The table
When you prepare your pizza dough, allow for 1 dough piece of around 200g per pizza.Then count on 1 or 2 pizzas per person, still in 200g dough pieces.
Put one or more jars of pizza sauce on the table, and as many ingredients as possible on plates or in bowls, so that everyone can compose their pizzas to their own taste.
Here are a few ideas:
- Mozzarella, of course, but also other cheeses: small cubes of feta, grated Comté or Emmenthal, thinly sliced goat's cheese, etc.
- Fresh basil in season, oregano, herbes de Provence
- Spiced olive oil or olive oil with herbs
- Pitted olives, anchovies
- Ham, smoked ham, chorizo, grilled smoked bacon
- Fresh mushroom strips, artichoke hearts, thin slices of fresh tomato
- Smoked salmon flakes, shrimps, shelled mussels
- Heavy cream, raw eggs, pesto sauce
A word of warning about the mozzarella: it shouldn't be fresh, but rather dry.
If you have fresh mozzarella balls, the day before or even 2 days before, cut them into small cubes, place them on a sheet of absorbent paper on a baking sheet, and leave them in the fridge, uncovered, until used.
Baking Pizza in a Bread Oven
Your oven must be very hot; allow a good two hours to heat up. The vault should be white, and the embers should be evenly distributed across the hearth to ensure even cooking.
When it’s time to bake, use the poker to push the embers toward the back and sides of the oven to clear space on the hearth.
Tap the flat side of the peel a few times inside the oven to thoroughly clear the hearth of any remaining ash and small pieces of embers, then begin baking.
When baking pizzas, it’s not easy—especially for an apprentice pizza maker (like me)—to successfully slide a fresh dough round topped with pizza sauce and all its ingredients—and therefore very soft—into the oven without risking disaster: the pizza sticking to the peel, the dough collapsing in the oven, ingredients oozing out, etc.
To avoid this, I suggest using aluminum pizza grids; these lightweight, thin grids allow you to bake the pizza practically in direct contact with the oven floor.
Spread a layer of tomato sauce over the dough, then add whatever toppings you like.
A few tips:
- Halfway through baking, remove the rack, rotate the pizza halfway, and return it to the oven for more even cooking
- At the end of baking, remove the pizza and rack from the oven, then return the pizza alone—without the rack—to the oven for 1 minute to finish cooking the bottom.
Be careful: with a very hot oven, baking takes about 2 minutes, so you have to pay close attention... (What happens to me most often is that a friend gets up from the table to watch their pizza bake, and starts chatting or toasting with you: you get distracted, and boom! You take a pizza out of the oven that’s overcooked or burnt.
Here’s a tip: while the pizza is in the oven, take advantage of this brief moment to warm up the plate that held the raw pizza a little.
Since pizza cools down pretty quickly, a warm plate helps slow that down a bit.
If you take a break during the meal, spread the embers out again on the oven floor to ensure even heat distribution while you’re away.
If the baking stone gets dirty during use—because small pieces of ingredients or flour have stuck to it—run a “pyrolysis” cycle: using the shovel, spread the embers over the stains for 5 minutes, then push them back to the bottom to continue cooking => everything will be nice and clean again..
Cooking in a conventional oven
You can also make good pizzas in your kitchen oven, if you just follow two simples rules:- Oven should be very hot (240/250°C), preheat it at least 30 minutes before starting to cook.
- Put pizzas directly on the oven sole, if possible without any baking sheet or mould. It's important that the pizza should be as close as possible to the high temperature at the bottom of the oven so that it cooks rapidly.
Sweet pizzas
You can make a complete meal out of pizzas, finishing with "dessert" pizzas, i.e. sweet pizzas.
It's the same principle as for classic pizzas, but to top the dough bases, we use almond cream (a thin layer) or a little fresh cream sprinkled with cane sugar or brown sugar, and we spread on the whole small cubes of fresh fruit, dried fruit, chocolate chips, etc.
The cooking process is the same as for classic pizzas.
Flours
At the most basic level, wheat grain is put through a mill, which produces a white-ish powder flour... Well, actually it's not quite that simple. First of all we need to distinguish between the different grains that can be made into flour: wheat of course, but also rye, barley, buckwheat, etc. So we...June 3rd 2024772 K 413.6
Small history of elements classification
The road to Mendeleev's table of tables has taken centuries. Here's a brief chronology.August 24th 202449 K3.9
Ice-cream and sorbets
Making homemade ice cream may seem complex, but with the right methods and a few tricks, you can achieve a creamy texture and incomparable flavors. On this page, we'll be revealing the secrets of successful homemade ice cream, guiding you step by step through the various stages of preparation. ...August 12th 2024476 K4.0
A little molecular gastronomy
Long-cooked meat becomes meltingly soft. What happens to achieve this result?August 29th 202347 K4.4
Receive an e-mail as soon as this page is modified or receives a new comment.