Dough is 60% hydration. Flour, yeast, salt, water.
I made this pizza tonight largely as an excuse to keep seasoning my Detroit-style pans. Also, I wanted to try a more faithful rendition of the genre.
This is a 60% hydration dough. The pans’ instructions say to use a relatively dry dough for the first couple of pizzas, as anything above 65% will have a tendency to stick. Continue reading “Detroit-style pizza, 60% hydration”
Topped with Vermont Smoke & Cure smoked pepperoni.
I made pan pizza last weekend but wasn’t happy with the thickness. I thought it was too spongey, too doughy, too much. What would happen if I halved the dough amount?
Well, even at 1/2- to 3/4-inch thick (as opposed to more than an inch), I’m still not that into it. Don’t get me wrong, the recipe I used makes a great-tasting pizza and is successful in its mission of re-creating Pizza Hut pan pizza. It’s just that I’m still unsure it’s a style I’m wild about. Continue reading “Thinner-crust pan pizza”
Topped with Vermont Smoke & Cure smoked pepperoni and candied jalapeños.
It’s no picnic trying to do Pizza Night with a baby in the house. The diaper changes, the rockin’-her-to-sleep sessions, the walks around the neighborhood—all those things tend to interrupt the two to three hours I like to set aside for pizza prep, baking, eating, and clean-up.
Cook date: November 18, 2012 Dough used:basic Lehmann dough mixed lean and with low sugar and yeast (58% hydration) Number of pies cooked: 2 (Brussels sprout, bacon, and Parmigiano; “frozen-pizza-style” pizza Cooking surface: Quarter-inch-thick Baking Steel, bottom rack; half-inch Baking Steel and Emile Henry Flame pizza stone placed on rack above
I used my quarter-inch-thick Baking Steel for this pizza. This time I put it on the bottom rack of the oven. On the next rack up, I had my half-inch-thick steel AND my old pizza stone arranged to cover the entire rack. (Longest edges of each running front-to-back in the oven, with stone overlapping steel by a couple inches.) Essentially they created an artificial low ceiling for the oven right over the pizza. This had the effect of blocking a significant amount of heat from rising to the thermostat. That in turn meant the oven stayed on, constantly trying to hit 550°F. This would be good if I had a broiler element above the pizza to cook the top as quickly as the crust. What actually happened, though, was that the bottom steel sheet got insanely hot and almost incinerated the dough. Well, not really. But the bottom crust was done in about 1:50. The top, not so much: Continue reading “Basic Lehmann dough, Baking Steel on bottom rack”
