New York Times Pizza Article and Pizza Dough Recipe

[Pete-zza]

An article appeared at the New York Times website today (4/16/09), at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/magazine/19food-t-000.html?hpw, suggesting that readers make their own pizza.

Peter

[mmarston]

Thanks Peter, I was out of town and missed this.

The McInerney/Crust fund intro seems rather misguided but this line is great.

“You are cooking a flatbread on a rock, part of a continuum that goes back thousands and thousands of years.”

I love it!

This topping sounds good. I use Artichokes on my pizza regularly. If you don't want to deal with fresh Artichokes look for  frozen hearts, they are much better than canned. I brown them with garlic, lemon and Thyme.

Michael

[PEEL]

it is not misguided, just different, as there are sound principles for using such a mixing scheme at home.

breadcetera.com/?p=9

[Pete-zza]

For those who are interested, I recently converted the NYT Steingarten dough recipe to baker's percent format so that I could attempt the recipe and, at the same time, expand the possibilities of the recipe to other pizza sizes and thicknesses. In my case, I halved the recipe and used Morton's Kosher salt since that is the only Kosher salt I am able to find in the stores near me. To do the volume-to-mass conversion of the flour blend (all-purpose flour and bread flour), I used November's Mass-Volume Conversion Calculator at http://tools.foodsim.com/. I selected the King Arthur all-purpose and bread flours from the pull-down menu and used the "Medium" Measurement Method. In my case, Medium meant dipping my measuring cups into the flour container, after first fluffing the flour, and then leveling off the tops with the straight edge of a kitchen knife. When I weighed the flours out using this method, the weights were very close to the values I got from using the Mass-Volume Conversion Calculator. The weight values are likely to be a bit different using other brands of all-purpose and bread flours, but as noted below the hydration of the dough made using the dough recipe is so high, and a lot of bench flour will be used, that these two factors will combine as to minimize the effects of the slightly different flour weights. According to the Mixed Mass Percentage Calculator at http://tools.foodsim.com/, the King Arthur flour blend has a protein content of 12.2117%.

I followed the instructions for the dough recipe as closely as I could. There were a couple of interesting aspects of the recipe. The first was the high hydration, about 87% based on the flour weights I used. The second was the high oil content, almost 10%. That was a unique combination that I had not seen before. Even when using a fair amount of bench flour, as the instructions suggest, the finished dough before going into the refrigerator was still quite wet and soft. When time came to use the dough, after almost one day of cold fermentation, I concluded that it was perhaps possible to dress the skin on my peel, but out of caution I decided to dress the pizza on parchment paper on my peel. I described the results of my efforts at Reply 3 at http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,8476.msg73691.html#msg73691. Based on the amount of dough I used to make my pizza (a 14" pizza), I calculated that the thickness factor was 0.09595. That is perhaps a reasonable value to use in one of the dough calculating tools (I used the expanded dough calculating tool at http://www.pizzamaking.com/expanded_calculator.html) to make other sizes of pizzas, but it will in practice vary somewhat based on the amount of bench flour that is used to offset the high nominal hydration of the dough.

Based on the above as background, this is the baker's percent version of the Steingarten dough recipe that I came up with:

Flour Blend* (100%): Water (86.7478%): ADY (0.69298%): Salt-Diamond Crystal Kosher (1.86995%): Olive Oil (9.89977%): Total (199.2105%): Single Ball:

409.1 g  |  14.43 oz | 0.9 lbs 354.89 g  |  12.52 oz | 0.78 lbs 2.83 g | 0.1 oz | 0.01 lbs | 0.75 tsp | 0.25 tbsp 7.65 g | 0.27 oz | 0.02 lbs | 2.25 tsp | 0.75 tbsp 40.5 g | 1.43 oz | 0.09 lbs | 9 tsp | 3 tbsp 814.97 g | 28.75 oz | 1.8 lbs | TF = N/A 407.49 g | 14.37 oz | 0.9 lbs

* The flour blend includes 1 1/2 cups of King Arthur all-purpose flour (199.75 g./7.05 oz.) and 1 1/2 cups of King Arthur bread flour (209.35 g./7.38 oz.), with the weights based on the Medium Measurement Method
Note: No bowl residue compensation

Peter

[Pete-zza]

After I entered my last post, a member was kind enough to send me a PM to tell me that there is a video at the NYT website that shows how to prepare the Steingarten dough and make a pizza out of it. The video, featuring Jill Santopietro, a chef and recipe tester at NYT, can be accessed at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/magazine/19food-t-004.html?ref=magazine. I believe the video is worth viewing. In my case, I wanted to see how my dough might have differed from that shown in the video. After viewing the video, I concluded that I made the dough almost exactly like shown in the video. I even used the same two King Arthur flours and about the same amount of bench flour (at every stage). However, I would say that my dough was wetter than the one shown in the video. I used the standard conversion of 8.345 ounces/cup to convert the volume of water to weight. If Jill used something less, like 8 ounces/cup, that would have accounted at least in part for the dryer dough she produced. Using 8 ounces (weight) of water/cup, for example, would reduce the hydration from about 86.75% to about 83.2%.

Another difference is that Jill appears to have used her dough shortly after preparing the toppings. In my case, I refrigerated the dough for almost a day. I also allowed my dough to warm up on my counter while the pizza stone was preheating. Jill used her dough without the warm-up. That made the dough easier to handle, even to toss it a bit. I could not have tossed my dough skin. It was too extensible and did not lend itself to using a rolling pin had I decided to use one. However, I noticed that even Jill had trouble with the dressed pizza sticking to the peel and had to free it up by putting flour under the dough and blowing under it. So, even her dough was on the wet side.

After seeing the video, next time I would be inclined to use less water and possibly to work with the dough cold when ready to make the pizza. I would decide at that time whether to use parchment paper based on the condition of the dough and the types and amounts of toppings I would plan to use.

The modified dough formulation with the lesser amount of water would look like this:

Flour Blend* (100%): Water (83.1582%): ADY (0.69298%): Salt-Diamond Crystal Kosher (1.86995%): Olive Oil (9.89977%): Total (195.6209%): Single Ball:

409.1 g  |  14.43 oz | 0.9 lbs 340.2 g  |  12 oz | 0.75 lbs 2.83 g | 0.1 oz | 0.01 lbs | 0.75 tsp | 0.25 tbsp 7.65 g | 0.27 oz | 0.02 lbs | 2.25 tsp | 0.75 tbsp 40.5 g | 1.43 oz | 0.09 lbs | 9 tsp | 3 tbsp 800.29 g | 28.23 oz | 1.76 lbs | TF = N/A 400.14 g | 14.11 oz | 0.88 lbs

*The flour blend includes 1 1/2 cups of King Arthur all-purpose flour (199.75 g./7.05 oz.) and 1 1/2 cups of King Arthur bread flour (209.35 g./7.38 oz.), with the weights based on the Medium Measurement Method
Note: No bowl residue compensation

Peter

[peetzabone]

Wow... what a wet mess! I thought I'd measured wrong... I have now cheated (I was impatient) and kneaded it and let it absorb more flour as I worked it. I'll see how it turns out...

I need to use it tonight so I'm going to let it rest out of the fridge... I want it to "age" as fast as possible. Is that logical?

[Pete-zza]

I need to use it tonight so I'm going to let it rest out of the fridge... I want it to "age" as fast as possible. Is that logical?

peetzabone,

A dough with a hydration of over 80% (and even less if a lot of bench flour was used) and yeast at close to 0.70% will ferment very quickly at room temperature this time of year. If the dough ends up being very extensible, and possibly on the wet side, you may have to use parchment paper rather than preparing and dressing the pizza on a peel.

Peter

[peetzabone]

Just a quick followup...  the dough, as you predicted, went to fermentation rapidly and I had two beasts on my hands within a couple of hours. I "punched them down" or de-gassed them.. whatever it's called and portioned them into 5 and 8 oz balls and wrapped them in plastic. They were still *very* sticky and and I had to dust my hands with every step.

At cook time they worked out very nicely although they tore more easily than my typical dough. I was repairing a lot of holes.. I needed a tube of "Pizza Putty" 

The flavor of the crust was I suppose a little unremarkable.. the texture was nice (550 deg cook on stones for ~6 mins). You don't get great pizza when you cut a bunch of corners but as you all know- it's always fun, it's always learning and it's almost always better than what gets delivered.

I stole the idea for shrimp, artichoke and bacon.. .it was the best of the bunch by far- a recipe I'll repeat. I pre-grilled the shrimp over wood to rare (marinated them in lemon, oil, garlic). Crisped some bacon (american) and crumbled it. Used marinated artichokes ( I know.. blasphemy.. but Mezzetta products are always tasty). I put garlic and oil on the dough, topped it w/ whole milk mozz, fresh marjoram and the three ingredients listed above. Black pepper as well. Still thinking about how good it was and how good it *could* be if taken to the "max". Not sure who's idea it was but it is a great combo.

[Pete-zza]

peetzabone,

According to this blog, http://journal.ngaloppo.org/2006/11/perfection-pizza/, the NY Times dough recipe comes from Jeffrey Steingarten's book and is called "Perfection Pizza." I am skeptical of absolutes when it comes to describing pizza (and anything else), but I found the recipe to be quite interesting because of the combination of extremely high hydration and high levels of oil. I have seen one or the other many times but usually not together. I think I would be inclined to use the dough fairly promptly, rather than after 24 hours, even under refrigeration. For a pizza of any decent size (e.g. 14" or more), and without going overboard on bench flour, that may be the only chance of using a peel rather than parchment paper.

Peter