Hello !

[dasmueller]

I am an ex Long Islander living in Wisconsin. I found this site through  the Fresh Loaf and have been very impressed w the information I see exchanged here. As a youngster back in the 60's I would go to a snack bar type place across from high school to get a slice or two at lunch. After high school a friend and I would often stop in at an  Italian rest-Dick and Dora's in Massapequa for a whole pie later in the evening. It was good back then but not so much when I tried to go back.

I have been making my own pizza for about 2 yrs now and it is pretty good but not close to what I see in the pictures posted here. Wow ! I have been using Evan Kleinman's dough recipe  from the March 2002 issue of Fine Cooking. It is from what I can see fairly close to Peter Rineharts recipe in ABED w the exception that it calls for no sugars. I found it to be a bit to wet-maybe my learning curve and needed a bit more salt. Usually I bake in the oven but have played w grilling a bit which I intend to pursue this summer.

Last wk I rcvd 2 pkgs of Caputo pizzeria flour. I made a 1/2 recipe w the sourdough recipe in ABED. I liked how the dough felt when kneading but felt it needed more salt.  Tonight I made a full batch w the above recipe w the exception of following Stan Ginsbergs's of NY Bakers suggestion about hydration being 56-58%. It still appeared to be a bit wet so I ended up a bit short on the hydaration, but the dough had a nice feel to it. Tomorrow we will see.


I understand the whole bakers %, weighing rather than measuring thing w flour and water but when it gets down to yeast, salt, etc. my scale will only measure in 1/4 oz. So I use measurements instead. I feel this is reasonable. Am I wrong ?

I will be in Deer Park Ny next wknd any thoughts on a nearby place for a top notch pizza ?

Again, thanks for all the great info you folks put up here and I hope to be able to help as I gain more experise.

Don

[Jackie Tran]

Don welcome to the forum!  If you were alive back in the 60's, then you definitely have more years of pizza eating experience than I have.    If you don't mind, snap some pics of your pizzas and post them as you get better at making pizzas.   I'm not anywhere close to getting there myself but always enjoy looking at other people's work/progress.   We all have something valuable to share and the rest of us can benefit from it. 

The pizzas of our youth always tasted better didn't they?  We really didn't have any standards to judge by or didn't even care back then.  I think i was always really happy to be eat pizza whenever I could get it.  One of my fondest memories of eating pizza was toasting frozen pizzas in the toaster oven when they went on sale and we could afford it.   I have another very fond memory of my 13th B-day party when my mom ordered a large pizza from Dominos for me and friends and we watch a movie afterwards.  It was just really awesome.  As a teenager and into college I use to make pizzas in the toaster on a couple slices of bread, sauce and cheese.  Memories like that are hard to recreate.  It's more about the experience than the actual baker's % that was in those pizzas. 

At the risk of offending folks, some of us get too wrapped up in the minutia of pizza making.  It has it's importance and place, but it's not for everyone.  It's more important that we can share some pizza with family and friends even if it's store bought pizza.  So IMO, you are not wrong in using volume measurements.  If I had to guess, I'd say pizza has probably been around before scales were even invented.  There's many many ways to make great pizzas and they don't have to neccessarily involve weighing out every ingredient and mixing it in a fancy mixer.   

[Bob1]

dasmueller.
If you use the dough calculator at http://www.pizzamaking.com/dough_tools.html it will give you the volume measurements for the smaller additives.  Peter stated that the measurements were pain stakingly researched.  It should be more accurate this way, unless you have a jewelers scale.

Bob