Pizza week +

iris bed

This week my irises began to bloom.  I have a large bed of these, and right now lots of yellow and a couple white are showing.  I imagine the blues will come along soon.  But for now the bed is looking very cheerful and sunny.  I love the early and mid-spring.  The temps are usually pretty mild and so it's perfect weather for making pizzas before the summer heat sets in.  Why is that important?  Because I crank the oven up to a very high temperature, not as high as pizza shops with ultra high temp ovens which routinely are taken to 800 F, as I understand it (and I've heard of some pizzerias going further, up to 900 F +), but I take mine to 500.  I have a set of pizza stones that all fit together to equal one large or I can keep the five individual pieces separate if I want to bake something small on a single stone.  Well, at 500 degrees, and with these stones in the oven absorbing and radiating that heat, I am able to produce a pizza crust I am happy with.  High temperatures are important to a good pizza crust.   Sometimes I take my oven up to 550, but I like to work with 500 and refine my recipes and baking techniques based on that slightly lower temperature and still get consistently good results.

I spent a long time sourcing a great pan as well.  Williams-Sonoma has a high temperature pizza pan made for them with a special non-stick coating that can take heat all the way up to 660. (Typically non-stick pans are not made for high heat, including the ones you use on your stove-top, so be careful.)  It's made for gas and charcoal grills, but I use mine in my oven on my pizza stones and it does exactly what I want.  Plus it has handles which is certainly a nice touch that is not normally found on pizza pans.

I could cook the pizzas directly on the stones and a piece of parchment paper (or with no paper), but I like the ease of using this special pan.  I still put down the parchment paper because I don't want to abrase the pan on the pizza stones.  After being in the oven at that high temperature for 10 or 15 minutes on those stones, that parchment paper is quite brown.

I made pizza almost every day for the last week.  I've made pizzas for many years, but I've decided I want take them to a consistently higher level so I'm testing out and tweaking different crust recipes.  And so I am using the same simple basic sauce, the same cheese combination, and pepperoni and mushrooms for the toppings.  In this way, every pizza has everything the same except for the crust so it's easy to tell which crusts I am happiest with without having that judgment affected by differences in the other parts of the pizza.

I have more pizza crusts to test still, and then I will be back for a second round to start refining my finalists, trying to improve my instincts for the dough and the baking time and the amount of toppings that can go on, etc.  It's a long process, but a fun one because ... well, just think about all the pizza I get to eat and share.

In the end, this process is important.  Baking consistently good pizzas in a non-commercial pizzeria oven is something that takes practice.  Pizza dough doesn't really take that long to make (aside from the time for the dough to rise) so even though it sounds like a huge amount of time is going into this, it's not as much as it appears.  But it is fun.  How could it not be with all that melted cheese, savory sauce, great toppings and beautiful crusts to compare?  It is time well spent.