Well, I got my Delonghi DSM 800 stand mixer a few days ago, and tried my hand at a NY style pizza. Here's my report on both.
First of all, the mixer looked beautiful. I decided to start slow, test it out so to speak, so I used a doubled standard NY pizza recipe (6 cups flour, 2 cups water, 2 tsp salt, etc).
And guess what? The mixer motor suddenly quit about 5 minutes in, even though it had been operating at low speed. I was like, "HUH??" I looked in the manual, and it said there's an "overheating overload cutoff", where the mixer will automatically shut off if it detects the motor has overheated. Fine, great, but that shouldn't happen with such a little amount of dough!!
So I took the mixer in for service. It's still in the shop. The guy from Delonghi Canada said that he didn't think it was normal for the motor to have shut off that quickly with that light of a load. I sure hope so--if that's normal, then I got rooked with this mixer
Anyway, on to part 2. The pizza!
WOW. It was AWESOME. The recipe wasn't all that different from what I've done in the past, but the little things really made a difference. Here's the recipe (in single form, not doubled as I did it):
--3 cups pizza flour (I bought it at a local food wholesaler in a 20 kilo bag--Sunspun brand, for those in Canada. I'm pretty sure "bread flour" is pretty much the same.)
--more than 1 cup warm water (I dunno exactly how much, but I went a little less than a half-inch over the line in the measuring cup. Thanks to all who suggested this recently...the extra water REALLY made a difference, I think, in the gluten!)
--1 tsp salt (NOT sea salt, as I had been doing lately. The regular salt tastes better.)
--1 tsp Fleischmann's Traditional yeast
--1 Tbs raw sugar (less than the 1/4-cup I had been using).
--1 Tbs olive oil
I let the dough sit in the fridge overnight. Punched it down the next day, and I found that it was easy to work with; stretched out in my hands with very little elasticity. For the first time in quite a while, I found I didn't need a rolling pin!
I put the stretched dough directly on the pizza stones at 500 degrees for around 2 minutes; then took it out, spread the sauce on, put it back in for about 2 minutes; then put the cheese on, and cooked for another 5 minutes. Once it was done, I took it out of the oven and let it cool for around 45 minutes (I had to walk away during this step, because it looked so damned good); then I *reheated* it on the pizza stone at around 350 degrees.
DELICIOUS!!!!!!!!!!!! Probably the best NYC-style pizza I've ever made. In fact, I had some friends taste it, and they told me it was the best one I'd made as well. I chalk it up to several factors:
--use of a stand mixer rather than hand kneading (better gluten development)
--extra water really helped
--better flour (higher gluten content) was important
--table salt rather than sea salt
--new sugar content (1 Tbs) was perfect amount
--reheating delay made it taste just like I remember from my old NY pizzerias!
Now if only I can get a working mixer back from the shop, I'll be in business!!!
Dave
