Pizza Margherita

Let's make a pizza, shall we?

Yes? Oh, you're so agreeable today.

The thing is, our dough will be improved if we let it age for a day, or for overnight if we're in a hurry. So let's get started now for a pizza tomorrow. It's all about the dough, after all. Well, that and the topping.

This will be a classical pizza in the style of the Margherita, which owes its success to its thin crust and to simplicity. No double stuffed crusts for us, no siree, those thick crusted bread-type pizzas are more properly termed torts, and monsters at that. And no garbage-can toppings for us either, which are exactly that, an embarrassing profusion of conflicting flavors. Pizzas were designed to be folded in half, if you can not do that then you're eating something else -- a mutant pizza.

The crust should come close to being a cracker. Although we're making bread dough, we're not concerned with producing a flat loaf of bread. Pizza is un-risen bread. Otherwise it's focaccia with topping, which isn't altogether bad, it's just not a pizza.

After years of making every error known to bread baking, at least once to understate matters, and as an avid noodle maker, I've arrived at a wonderful tasting pizza dough. I prefer roughly 60% -- 80% AP flour with 40% -- 20% semolina, roughly estimated. For one medium size personal pizza I like to start with 1/2 Cup of water and a scant 1/4 teaspoon yeast with enough flour combination to produce a stiff dough.

Salt does yeast cells no good whatsoever. It kills them. Yeast cells hate salt. But dough without salt is blah, and salt is not so lethal that a small amount of salt can kill a large number of yeast cells. Salt is essential to the aging process of dough. It tends to retard it. Therefore, we'll add salt and age our dough overnight.

Observe my mad dough-making skillz as I estimate these amounts for tomorrow's dough. I'll estimate 3/4 Cup water and 1/4 teaspoon of yeast granules and let them hydrate for a minute. I'm not letting it proof because my yeast has got nothing to prove. I know it's good. I used cold water because I'm not concerned with hyperactive yeast cell activity, in fact, quite the opposite.

Added 1 Cup of AP flour and estimated 1/3 Cup Semolina flour and mixed. The dough came out a little bit too wet.

Corrected with about 1 teaspoon of AP flour.

I played with the dough ball. Stretched it out in my hands like a pancake. Rolled up the pancake into a snake. Coiled the snake. Turned the coil inside out. Stretched into a pancake again. Snake. Coil. Invert. Pancake. Snake. Coil. Invert. Pancake. Snake. Coil. Invert. Yay! While in the form of a pancake, I sprinkled it with salt, knowing the yeast inside which was just getting started, all went, "Ouch! There goes our perfect environment." That's all the kneading this dough is going to get, although it will be stretched tomorrow. It was covered in plastic and placed in the refrigerator where the chill will assure the yeast never gets a chance to develop into bread, but it will rise a little, just to get smashed down again and stretched out tomorrow.

Tomorrow, the toppings, and we're going to go simple.

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Does semolina scare you? It shouldn't. It's just a rougher, simpler form of flour usually but not always made from hard duram wheat grain. Large commercial milling operations use steel rollers that are adjusted for the space between them to be slightly more narrow than the width of wheat grains. As the grains pass through the rollers, as violent an experience as any grain would be expected to endure, the bran and the germ are flaked off and the endosperm, which is the starch portion, is cracked into coarse pieces. Ouch. Sifting separates the bran resulting in semolina. To produce proper flour, the semolina is ground further. This approach simplifies separating endosperm from bran and germ and makes it possible to grade endosperm to create different types of flour of varying protein levels; low for pastries, mid range for AP, and high protein for bread.
Semolina from soft wheat is white and marketed in the US as Cream of Wheat, and semolina milled from hard duram is used for pasta, gnocchi, etc., it is yellow in color and if you were inclined to examine it with a loupe, as I am, or to photograph it with a macro lens, it looks like this:

In'nit purdy?

Semolina (sometimes cornmeal) is the ball bearings sprinkled on a peel used to slide a pizza into an oven.

Semolina is essential for making pasta, and don't let anybody tell you differently. I absolutely do not understand why cookbooks describe noodle-making using only AP flour. That's ridiculous. The result is a limp anemic noodle that cannot hold up to a sauce and so vapid as to be hardly worth the effort. Some pastas are produced with 100% semolina. But that's another story. Right now, we're interested in the relative coarseness of semolina improving our pizza dough.

I buy semolina from Whole Foods in bulk from the bins and keep it refrigerated. It's ridiculously inexpensive. How I do adore those bulk bins. They're so fun! Conversely, you can buy it in small quantities prepackaged and found in most grocery store baking sections along with other milled grains and marketed as if they were something specialized and fabulously expensive. Oh, clever cook and wise consumer, the choice is entirely yours.

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It has now been twenty-four hours and our pizza dough has aged nicely. I like the smell of it. It has risen inside the refrigerator even though we started out with a scant 1/4 teaspoon of dry active yeast, and we didn't bother to proof it, and we added salt early, and we used cold water to start with, and we put it into the refrigerator right off, all of which act to retard cellular reproduction. It grew anyway. As you can see, it over doubled its size.

The basil is from the AeroGarden, splendid thing, dedicated entirely to basil, which is my favorite fresh herb, and which I can not seem to ever get too much.

We are not using San Marzano tomatoes which are available only in cans in the US, not an altogether bad thing, but not as good as fresh, in my opinion, and who do they think they are anyway? Grown on the volcanic slopes in the shadow of Mt. Vesuvius, pish tosh. Well, we've got volcanos too! If you listened to those European guys you'd think they invented the tomato, which they didn't, it's a New World fruit. In fact, they thought it was poison at first, related, as it is, to the nightshades. But let's not get worked up about that, we have perfectly fine hot house tomatoes all through the year. I'm using a mix of two sweet types.

We were not able to obtain Mozzarella di Bufala, which is sad because it's a requirement for pizza Margherita, and it won't be available until Spring, and this intolerable situation leaves us no choice but to use cow mozzarella. Oh well, they're both bovine so it can't be that bad, but it will take our pizza down a notch, and this cannot be helped. Incidentally, by buffalo, they mean water buffalo, and not American bison which is a whole 'nuther animal.

A few words about Parmigiano Reggiano. The real thing is the life blood of the people of Parma. If you have one of those green cylindrical containers of Kraft parmesan in your refrigerator, walk over there right now and throw it out, and I'll never mention this to anybody. That crap is the culinary equivalent to ground toenails and a rude and cruel hoax perpetrated upon an unknowing public. You do to everything you sprinkle it on a great disservice, and it advertises that you don't know what you're doing and that you don't care to know. Yes, Parmigiano is expensive, but believe me, it is worth every cent and a bargain at twice the cost. It takes something like 16 gallons of milk from a single species of cow that have grazed in a specific location, from a specific period of months of a year to produce 1 LB of Parmigiano Reggiano.  All of this is all tightly regulated to guarantee quality. [Let see here; According to the internets, the vats that hold the milk produce two large wheels of Parmigiano Reggiano cheese that weigh 75 to 80 LBS. Look for a full cheese wheel on the internet and it's most likely 75 LBS. The vats that produce two wheels contain 1050 litres. If Litres means liters, then 1050 liters = 277.38 Milk weighs on average 8.5 LBS per gallon, depending on its fat content. 277.38 Gallons X 8.5 LBS per gallon = 2,357.73 LBS ÷ 150 LBS for two cheese wheels = 15.71 Gallons of milk per pound of Parmigiano Reggiano cheese.] Imagine buying 16 gallons of milk. That's what you're doing when you buy one pound of Parmigiano Reggiano. Now quit complaining, and marvel!

We are not using a sauce. Why should we? We have tomatoes!

Turn the oven on as high as it will go. Don't let all those warnings and alarms dissuade you, it really needs to be hot.

The dough is stretched thin, not rolled, and lightly oiled and baked, then the toppings are put on sparingly, they're drizzled with additional oil, and returned to the oven to warm through.

Sea salt to finish.

It must be said, even if I must say it myself, this is the best pizza you're ever likely to taste. No brag, just fact.

Tomorrow, since we have the pizza dough all ready to go, and because the oven will be hot to make sourdough loaves, and because this was so good I can't stand it, we'll go on and make another, less traditional pizza.