Saturday, November 13, 2010

The great pizza divide - William loved them, I wasn't thrilled.

I experimented with my personal favorite food last night, which, if you've looked through the blog at all you have to have guessed, is pizza.

I've never made a really slow rise dough but came across a recipe for one that sounded too good to ignore. Slow rise dough uses less yeast but rises long and slow in the refrigerator. The slow rise adds a depth of flavor to the dough. If you try this, heed the instructions and make sure that your refrigerator is no cooler than 40 degrees or you will kill the yeast and end up with hardtack.

I found the dough recipe here:
http://cookeatshare.com/recipes/pizza-time-pizza-with-long-rise-dough-366817

I made three variations - once plain cheese, once cheese and pepperoni and two "supremes" with black olives, onion, Italian sausage, pepperoni and mushrooms.

William liked these more than I did. If I made these pizzas with this dough again I would increase the oven temperature or increase the cooking time to 10 minutes. The last pizza I made I left in for 10 minutes and that's the one I think turned out the best.


I like my own sauce so that is what I used:

Pizza sauce

Ingredients:

1 28 ounce can of peeled Italian plum tomatoes

1 4 ounce can tomato sauce

1/2 large onion, minced

3 cloves garlic, minced

2 Tablespoons olive oil

2 teaspoons dried oregano

2 links Italian sausage with fennel (optional)

Put the tomatoes in a large bowl and crush them with your hands.

Heat the oil in a sauce pan and add the minced onion and garlic. Saute until the onion is translucent then add the tomatoes, tomato sauce, oregano and sausage links, if using.

Simmer until the onions are very soft and the sausage is cooked through. Remove the sausage links from the sauce and set aside to slice as a topping for one or two of your pizzas.


2 comments:

Emily said...

They look great! What didn't you like about them?

Jill said...

It was probably my fault.
When I made the dough, I skipped the step that called for hand-kneading it before refrigerating it and just just let it knead in the mixer.
When I finally turned it out, the dough was too wet and I had to add more flour at the last minute when I did the last kneading. It made the flour taste too raw because it did't rise in with the rest of the dough.

Also, I should have left them in the oven just a little longer.

And, I like mosre cheese than your dad does but I was conservative with the toppings to made sure I could slide the pizzas off the peel.
They were small - about 12 inches - just big enough to fit on my stone.
I need to find smaller oven tiles so I can fit them on the entire oven rack and make bigger pies.
Then I'll have to get a bigger peel.