A word about pizza

    I make pizza often, and it's often been featured here - see, for example, Polpo's courgette one, their red onion and thyme, Leon's bianca, Hugh F-W's asparagus and even his kale and onion version. I'm constantly trying to perfect what is essentially a very simple dish, and thus every iteration, variation of flour, cooking time, and so on, is scrutinised and compared.

    Last week in Oxford I had pizzette from the wood-fired oven at Gee's (and I'll come back to Gee's in a later post), and they were very thin of crust, and with their goats' cheese and garlic or prosciutto and black olive toppings, very good indeed.

    I couldn't hope to replicate the cooking conditions in a domestic kitchen, even though the Aga's roasting oven is very hot, but I thought I'd try for a thinner pizza than usual, so I turned to Hugh F-W's magic dough recipe (from River Cottage Veg Every Day, but I used only strong plain flour instead of the mixture he specifies) and did the following:

    - let the dough rise for a good hour and a half

    - divided it into four pieces rather than my usual two (for 4-5 people)

    - rolled them a bit and shaped them by hand until they were roughly the same diameter as my usual two, i.e. half as thick as normal

    - pre-heated the (oiled) baking sheets

    - baked the pizzas without any topping for 3-5 minutes

    - gave each one a 'suggestion' of tomato sauce (Hugh's roasted tomato sauce from the Veg book again)

    - added the toppings (the same ones as Gee's) and then baked them for around 8 minutes, by which time they were nicely brown, crisp, and still pleasingly thin.

    There was much swapping of trays in and out and from oven floor to rack, and then to the simmering oven while the later pizzas cooked, so there was a bit of a production line going (and no chance to take pictures), but it was worth the extra faff because although I say it myself, they were the best I've ever made.

Comments

[Claire]

Um, interesting. I make pizza in my Aga and have never got the base as thin and crispy as I'd like. I also have difficulty transferring the dough onto the baking sheet. Any tips for the that in your next masterclass would be appreciated! I think I've even tried rolling on semolina as suggested by Paul Hollywood.

[Cornflower]

I found the dough easy enough to handle, Claire, despite the relative thinness. Having shaped each piece I stacked them on a floured board, interleaving them with baking paper, and they slipped off this onto the baking sheets with a bit of a helping hand and not too much sticking - everything was roughly the shape I'd intended, and having oiled the trays well, once cooked they could be served without any difficulty.
Good luck for your next try!

[Claire]

Oh thank you, Definetely going to be pizza on the menu here one night next week!

[ctussaud]

Try rolling out the dough through the rollers of a pasta machine; I haven't done this myself but have taken the idea from somewhere.

[Cornflower]

Funny you should mention that, Curzon - we did try it before resorting to the rolling pin and stretching it by hand, but because the dough is yeasted and puffs up as you're working with it, it wasn't successful.