First pizza night

[wotavidone]

I still haven't built an oven, though I have finally obtained all the materials I think I need. (Except the Portland Cement and Lime - if I can't walk into a local hardware shop and buy those off the shelf, I am definitely moving to a new town.)
Anyway, this week a string of chance encounters led me to try pizza making on a stone.
Firstly, a construction supervisor at work who was doing a job for me, looked over my shoulder at the little kangaroo I had fashioned from my clay and fired on my gas stove. This led to a discussion on wood pizza ovens. Owning such a beast was a burning desire he had harboured for some time.
This led to a discussion of making dough, since he trained as a chef in the navy. Navy cooks actually have to be pretty good, churning out bulk meals from basic non-perishables, and during weeks at sea making sure the tucker is good enough to stave off mutiny. Then you have to be able to roll out restaurant quality meals when the brass come to visit.
Protein levels, fineness of grind, proper working up, rest times, all got a go.
Then he said, "use your bread machine on the dough making setting with ordinary everyday flour, and you will be surprised." His contention was, how you work the flour is probably more important than what sort it is, and a bread machine generally does a pretty good and, most importantly, consistent job.
Secondly, had to attend a meeting for work in Adelaide on Friday. This meeting was about 5 minutes drive from Australia's last big commercial pottery, Bennetts of Magill, where my company buys all its clay.
The boss didn't mind driving up there in the lunch break, so I got about 65 pounds of fine dry clay, and two stoneware pizza stones. He even helped carry them to the car.
End result, Saturday night was pizza night.

I took the approach I first saw on this whirlpool forum. http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/1183258 about the sixth post down the page.

I made some pizza dough as per the recipe that came with my bread machine.
Water, flour salt yeast and olive oil. Dunno what the purpose of the oil is, but figured I'd start there and see how it all goes.
I slid the stone under the gas griller on my kitchen stove and preheated it as hot as I could get it. Assembled a pizza (ham and cheese as per my youngest child's instructions), slid it onto the smoking hot stone, and slid the lot back under the grill. About three minutes later, junior pizza critic pronounced it better than a bought one.
My vegetarian pizza consisted of tomato puree base, sundried tomatoes, roasted red peppers, green Verdale olives from my Greek neighbour, Socrates, (suppose I really shouldn't call him Greek, he's been here for 50 years, and took out citizenship decades ago), baby spinach leaves, pinapple chunks, and mozzarella. The missus came back for seconds, so it couldn't have been too bad.
Lessons learned/reinforced:
A pizza peel is a must, the underside of a stainless steel plate with a rolled edge and no handle just isn't up to the job.
Thin crust is the way to go.
Less is more on toppings.
The teflon bakers sheet I taped to the table at the beginning was a very good thing, but still needed to be lightly floured.
Work very quickly once you have your dough pulled out into shape, otherwise it sticks more and more and gets harder to slide onto your peel.
Keep it as hot as you can get it, there's nothing like pulling the pizza out after two minutes and seeing a brown crispy crust surrounding an island of fresh ingredients held in place by a bubbling and steaming layer of tomato sauce and molten mozzarella.
All in all, a good night, and I can't wait to finish my oven.
Mick

[cobblerdave]

Dear Mick
The pizza sound well yummmm.... and that clay sounds serious.....finally committed to a plan ha.....looking foward to you oven build

Regards Dave

[wotavidone]

Cooked more pizza on Friday night. Getting the hang of it now.
Another experiment - I made a pizza peel for loading the pizza on the stone. Nothing flash, just a 10 inch square with a 4 inch handle poking out one side. Took about 10 minutes with an electric jigsaw and an offcut of 3mm MDF board. Rounded the corners a bit, and sanded the edges smooth. Works like a charm. Pizzas just don't seem to stick much to it.
Added anchovies and jalepenos to the veggie pizza I made the first time around. Perfection.
I'm really glad I read all the stuff on here about "less is more" when it comes to toppings. Otherwise I mighta got put off by the ingredients cost. However, although a jar of roasted peppers, semi dried tomatoes, jalepenos or anchovies might look a touch expensive, there's a lot of pizzas in them there jars. Originally, though, I was sorta looking and thinking I might as well buy pizzas. Especially when I was adding in the price of the special pizza flours, etc. When I made my first pizza, I realised that when you have a half dozen toppings, it doesn't take much of each to build a generous layer.
Reckon I could make at least half a dozen 9 inch pizzas for under $20, which is waay less than buying them. And junior pizza critic has now decided mine are better than bought ones.
My chef pal advised me to try the ordinary floor in the bread machine, and I like the way the crusts turn out so much that I'm wondering just how they could be better with the OO flour. I guess I'll try some just to see.
Mozarella is a challenge though. I'm not a massive fan of cheese on cooked dishes of any sort, I swear I can feel my arteries clogging as I eat it. I really only like to use enough to hold everything together, but it still a 500g bag doesn't go very far. I'm saving the little balls of real mozarella for when I get the wood oven up and running. In the meantime using the shredded stuff. Its all great fun. Made lots of progress on painting the house this weekend, so the oven is getting closer.

[scottz]

nothing is better than pizza in your oven, good luck with it and keep on going!

Scott

[cobblerdave]

Dear Mick
Don't worry about that mozzarella cheese its a high protein low fat cheese... try some ordinary cheese on your pizza and you'll see what I mean ... you'll end up with a puddle of grease floating on you pizza!!
Its traditionally made from water buffalo milk so the Italians got more than the recipe for gunpowder and noodles from the chinese it seems....
00 flour....well do you need it ? seems like the old bread maker has taken the quess work out of prep'ing the dough. 00 flour is like the the mozzarella a high protein flour the extra protein ...gluten is the stuff that makes the dough spring back when stretched ( and keeps the bubbles that make it rise, in)
I use a 50/50 mix most times of plain flour and either 00 flour or bread flour and this seems to give me a good dough "soft and springy" with a good "chew". Drop the moisture level you get a heavyer dough that takes a larger "Topping load" for Fat Auzzie pizza as well. Its all a bit of a case of experimenting but i have found I dont need to buy bulk lots of 00 flour to make pizza dough affordable. I can buy a 1 Kg bag of 00 flour at Coles for about $3 or Bread flour if its on special. Heres my fav recipe at the moment.....

Potato rosmary pizza...

1 X 12 in pizza dough
1/2 potato cut into Micro thin slices
30-50? grams shaved ham ( or prosciutto if you wish both work)
1/2 clove chopped garlic
2 teasponn olive oil
10 gms parmesan cheese fine grate
1 tblsp rosemary sprigs rough chop
Rock salt
On your base drissel the oil add garlic then shaved ham then place on potato slices slightly overlapping. Sprinkle the rosemary and then add the parmesan and rocksalt to taste.

Have you read that recipe for lemon pizza yet.... now that I have got to try.

regards Dave

[wotavidone]

Made the wife something resembling a margherita the other night. Just the dough, the tomato puree, some baby spinach leaves (we didn't have any fresh basel leaves), some sliced buffalo mozarella, with a sprinkle of sea salt crystals and a very light drizzle of olive oil after it was cooked. She must have liked it, she mentioned it again today.
Went to the Yorke Peninsula Field Days today. For those who don't know, field days are a sort of trade fair aimed at farmers. Lots of guys selling tractors plows and trucks to other guys wearing akubra hats or baseball caps with "John Deere", "Case", "Caterpillar", etc on them. The YPFD are a three day event held every second year, and they get lots of people through the gate, I mean sh*tloads of people. ("sh*tloads" is a technical term I got from a visiting professor from the University of Oklahoma. It means " a very large population of the organism of interest")
Anyway, looking through the list of exibitors, I noticed that the catering included "gourmet wood-fired pizza". So we hot footed it over to the street it was on to take a look. What a disappointment. We didn't buy any pizza. They had an authentic looking pompeii igloo shaped oven, but it was downhill from there. It looked like the bases were some processed premade thing. They were stacking pizzas one on top the other waiting to be cooked, and the uncooked pizzas were solid!! Looked like you could use them for frizbees. The guy loading the oven whacked them in and shut the door. No flames visible, no smoke out of the chimney. It looked like they were cooking frozen Papa Guiseppes with retained heat. I might be doing them a dis-service, because I did not observe for long, but I decided against paying $12 for something no more than 8 inches in diameter, that looked like a frozen supermarket special.

[wotavidone]

I was in Bunnings today, where I observed three veerryy interesting things,
One, the "big" bunnings oven is 660mm/26 inches across, but significantly longer than that,
i.e. its sorta oval.
Two, the small one is 600mm/23.6" across, and the inner surface crumbles/erodes when I rub it with my fingers.
Three, they sell pavers that are actually sawn sandstone, about 20mm/7/8" thick, and 300x300mm/12"x12".
It looked so much like a pizza stone that i bought one. Sticker price was $5.98, but at the checkout they insisted it was $2.98, even after I told them it was $5.98. So I capitulated and for 3 bucks came home with a slice of natural stone that I heated to 350C under my grill and let cool to room temp - NO Cracks. next step, cook a pizza tomorrow night.

[cobblerdave]

Gudday
There was some extensive studies done in the 60'.s on 19 centry country ovens in Quebec Canada. They were a wicker frame construction with a thermal mass of clay over this. They had an oval floor to allow the best cooking space but the dome was a advacardo shape with the door being at the small end. This shape encoured the flame path to follow the longest path to the exit and retain more heat in the back of the oven. The studies found door height to oven height was of course an average of 63%
This info came from a Aussie book called" build you own wood fired oven" by Allan Watt. Roseburg Publishing Rosenberg Publishing makes an interesting read

Regards Dave

[wotavidone]

Interesting Dave. The better homes and gardens adobe plans also say an elongated shape is better than a perfect hemisphere.
Tried my slice of real stone out tonight. Awesome. It is thicker and heavier than my terracotta stone, and takes a bit longer to get hot, but the extra mass seems to work very well.
At $6 on the hself and $3 at the checkout, its a bargain.
Use 62% hydration dough, let it rise some more after dividing it into balls, and even gave it a few moments to rest after rolling it out.
Result, very satisfying pizza crust.
Regards,
mick

[cobblerdave]

Gudday
Due to another really wet summer and the fact that the oven was doorless whilst built another door....well I have a pretty soaked oven.
Had me bestest mate coming over, he loves pizza and loves the whole burn wood in the oven thing but the ovens basically unusable so I brought a pizza stone and thought I'd give it a go on the gas webberQ on the dry back verandah. Made some dough the day before the whole 65% hydration, 00 flour etc.
Checked out the forum and flashed the bbq it upwith stone inside. Gave it about a good 1/2 hour to heat and got the thing around 325C. Used a wooden peel and corn flour to flick on the pizza shut he lid and waited 5 mins. WebberQ's cook with the lid down otherwise the heat escape so it was a bit frustrating to just wait and hope. At the 5 min mark the dough had puffed up and the topping/cheese had started to bubble gave it another 4-5 min and then removed it for the taste test.
Not Bad... a bit crisper than more normal pizzas but not to bad at all. Put out another 8 pizzas and they were all recieved well especially by the family cause there educated and will not except just any pizza now. The results were good but the time factor was the main thing I noticed it took forever after being used to a full blown oven.
Got on question How do you clean the thing? the instruction say just wipe no detergent. Looks pretty stained only after one use



Regards Dave