Advice wanted about a pizza pie crust

[TdeV]

I'm investigating a Swiss pizza-ish dish called Wähe which roughly translates to "pie". The pizza is baked in a tin with raised sides, so it often has a füllung or "filling".

I made the dough in my bread machine (flour, olive oil, lukewarm water and instant yeast) and it was very wet, but eventually I got enough flour on it to make it possible to roll out and place in the thin metal pan.

I filled the pizza with Quark (a Swiss cheese variety, made in Vermont in US, with a texture a tad stiffer than sour cream), cream, an egg and spinach. Because I wasn't sure how long the filling would take to cook, I did not use my baking stone. I have a gas convection oven whose instructions are to lower all baking temperatures by 15 degrees, so I cooked it at 375 for a time. However the instructions suggested that the pizza pie would be cooked in 15 minutes, so I raised the temperature to 425 for the last 10-15 minutes.

The pizza tasted fine. The crust was thick and pleasantly bread like in the centre BUT the bottom surface (1/16th inch) was tougher than shoe leather. The pizza wheel would not cut through it, a sharp knife was required. 24 hours later, the leftover pizza bottom was perfectly fine.

It has taken me a long time to get my pizza making where I can produce a consistent good pie, but this is a new venture for me and so many things are different from my usual pie.

Any suggestions about what is making the skin of the crust tough?

Thanks in advance 

[scott123]

Theresa, I googled 'Wähe' and it seems that all the images that come up show a crust that's more pastry-like or cake-like than bread-like.  The pastry realm is high fat, very low water and as little mixing/gluten formation as possible. I'm not saying Wähe is pastry, but I don't think I'd adhere to a purely breadmaking process. If you post your recipe, perhaps one of the Chicago style folks can comment on it, since that gravitates towards the pastry realm as well.

[TdeV]

Scott,

You must be looking at recipes which aren't what I was making. My recipe, Spinatwähe, actually comes from a Betty Bossi cookbook called "Wähen, Pizza, Flammkuchen". Here are (somewhat related) pictures which show some of the pie structure:
http://www.bettybossi.ch/de/schwerpunkt/5496_iwb_spkt_tdsu.aspx

The dough recipe was:
500g Flour
1 1/2 tsp salt
1/2 yeast cube (I used ~3.2 g instant yeast)
3 1/3 to 3 1/2 decilitre lukewarm water
2 Tblsp Olive oil

I put this in the bread machine. The dough was too wet. I added flour until it was workable.

Everything about the pizza pie was fine except for the exterior 1/16th inch (bottom) which was very hard. I'm sure it has something to do with how the pizza was cooked.

I'm trying to find out how to cook that pizza so that the crust is not hard.

(The leftover pizza was fine when reheated in the oven the next day).