This is the third pizza made from a small batch of dough that was divided into fourths then set in the refrigerator to age. The dough is three days old. It's kind of funny. The yeast inside the dough was never given a good chance to start, nevertheless it did start very slowly over a period of days while in the cold storage. When a portion is brought out from the refrigerator to the warm kitchen it explodes into activity making the frenetic best of improved environment even though the dough wad is tiny so the food available to the yeast cells is limited. If the yeast cells could take a macro view of its situation it collectively would be more circumspect regarding its available resources. If I chose to it would be possible to double the dough wad thus increasing available food for the yeast and go on in this manner day after day indefinitely never to buy commercial yeast again. That is what the bread chef does that Anthony Bourdain describes in Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. In that case, the bread dough is so bulky and demanding, requiring regular feedings of all kinds of obnoxious kitchen refuse, temperature control by moving its unmanageable bulk from room to room at hours determined by the peak activity of the dough and not by the convenience of the baker, so that the cooks become slaves to the needs of the dough and the live yeast within it and in accordance to the customary tone established by full time cooks assigned the demanding dough the unaffectionate sobriquet "the bitch."
I call my dough Pepi.
This is the first pizza to taste-test mozzarella bufala.
This is the second pizza with sausage and also with mozzarella bufala.
This pepperoni was purchased specifically for this pizza and it does taste good, but when test heated the discs curled into little cups as pepperoni slices do and formed oil in the cups. Plus it is quite tough and I didn't want that so it was rejected for this pizza. I don't even know why I'm showing it other than to serve as example. It is irrelevant to this pizza.
The sun-dried pesto isn't tomato-y enough to suit me so I decided to increase the sun-dried tomato quotient of the mixture. Water was added to assist the blending, then the excess water removed by evaporation to bring it back to a paste. Trouble just for more tomato taste, I know, but I don't have any tomato paste and I do like the flavor and the concentration of sun-dried tomatoes.
An assortment of cheeses that must be gotten rid of but not mozzarella bufala. That's being saved for tomorrow.
Previous pizzas not including the two from this dough batch:
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