Last night, I finished a new design which worked better than any other designs I have implemented so far. . . . Please, notice the the bent steel plate below the pizza stone and above the bake element. It functions to divert the heat away from the stones (keeping them not excessively hot) and toward the dome. This mechanism keeps the dome hotter than the floor, giving me a longer "bake time-frame".
Two nights ago I had a strange dream. . . I dreamed a round pizza stone, on its way floating upward from beneath an ocean, colliding with and shattering a rectangular pizza stone. Once the round stone reached the surface of water, a beatific Pizza Margherita appeared on it. So . . . yesterday morning I replaced the stack of rectangular pizza stones with a stack of round pizza stones (three of them) inside my gas oven. In addition, I removed the "curved steel plate" from below the stones and placed it, still in the same position, under the bake element to reflect, like a mirror, the heat radiation upward, around the circumference of the stack of round pizza stones. Below are the results:
_______________________________________________________________________________________
1000 gr. Caputo Pizzeria (Datum Point)
590 gr. Water (59%)
28 gr. Sea Salt (2.8%)
30 gr. Sourdough Culture (3%)
♣ The dough was prepared with Kitchen Aid
♣ Indirect Method: Autolyzed Flour ⇒ Salt-water ⇒ Sourdough Culture)
♣ Mix time (water [537 gr.] & flour [1000 gr.] only): 3 minutes (on slowest speed)
♣ Autolyse duration: 30 minutes
♣ Knead time: 5 minutes (on slowest speed)
♣ Fermentation Period: 2 + 49 hours at controlled room temperature, which got out of control toward the last 6 hours of the second fermentation! I did not mean for the 2nd fermentation to go that long and unsupervised.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
♣ Conventional Gas Oven Temperature: 885° F floor & 869° F dome for the 1st Margherita; I did not measure the floor & dome temperatures for the 2nd Margherita.
♣ Bake time: 87 seconds for the 1st Margherita; 93 seconds for the 2nd Margherita
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Both pizzas had very tender and flavorful crusts. (Dear Chau, the first Margherita bears the mozzarella di bufala by "Mandara" and the second Margherita bears the fior di latte by "Polly-o".)
