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Adventures in Home Pizza Making: Part III

It has certainly been a while since I wrote about my pizza experiments at home.  Last time we saw our superhero, I was still noodling with my dough recipes, and I was still unearthing some pretty significant take-aways in my quest to make a Neapolitan-style pizza at home without a fancy oven or special equipment.

While my dough continued to improve, the heat source was still a big question mark for me.  I was unsure that the grill was getting hot enough and was any better than making the pizza in my gas oven.  So I decided to give it a shot and see what happened.

Continue reading ‘Adventures in Home Pizza Making: Part III’

Adventures in Home Pizza Making: Part II

A few weeks ago, I kick-started the pizza-making craze here on blogging for burgers, documenting some of my early (relative) successes and (definite) failures.  An avid reader of J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s food lab experiments on Serious Eats, I am consistently jealous of his cooking experiments.  I wanted to get in on the action.

So I did.

But here is what I think is the main difference.  Kenji is a legitimate food writer and recipe developer (and he’s definitely awesome at it).  I am just a dude with a camera, a kitchen, and an insatiable appetite for obsessive internet research.  In other words, I’m pretty much the same as you.  I’m not able to write off any of my food expenditures, so I’ve gotta make sure that I’m not wasting anything I buy.

In other words, I’m a cheap wannabe food writer.

With that said, let’s get back to the pizza!

Last time, I had a few major takeaways:

  • Make pizza on the peel, NOT on the counter
  • Place stone on indirect heat zone to get more heat around the sides of the pie
  • Use higher gluten flour, such as bread flour, and give the dough more time to ferment
  • Don’t use olive oil in the crust

With these lessons in mind, I adjusted my technique and headed back to the kitchen.

Continue reading ‘Adventures in Home Pizza Making: Part II’

Adventures in Home Pizza Making (Part I)

As my most devoted readers will remember, I recently made flatbread that wasn’t very pretty, but did taste pretty good.  For those of you who don’t remember or are just stumbling across the blog now, it looked a little something like this:

While this “pizza” was tasty, the cross-section left something to be desired.  It was dense and heavy, far from what one looks for in a pizza dough.

Phase II

Of course, once I got bitten by the pizza-making bug (again), it was pretty hard to go back.  I had a phase a few years ago that lasted for months, and I had been freshly re-infected.  I started to dig up my old recipes and techniques for dough making.  I pulled out my war-notes, which were tattered from wear and filled with endless scribbles.

Newly armed with old knowledge, burgergal and I made ramp pizza.

Continue reading ‘Adventures in Home Pizza Making (Part I)’