.
You will be amazed to see the regional variation of pizza
available in US, around 30 varieties; you want to take a look at it
peek
here. Traditional New York style is thin crust pizza with few toppings,
however I didn’t followed that rule, I added few of my favorite ingredients. I
got lucky with my creation the third time, first time instead of thin pizza I made
thick pizza, more like Chicago style.
Second time I got thin pizza however it was on the crispy side.
Then I started researching what went wrong
with my pizza. In the mean time I got this book
Flour
Water Salt Yeast by
from
Ken Forkish
and trust me it has
excellent pizza section in the book. Which explain how to get a homemade oven
to work best for making the pizza? I tried his oven techniques, and the pizza
that turned out is best. First two times I tried Pam’s
suggest
pizza recipe.
Third time I tried
Archana’s
suggested
recipe .
While trying I learnt lot
of nuke and corner of pizza making. Still I didn’t figure it yet. One day I
will be going to try the flipping of pizza dough in the air (may be in dream).
Third time I also bought
a steel pizza
pan from Wal-Mart.
I baked my pizza
on pizza stone with this pan on it as I don’t have pizza peeler in hand, and was
afraid of losing all my topping without peel. I found bread flour tasted really
great compared to all purpose flour pizza.
Traditionally pizza’s is baked with
Caputo
00 flour, however it is not available in the local grocery store; and you
need to mail order them. I may buy it next time and try.
Next task in this challenge was to make a homemade pizza
sauce, for first two pizza trials I used
fresh tomatoes to make the sauce, they tasted okay but lacked the
characteristic red color. So for the third attempt I used canned whole tomato
which gave me red colored sauce. I also added few spices in pizza sauce. So my
preference for making homemade pizza sauce is to go for canned tomatoes, which
will also help you from blanching and peeling the skin of tomatoes.
There is a You Tube video link on the first recipe about how
to stretch the pizza dough, and I tried the technique, and unfortunately I was
able to cover only 15% of what he shown in the video. He does it very
flawlessly. But I couldn’t finish that. I also read that to increase the flavor
you can brush the pizza dough with olive oil before brushing with tomato
sauce. I used both freshly grated mozzarella
as well as shredded mozzarella cheese as suggested in the Flour water Salt Yeast
book. I sprinkled the top of pizza with little parmesan cheese. You can’t make this pizza same day as it
require slow fermentation, best will be make the dough today and bake it after
72 hours.
I made the pizza dough on Friday evening and baked the pizza
on the Sunday evening, taste tester number one my princess who approved it
immediately. Then my hubby who said it is delicious. It may look laborious but
you will get delicious pizza in the end. Wait is always worth it.
I made Pizza dough like this
I made pizza like this
Pizza after baking looks like this
Do you want a slice
Thin
Crust Vegetable Pizza: Best Pizza I Ever Made
Preparation time: 74 hours resting time + 10 minutes baking
time
Yield:
1 14 inch pizza
Ingredients
for the thin crust:
·
11 ounces /2 ¼ cup/339g bread flour, plus more for
dusting
·
3/4 tablespoons /14g sugar
·
.10 ounces /1 ½ teaspoon/9g salt
·
1 teaspoons /3g instant yeast
·
1 1/2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
·
7.5ounces/1 cup/ 21g lukewarm water
Ingredients
for making its NY Style pizza sauce
·
1 (28-ounce) can whole peeled tomatoes or Fresh
Tomatoes.
·
1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
·
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
·
2 medium cloves garlic, grated
·
1 teaspoon dried oregano
·
1/2 teaspoon pizza seasoning
·
1/4 teaspoon marjoram
·
1/4 teaspoon red chili powder
·
3/4 teaspoon salt or to taste
·
2 six-inch sprigs fresh basil with leaves attached
·
1 medium yellow onion, peeled and split in half(
about 1 ½ cup chopped)
·
1 teaspoon sugar
Toppings:
·
Any sliced or chopped veggies of your choice such as
capsicum, sliced onions, mushroom, also you can add paneer or sliced jalapenos
or even fruit such as pineapple.
·
Any Meat as you like. Preferable pre-cooked Chicken
pieces if you want. It is optional.
·
1 to 2 cups depends on the size of the pizza -
Parmesan or Mozzarella Cheese grated as you like to choose.
Procedure:
For
Making the sauce:
1. Pulse
the tomatoes and their juice in food processor / Blender until pureed, or puree
with hand blender. Puree should not be completely smooth, but should have no
chunks larger than 1/16 of an inch. Set tomatoes aside.
2. Puree the onion and garlic
and set aside.
2. Combine
butter and oil in medium saucepan and heat over medium-low heat until butter is
melted. Add onion puree and oregano, marjoram, pizza seasoning, and
large pinch salt and cook, stirring frequently, until fragrant but not browned,
about 3 minutes. Add tomatoes, basil sprigs and sugar. Bring to a simmer,
reduce heat to lowest setting (bubbles should barely be breaking the surface),
and cook, stirring occasionally, until reduced by 1/2, about 1 hour. Add salt
to taste. Allow to cool and store in covered container in the refrigerator for
up to 2 weeks.
For
Making the thin crust pizza:
1.
Combine flour, sugar, salt, and yeast in bowl of
food processor or in a bowl. Pulse 3 to 4 times until incorporated if you have
food processor. Otherwise mix well together with the help of the whisk. Add
olive oil and water. Run food processor until mixture forms ball that rides
around the bowl above the blade, about 15 seconds. Continue processing 15
seconds longer. You can mix the dough with hand or in stand mixer to form soft
dough.
2.
Transfer dough ball to lightly floured surface and
knead once or twice by hand until smooth ball is formed. Place the dough
in a plastic container and keep it in refrigerator and allow to rise at least
one day, and up to 5. I rest the dough for about 72 hours.
3.
At least two hours before
baking, remove dough from refrigerator and shape into balls by gathering dough
towards bottom and pinching shut. Flour well and place each one in a separate
medium mixing bowl. Cover tightly with plastic wrap and allow rising at warm
room temperature until roughly doubled in volume.
4.
Preheat oven to 525°F for 30 minutes with
pizza stone inside.
5.
Turn the dough ball out onto lightly flour surface. Gently press out dough into
rough 8-inch circle, leaving outer 1-inch higher than the rest. Gently stretch
dough by draping over knuckles into a 12 to 14-inch circle about 1/4-inch
thick. Transfer to pizza pan.
5.
Spread approximately 2/3 cup of sauce evenly over
surface of crust, leaving 1/2 to 1-inch border along edge. Add toppings of your
choice evenly and spread 1/3 of cheese over sauce evenly
6.
Change the oven setting to broil for about 5 minutes.
7.
Switch the oven back to bake at 525F.
8.
Load the pizza into the oven and bake for about 5 minutes.
9.
Switch oven to broil and bake for 2 to 3 minutes, keeping a close eye on it,
until the pizza is done. (It took 5 minutes in oven) .
10.
Transfer
to cutting board, slice, and serve immediately.
Please take a look
at what other baking partners are cooked up. If you are interested to join the
group, you can e-mail me at favoriterecieps12 (at) gmail (dot)com
I am linking this delicious pizza
Hearth and Soul blog hop hosted here
