Hog Bay Software pizza post

This post is inspired by Gus Mueller’s pizza post. I’ve liked making pizza for a long time, and last summer I got a bit more serious after hearing about cooking pizza on your oven’s cleaning cycle. In the end I never tried the cleaning cycle technique, instead I channeled my new excitement into getting what I really wanted… a wood fired oven. But most of my recipe/process comes from the cleaning cycle website.

Starter

I keep a half flour half water starter in the fridge. I use the same starter for both bread and pizza. When I’m planning to cook I take the starter out in the morning, refresh it, and put it in a warm place. When its cold (like above) I put it in some warm water. Once it gets bubbly/foamy its ready.

Mixer

I got a DLX Magic Mill Assistant 2000 mixer off eBay. This I feel a little guilty about, lots of people make great pizza dough by hand. But I was never sure that I was mixing my dough enough by hand (turns out I wasn’t) so I got the mixer to be sure. The mixer looks a bit odd, but it’s supposed to be better with pizza/bread dough. I like it a lot so far, but I only use it for dough, I’ve seen some reviews that complain about it as a general mixer.

To mix I:

• Mix total salt into total amount of flour.
• Put all water and starter into Mixer.
• Put most of flour into Mixer.
• Mix for a few seconds to get flour wet, then let rest for sometime over 20 minutes.
• Then mix about 15 minutes. Starting on slow and ending faster. Adding rest of flour toward the end.

The end result is a very wet dough, 65% water to flour. I’m not sure if it’s a good idea to speed things up at the end or not, but I read it in some forum, and I like the results so far. If you know better, feedback about this, or anything other part of my pizza making process is very welcome.

Once it’s fully mixed the dough will be filled with long strands of gluten. All this mixing means the dough can get really thin without tearing, makes nice bubbles, and is less likely to stick to your hands even though it’s really wet.

Shaping

Even so, when you dump it out of the mixer it still looks like a sticky mess.

But in just a few seconds you can hide all that stickiness in a thin layer of flour. I use a dough scraper, I think it would be pretty hard to do the initial rounding without one.

I divide the dough and then start making dough balls. The above video shows how to work with really wet dough without having it stick all over you. The trick is to keep moving fast, and start with a well mixed dough. The “real” guys do this step a lot smother and faster then I do, but the dough didn’t end up on the floor, so I was happy with this take.

Once it’s mixed I store in plastic containers overnight (at least) in the fridge. I take it out a few hours before I’m going to use it. It doesn’t rise a lot, but it relaxes and starts to get lots of little bubbles. If it doesn’t yet have the bubbles give it more time before using.

Kitchen

Having your oven outside isn’t ideal in Maine. Someday it would be fun to have it a bit closer to the kitchen, until then I setup a temporary kitchen outside. And I don’t make pizza in the winter.

I didn’t get a video of preparing the dough. To do that I push it out into a circle. Then pick it up and slowly work it around on the backs of my knuckles until it’s the right size. Then I put it on the table and put sauce/etc on it. It’s very thin, but it doesn’t have a huge amount of toppings. The dough is also strong enough so that I can just grab the pizza and quickly drag it onto the peal. Generally if you do things quickly with a wet dough it seems to mostly work out, but if you stop to think about it and are hesitant then it turns into a mess quickly.

Oven

The oven! I got a Forno Bravo Primavera 60 Oven. A better person might build their own. I thought about that for a long time, but in the end I clicked a button on a website and got mine that way instead. Important note… this is primarily a pizza oven as opposed to a bread oven. Its neat trick is that it can reach 900 degrees (pizza temp) in a little less then an hour. With more massive bread ovens they take much longer to reach bread cooking temps and I’m not sure if you can even get to pizza cooking temps.

Cooking Pizza

Finally the pizza cooking! In the above video the oven has just heated up (notice the inside of the oven is white once it’s reached temperature). I push the coals to one side, then clean off a cooking area. After cleaning I waited a few minutes (while I made the pizza) then put the pizza to cook. I probably should have waited a bit longer for the temperature to even out, notice the bottom gets a bit burnt. But it cooks so far the burn layer is very very thin, the pizza still tasted great.

Here is one more pizza cooking. This time the over is cooler, and there’s a real camera man (thanks Clyde!). So you get better viewing angles, but a slightly longer then average cooking time.

Cooking Bread

Once you are finished cooking pizza there is still lots of heat left in the oven. Once it drops to around 500 degrees I put in this bread. It might take an hour to be ready for bread after pizza. For bread you take the fire out and clean off the surface with a wet rag.

Once the bread is finished I put in some roast vegetables. By that point the oven heat and my energy are pretty much used up.