How to Make a Great Pizza

 

   Making a great pizza is easy. The hard part is making it in a way that tastes great to you. Lesson One:  Even a bad pizza is pretty good. When people discovered how to make flour 12,000 years ago, they immediately started baking flat bread. Pizza is just flat bread with stuff on it. The first flat breads were probably terrible, but the family choked them down anyway because they would have starved if they didn't.

   By making pizza we're paying homage to our ancestors. I keep them in mind whenever I attempt to improve my pizza. Lesson Two: The crust is by far the most important part of a pizza. If the crust is great you can put dirt on top and it will still taste good. In fact I think some high-end gourmet pizzerias do just that.

   The dough for the crust has four ingredients: yeast, water, flour and salt. Start with a cup of very warm water in a medium size bowl. If you have a thermometer, no hotter than 130 degrees. Sprinkle a teaspoon of yeast onto the water. I shake the bowl a bit so the yeast sinks. Let the yeast dissolve five minutes. Avoid ancient yeast packets.

   Stir the yeast-water mix and add a cup of flour and a teaspoon of salt and start stirring, adding more flour a tablespoon at a time. This is the part that confuses beginners. They want to be told: one cup of water and two cups of flour. But flour has its own water content, less in winter, more in summer, so you have to keep adding and stirring till it's enough. When the lump of dough starts sticking to the mixing spoon, scrape it off, put some flour on your fingers and knead the dough in the bowl for a couple of minutes, picking up the loose flour in the bottom of the bowl with the ball of dough.

   If the dough is still super sticky, add a little more flour. Rub your fingers together so any bits of dough fall into the bowl. Knead some more, still in the bowl, to pick up the loose bits. Keep telling yourself that the dough is your friend. This is the step that determines how light or stiff your crust will be. I quit adding flour when the dough is still a little sticky. If you like a crust like a cracker, then keep adding flour. I let my dough rise in the same bowl I mixed it in under plastic wrap.

   The dough can rise for ten minutes and be ready to roll out on the pan. Or it can sit in its bowl all day in the fridge. I think the crust turns out  better if it has some rising time. If I've left the dough in the fridge I try to remember to take it out a half hour before rolling it out. If I forget to do that, it doesn't matter much. So many things in cooking are not that important. The art of cooking is learning which things do matter. Because my dough is sticky I dip my flexible plastic bench scraper in the flour bin and use it to ease the dough out of the bowl and onto my greased pizza pan. An old credit card makes a good scraper. I use a round pan with lots of little holes in the bottom. Avoid Teflon coated pans. A cookie sheet works fine too.  

   I flatten the dough on the pan and put a teaspoon of olive oil on it so I can spread the dough with my fingers. Even if the dough is stretched very thin, it will puff up a bit while baking. Now the fun part: the toppings. Just about anything goes. After the toppings comes the next tricky part: the bake. I bake at 505 degrees on the middle rack for 8 minutes. The bottom of my crust gets done a little before the top so I move the pan to the top shelf and turn on the broiler for 90 seconds. I do not leave the room at this point because I can quickly have Hades style pizza if I get distracted. Every oven is different. With some ovens the top of the pizza cooks before the bottom so I slide the whole pizza off the pan and let it finish on the rack. This is done near the end of the bake. You want the crust to be stiff enough to not droop through the rack. That's happened to me.

   The above is all you need to know to make great pizza. Play around with it. Keep a small bowl of olive oil and salt handy by the oven to paint the crust edge when it comes out. Bam! It's always fun to watch people make pizza on YouTube. I have a video myself. I might hold a pizza camp this summer. Watch this spot for further details.

Mona Pizza