Pizza!

Pizza is one of those foods that is as varied as the people who enjoy it. One of the most exciting things about cooking it yourself is the endless amount of tinkering you can do to the recipe to make it exactly how you like it.

My take on pizza is somewhere between a Neapolitan style and a thin NY-style crust. For almost any style of pizza, the most important factors are: baking temperature, hydration level of the dough, and kneading.

For the right temperature, it's critical to have a pizza stone. Nothing else works as well at retaining the heat of the oven and transferring it to the dough. When you're ready to cook, put your pizza stone in your oven as close to the heating element as possible, then turn your oven on as high as it will go (550F for me). Let it preheat for 60-80 minutes.

Below is the dough recipe. I try to use a dough with around a 65% hydration level, but experiment and vary as you see fit! You'll notice that all the measurements are by weight. This is a much more precise way to measure ingredients, especially flour. A cheap kitchen scale can be incredibly useful in your kitchen experiments! You'll also notice that I recommend using bread flour. Bread flour has a higher gluten content than all-purpose flour and therefore makes a chewier crust. It also allows you to make a thin crust that won't fall apart or flop over when you pick up a slice of the pie.

Recipe (makes 3 small pies)

Ingredients:

• 350 grams of warm water (preferably filtered)
  
• 2.5 grams of instant dry yeast
• 570 grams of flour (King Arthur bread flour works very well)
• 15 grams of kosher salt

Dissolve the yeast into the warm water. Add a small pinch of sugar to give the yeast something to eat.

Sift together the flour and salt. Slowly add the water/yeast solution to the flour while mixing. The dough will look wet, which is exactly what you want.

Here's an important, yet often skipped step: Cover the dough with a towel and leave it alone for 20 minutes. This allows for the water to be completely absorbed by the flour. You'll notice the difference when you come back.

Next is the fun part. Knead the dough. You can do this by hand or with a KitchenAid mixer. I prefer by hand, as I've found that the dough-hook on my mixer generally just spins the dough around rather than kneading it.

• If you're using the mixer, use a dough hook and knead the dough on the lowest setting for 8-10 minutes. Let it rest for 5 minutes after kneading.
• If you're mixing by hand: Dump the dough onto a lightly floured countertop. Knead by folding the dough over on itself towards you, then stretching it back out away from you using the palm of your hand. Turn the dough 90 degrees and repeat over and over and over and over...Do this for 10-15 minutes. This is a laborious, but a very important step. Kneading promotes the formation of a gluten network within the dough. This gives the dough its structure and chewiness. If the dough gets really sticky, add a small dusting of flour (not too much!). You want to keep the dough as wet as possible. This will create steam in the oven, blowing up the tiny air pockets that the yeast created and making a light, chewy dough.
  

Cut the dough into 3 equal portions (by weight) and form each into spheres. Put them in lightly oiled containers (I use a tupperware container or pie-pan) and cover well so that the dough doesn't dry out. Tupperware works well because you can seal it with a lid.

If you are using the dough that night, let it rise for 1.5-2 hours at room temperature.

If you are using the dough another day, just put it in the refrigerator, sealed. It can be kept there for 5 days or so. I've found that this is actually preferable to using the dough the same day. Leaving it in the refrigerator for a couple of days allows the dough to develop more complex flavors.

When you're ready to use the dough, just stretch it out onto a floured surface that you can use to transfer the dough to the pizza stone. A wooden pizza peel (shown below) works really well.




Top your dough with your favorite toppings and transfer to the oven!
(Tip: I've gotten really good results by moving my pizza stone close to the broiler element, and actually broiling the top of the pizza as it cooks. This gives you the nice charred spots you see on the pizzas below. Just be sure to rotate the pizza as it broils so that it cooks evenly.)

Here are two pizzas I've made recently. One is topped with pancetta, rosemary, mozzarella, and carmelized onions. The other is topped with brussells sprouts, cubes of pancetta, slices of garlic, mozarella, parmigiano reggiano, and olive oil.