It’s amateur hour!
I got into making pizza through bread baking. As I became a somewhat decent baker, I realized most of the local pizza joints just weren’t using good flour or making very good bread. So I started trying to do it myself.
This is my second attempt using Glutenboy’s formula with Pete-Zza’s vital wheat gluten adaptation. Some of the percentages may be off from Peter’s original calculations because my cheap kitchen scale is only accurate to the gram. These were baked on day five.
97.13% KABF +
2.87% Bob’s Red Mill Vital Wheat Gluten = 100%
61% Water
.2% IDY
2.5% salt
These were baked at my parents’ house. The baking rig is pictured below. It’s a gas grill with three burners on the bottom and a heating element on top. One baking stone was placed directly on the grill and the other one was placed on a shelf above it. The grill’s thermometer read between 600 and 700 degrees throughout the bake.
My mother shaped and dressed the pies. I use toppings more sparingly, but it was her birthday and this was a lot of fun for the family. And the buffalo mozzarella they sprang for was pretty amazing.
Some of the pies ended up a little too charred in places, and the styling was certainly far from perfect, but the texture of the crust was close to what I’m looking for—seared, charred, and black in places, yet still incredibly soft. The closest I have come to this is by grilling pizzas directly over coals, much like you can find described on Slice. I like this technique, but it has its limitations, and in my experience, oven spring just isn’t happening.
On my first and third attempts with this dough, I baked in my home oven. I preheated my oven and stone to 550 for an hour, and then baked on broil 6” inches under the broiler for six to seven minutes. This resulted in a good pizza, but not the texture I’m looking for. It was a little bit firmer, a little bit tougher, and a little bit browner than I wanted. I’m sorry I don’t have pictures, but the camera we used is currently experiencing a lens error that prevents it from doing pretty much anything. When I checked the manual, it says the lens error can be caused by using it in a dusty environment, which really makes me think I was using too much bench flour.
My next move in the home oven will be to move the shelf to the top position, which should put the pie at 4” from the broiler. I am seeking a softer, fluffier pizza, something I’m not sure I have had before, but I feel like I will recognize when I taste it. Any suggestions? I’m definitely thinking about higher temperatures or trying bromated flour, but I’m not entirely sure where to go with this to get the results I want.
