Pizza-tossing

How to Throw Pizza Dough: New Video

(photo by Mark Luinenburg) It has been suggested to me that the real reason I like to throw pizza dough into the air when I teach a class is not because throwing the dough improves the pizza, but because I am an incorrigible show-off.  I will neither confirm nor deny this beastly rumor.  But having now thrown a lot of dough, I truly can say how beautifully it thins the dough and relaxes the gluten.  There’s more on this in Artisan Pizza and Flatbread in Five Minutes a Day, but here are some photos a video that show how it’s done. Read More

Doughnuts

Savory Doughnuts

This week is Chanukah and it is all about frying our food, which brings me great joy. I am constantly trying to come up with something new to add to our menu of latkes, jelly doughnuts and all the other traditional fare. These savory doughnuts were inspired by the fried pizzas I had in Naples. We ate them as snacks during the day, to tide us over to the next pizza. Most of the pizzarias sold them outside their front doors to people waiting in long lines or folks on the run. Pizza dough stuffed with ricotta and deep friend; simple, but perfect. My boys love them stuffed with a variety of fillings, so use your imagination and create your own savory doughnuts. Read More

Pizza with ricotta, arugula, eggplant, and tomato. Lots and lots of vegetables.

This was lunch today.  If you want to get more vegetables into your diet (or sneak it into someone else’s), pizza is the way to do it.  Nobody ever turns down homemade pizza.  Here’s a vegetable pizza with lots of arugula baked right in, so this is different from what we did with arugula in the book (using it raw as soon as the pizza comes out of the oven)… Read More

Corrections to first printing of Artisan Pizza and Flatbread in Five Minutes a Day

These errors snuck through, for Artisan Pizza and Flatbread in Five Minutes a Day:

Page 52, first line:  To freeze a prebaked pizza crust… (page XX) should read (page 48)

Page 72 (Ingredient list for Crisp-Yet-Tender Pizza Dough Even Closer to the Style of Naples):  Lukewarm water amount should be 3 3/4, not 4 3/4.

Page 73 Our description of 00 flour is not quite right, the flour is actually not a low protein flour, it is very finely ground and creates a wonderfully chewy and crisp crust.

Page 91 (Corn Masa Dough) The Corn Masa amounts are wrong for the weights. The correct number should be 6 3/4 ounces or 195 grams, not 13 ounces or 365 grams.

Page 95 (Rustic and Hearty Rye Dough), last line:  Use 8 cups whole grain flour, not dough.

Page 174, Step 2 (Thick-Crusted Sicilian-Style Pizza with Onions):  Dough thickness should read “a 1/2-inch-thick rectangle,” not “a 1/4-inch-thick rectangle.”

Page 251 (Intro paragraph for Challah Dough):  Omit (450 degrees F) from Line 6

Secrets of Sicilian Style Pizza Crust

(photo Mark Luinenburg)  Growing up in New York in the 1960s and 70s, there were two options when you walked into a pizza place:  “regular” (thin-crust) baked right on the hearth, or “Sicilian” (thick-crusted), baked in a pan.  I’m fairly certain I didn’t know where Sicily actually was, and my parents were partial to “regular,” so that’s what we got.  Eventually I started going by myself and tried the chewier, thicker stuff.  It’s a hit with kids, and for many of our readers, a pan-built pizza is an easier trick than the traditional free-form pizza slid off a peel (see Zoe’s post on that). 

But first, we have a winner… of the pizza baking giveaway package from October 25.  The winner, picked randomly from among nearly 800 entrants is:  Dave W, who favors a soppressata, peppadew, and onion creation.  Dave, just answer my e-mail and we’ll ship out the package…

OK, here’s how to make the perfect Sicilian crust. 

Read More

New Video: Grilled pizza!

I promised a video to go with last month’s recipe for this fantastic mushroom and potato pizza from Provence (Rustic Wild Mushroom and Potato Pizza), a recipe from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day.  I did it outside, on the grill with a stone, so here it is.  A few things:

  1. Grill temp: Though some of the stones say to crank the gas grill as high as it can go, we’ve found that pizza done this way scorches on the bottom before the toppings are hot.  I used about 500 degrees F by by grill’s thermometer (250 C).  Today I used the Emile Henry Flame Top Pizza Stone, which worked beautifully (give it a 20 to 30 minute pre-heat)
  2. Baking without a stone: That works too; follow the directions here if you want to go for a crisper, smokier effect.  We’ll have much more on that in our upcoming pizza book (pre-order on Amazon).

Rustic Wild Mushroom and Potato Pizza Provencal

Well, we do have a pizza book coming out in October, so we can’t start putting those recipes up on the site.  But here’s one of my favorite from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, our first book (2007).  It’s never been on the web before, and it’s a gem of Mediterranean simplicity.  In the next several days, I’m going to put up a video of the gas-grill version of this bread, so check back– for now, here’s the oven version (though you can probably figure out  how to do this from our old grill-pizza posts—https://artisanbreadinfive.com/?p=846

https://artisanbreadinfive.com/?p=248

As you can see, if you choose portobello mushrooms, they’re dark, dark brown in the first place and as they caramelize in the skillet and on the pizza, they become almost black.  Don’t be alarmed– they aren’t burned.  They’re just developing intense flavor as the dehydrate a bit. Read More