This challenge was exactly what I needed to get off my butt and try the left side of my oven – before yesterday, I had never done it. The oven floor has two materials. The right side is regular firebrick and the left side is biscotto. It is pretty easy to fall into a pizza rut. I have spent a lot of time trying to dial in my version of the wood fired pizza I ate growing up (serious Pizza Cognition Theory in effect) and now I end up making that with minor tweaks. It can kind of feel like that is the pizza I’m expected to make when the oven gets fired up. So, in all the time I have had a wood oven, this was the first time I banked the coals on the right side of the oven and launched pizza onto the biscotto.
I picked up a bag of Caputo Chef 00 flour. I was going to get an unmalted All purpose but couldn’t find one. I combined 600g flour, 376g water, 18g salt and 0.6 g of IDY, did 3 stretch/fold over the course of and hour, made four about 245g balls and let sit in a 60 degreed basement for about 24 hours.
In the end, I think the dough might have been a little under fermented. Maybe colder in the basement than I thought. The dough was definitely the weak link. Could have been some operator error opening them too. Crumb was a little tight. I made 3 Margherita pizzas experimenting with how the mozzarella was cut. Wasn’t impressed with a local market’s fresh mozzarella. Tasted like they forgot the salt in the water so I added some salt to 2 of the 3 Margheritas. The other pie was a pepperoni/green olive that gave me a chance to play with my new olive pitter.
Bakes were in the 1:30 to 1:45 range. I forgot to toss in a small log before launching the longer baked pie. After making these Neapolitan pies, I took a little nap, let the oven cool a little and then made a bunch of my usual pies. All in all, a fun day. Kind of makes me want to get a starter going.
