I played around with the dough calculator on Wednesday night. That thing is just awesome.
Anyways, I wanted to make a whole wheat Chicago style crust. I made one the last weekend and it was great. Unfortunately, the recipe was converted to WW by dumping in water until I thought it looked wet enough, and it only rose for a few hours before we got too hungry and decided it was time to bake it. It came out great; the boyfriend voted it the best pizza ever. Since I didn't write my percentages down, I'm starting with a new recipe.
Here’s what I used:
Flour (100%): 470.83 g | 16.61 oz | 1.04 lbs
Water (85%): 400.21 g | 14.12 oz | 0.88 lbs
IDY (4%): 18.83 g | 0.66 oz | 0.04 lbs | 6.25 tsp | 2.08 tbsp
Salt (2%): 9.42 g | 0.33 oz | 0.02 lbs | 1.96 tsp | 0.65 tbsp
Sugar (1%): 4.71 g | 0.17 oz | 0.01 lbs | 1.18 tsp | 0.39 tbsp
Total (192%): 904 g | 31.89 oz | 1.99 lbs | TF = 0.406
Anyways, I made the dough on Wednesday night. I ran out of WW flour, so I used some WW pastry flour instead. I didn’t mix much, as I understand the thick biscuit-like crust comes from barely any kneading. And I was short on time, so I couldn’t’ve done much more if I wanted to. I just incorporated the water in with the flour and called it good. I covered the bowl of sticky dough and threw it in the fridge.
The dough was punched down Thursday night, and then I took it out of the fridge on Friday morning and stretched it out into a 9 inch spring form pan. From there, I covered and threw it back in the fridge.
I wasn’t sure it was a good idea to form the cold dough in the pan, but I’m starving when I get home from work, and I thought it would be cool to just heat up the oven and throw on toppings, and then have pizza very soon afterwards. It had about 9 hours to rise in the fridge, and the boyfriend took it out about an hour before I got home.
The dough seemed pretty ok Friday evening; I had to flatten down the middle to make room for toppings, but it came out ok. I put cheese on first, spices, then (vegetarian) sausage, turkey pepperoni, lots of onions and peppers, and some sauce on last. The thing baked for an hour!
Note: I took it out after 30 minutes, cut it in half, and saw the dough wasn’t done in the middle. Then I smashed it back together and threw it back in at 450 degrees for 30 minutes.
Anyways, I know I did a few things wrong. The recipe was for a 10 inch pie, not a 9 inch one (I don’t know what I was thinking). The crust was crazy thick. It was good, but very… thick. And I didn’t include oil. I don’t have anything against olive oil, but I wanted to see how much it impacts the flavor and texture. It definitely impacts the flavor and texture.
Now I have some questions. How does one assemble such a pizza so the toppings don’t burn? What goes on the bottom? What goes on top? I know cheese doesn’t go on top; after an hour it would be a blackened mass of gross. How do I persuade my onions and peppers not to leak so much on the pizza? Really, they just sweat water and make everything soggy. And yes, I pile them on; veggies are good.
Eh, I just need some suggestions on how to make my pizza more awesome. I’ll definitely put the correct pie size in the calculator next time, but what else can I do?
