Part fifteen of the Pizza Project:
e2e Process
The last post completed the process part of the project. I’ve tried to summarise the process on the attached diagram / graph. A bit difficult to summarise: too many target audiences and interests to work for all.
On the diagram a timescale runs along the bottom x axis, starting at -9h to depict “Preparation” the day before. The scale is not linear. Up the left hand side of the graph is temperature as the y axis, focused on the 24C target but with an ambient temperature of around 29C and substantially cooler ingredients.
During Preparation we can see the temperature of the ingredients is changed to get to the temperature we want at the start of mixing: the example here involves warming the flours and cooling the water.
After Preparation, we move onto Mix: from time zero we have mixing to create the dough with the goal of reaching the target process temperature of 24C: the red dot. Note the time scale change from hours to minutes. This is followed by around a 3m period Scale when the mixed dough is formed into balls and tubbed.
Then the ball Maturation period follows, keeping the temperature constant at 24C. In the example this takes us up to 11h.
At this point the dough has doubled, x2, at the start of the Window of Consumption. The first ball is now used to make pizza.
The y axis only serves in this example for the Preparation and Mix aspects. In the future if temperature was varied during Maturation, modifications would have to be made to the process.
Now ingredients...
Pizza Ingredients
Flour, water, yeast and salt first, then toppings. Even though some toppings may be unusual, alternatives with different names exist: perhaps this is more about flavour combinations, than specific names. As part of the project ambition, I have attempted to use ingredients from Spain and Internationally.
Pizza Base: Flour
With a lot of exaggeration, we find 100% Caputo Pizzeria 00 flour produces a cake or pancake like character: very light, creamy, but too much “give” even though the protein level is high compared to a regular Type 00. Alternatively, we find 100% Spanish T-55 strong flour (protein 13%) can give a bread like character: far too tough. I'm struggling to find a consistent way to express this, the distinctions are very small.
Using Spanish T-45 and T-55 general purpose flour (8.5 - 9.5% protein) gives us a good texture, creamy, somewhere in between the above, but the dough is too weak to easily handle: especially as some of our topping recipes deliberately use overloading. We expect to start using this flour more in future blends but it is not a priority.
When the first sack of Pizzeria arrived we made poor pizzas as the hydration was too low: 55% was ridiculous, but some recommend it. The third session had 60% hydration and was amazing: it handled so easily, and a "creamy" flavour. So we were very impressed, and carried on happily.
A year later we tried a blind comparison session, half of the dough used Pizzeria, the other half a Spanish general purpose / German strong blend that had been popular the year before. Hydration 62%, yeast and salt the same. It was almost impossible to tell the difference. The difference between pizzas made using the same flour was greater than the difference between the different flours. What had changed however was there had been an intervening year of progressively improving technique.
We were left with the conclusion that Pizzeria was more tolerant of a less experienced or less patient pizza maker. Our old "pre Pizzeria" blend however was a bit unforgiving of poor handling: it had a higher "big hole in the pizza" rate and some dodgy corniciones.
We continue to try different flour percentages, sometimes varying with mood and appetite.
The spring 2019 favourite was a blend of 10% Spanish strong flour 13% protein, 30-40% Spanish strong flour 12.2% protein, and 50 - 60% Pizzeria. Then for the project it was 10% Spanish strong flour 13% protein and 90% Pizzeria. We have moved away from Pizzeria since, now we are more experienced we can get close to what we want without the costs. We believe successful marketing image to be a large part of Italian flour prices. As a lot of Italian flour is made from imported grain, it would make great sense to find a way to differentiate product value and increase sale prices: the base ingredients being a commodity.
The attached table shows some of the successful home blends we have used to date: the table calculates the overall protein % for each blend, we currently stay above 12.2%. There are several blends yet to try out ("n" in the used column), especially using more general purpose flour. The colour coding indicates unusually low protein levels: we have had success down to 9.5% in the past. Most of these blends refer to pizzas made before the full standardisation of the process. It’s a work in progress. You may have spotted that the bottom right hand 12.2 figure is an error, it should be 12.28: apologies.
Blend protein content is just one aspect as the number hides many things such as the proportions of different proteins. We have found flours can be a challenge once you go beyond the packet label. At "European level" flour and additive health aspects are regulated, but each European country has its own specification standards: different to USA standards. In local supermarkets flours from different European countries are available, we have seen flours from 4 different countries stocked on the same shelf length in a local supermarket.
Italian, German and Spanish flours are all specified differently, some have huge allowed variation (ie Italian 00), some have different analysis moisture contents so ash and protein figures are not comparable, some have very tight specification (Germany), some have unique measurement methods (Spain). France and Germany do not specify flour types using protein, they use ash content. And of course the French are different again.
The country of wheat origin has to be specified in many countries, also the country of milling. Country of wheat origin is not specified on Italian flours, but in Spain it is a selling point: grown and milled in Spain for instance, as much wheat is imported (Italy also being an importer of wheat). Here we get into commercial blending, common in the USA, but many European flours are milled "straight": a single wheat ground and packaged as one. Pizzeria is a blend however. Anecdotally, German flours are much more finely ground than USA flours for the same protein level. Whatever “same” means.
It gets worse: unlike the prairies of USA and Canada, the provenance of wheat strains is highly variable in Europe based on geography, climate, much smaller scale and consistency of farms, size of field, let alone variations within and between crop/s. Quite independent of the choice of internationalised sowing seed stock and fertilisers.
We don't worry about all of this any more. Now we just use protein % as a loose indicator of character and stick to 12.2 – 12.5% blends.
The Pizzeria is purchased from Napoli in 25kg bags, it is immediately broken down into 3kg ziplock food bags with as much air as possible removed. The bags are stored in clingfilm sealed 30 litre plastic lidded tubs which contain around 100g of coarse salt to fix air humidity. The tubs are kept on a tiled sealed concrete floor in the base of a cupboard in our basement.
Over a year there is a 19-25C temperature range in the basement, with a very slow rate of temperature change. 25kg of Pizzeria lasts for 11-15 months, and we have almost finished our third bag, with no degradation noticeable (checked by making a batch of remaining old flour and new arrival flour dough together, and blind tasting the pizzas). The flour was purchased in July, August and September over almost 3 years, so the flour in each bag will have been milled and blended from grain at least 10 months older. There is 3kg remaining of a Pizzeria sack bought in July 2018. It's fine. As you’ll see later, it may be there for some time.
The strong flours used in the blends are bought throughout the year in 1kg bags, usually buying several bags at one time from the same batch. We use supermarkets with high turnover of stock. The bags are stored in a floor level kitchen cupboard, simply because these flours are rapidly used with bread making: throughput is around 4 - 6kg (9 - 13 lbs) of flour per month. These flours are sourced from Germany (wheat grown and milled) and Spain (wheat grown and milled) and are unbleached with no additives. The brands have been used by us for some years. How much variation is there ? No idea, no indications to make me suspicious. We have also used brands which do not work well.
Pizza Base: water, yeast and salt
The pizza water is bottled spring water (Sierra del Segura Neval Spring, Murcia) with 243mg/l sodium potassium and magnesium bicarbonates, 122mg/l sulphates, and 147mg/l chlorides. It tastes very pleasant: definitely not too hard, but with a bit of edge. There are some bottled waters here which taste a bit insipid, others too mineralised. This one suits us and is really cheap in 8 litre bottles: it is our house general-use bottled water and is widely available in Spain. We have not experimented with water hardness and solute levels: if there is a good reason to do this this, please update me. We know that water is a key variable in brewing.
The yeast was “Mercadona” supermarket brand IDY (no additives or processing chemicals) sourced from Germany. The yeast manufacturer is unknown. German purity laws are relevant, this is probably why there are no additives to the yeast. On completion of the project we changed source to one of the big yeast suppliers: Lallemand. I digress for a mo:
Lallemand products are not just Canadian: they are widely available in Europe through their acquisitions and manufactured in several European counties. Mine is a 500g bag of Instaferm 01 (Red) IDY from the acquired Portugal factory. Sorbitan Monostearate is also present in this yeast, as a residue from the manufacturing process. It is also used in pile ointment.
NOTE that the SC strain/s used in this IDY is/are unlikely to be the same as in the same product made in North America, as it may be tuned to Portuguese and Spanish bread manufacturer and market preferences. Spain, France and Germany make significantly different mainstream and artisanal bread products with distinctive processes.
Whilst not really part of the project, we have found that the new yeast has changed the dough Growth Rate upwards to around 0.13h-1. ....an IDY yeast from a different manufacturer made using a different process giving different results.... to be expected. The yeast is definitely from a different supplier / process as when Sorbitan Monostearate is present in a food in Europe it has to be declared by law. I need more pizza sessions to refine the new Growth Rate estimate adequately to compare with the controlled sessions. As you will find at the end of the next and last post, that is unlikely to ever happen.
The salt is fine sea salt locally sourced, nearby are the salinas of some of the biggest producers of sea salt in Europe. The salt is not iodised and does not have any free-flow additives. Please note that so-called rock salt is actually sea salt too. All that varies between one unadulterated salt and another is the proportion and type of contaminant.
We do not add anything else to our doughs. We have a range of other more artisanal flour types at home, but have not experimented with these in pizza. We do not like adding oil ( we have used EVOO up to 2%). We avoid sugar for health reasons and may in future try reducing salt levels further, again for health reasons.
Margherita Time
The recipes presented in earlier posts give an impression of "excessive" toppings. Our pizza sessions in reality are dominated by the basic standard pizzas, with some experimentation. The perfect Margherita is clearly a personal experience: whilst we respect the perspective of the AVPN, we are global in outlook and do not consider their perspective to be a worldview.
Below are our variants on Margheritas which we call the Mutantes. We enjoy “straight” Margheritas, but the twists below are popular with guests, and one in particular we believe is a genuine improvement.
Mutante Uno: Add Jamon Serrano: the usual scrunched up pieces, 6 -10 pcs. The saltiness offsets the bland cheese perfectly: but that really comes down to how salty the tomato sauce is. We don’t detect a difference when we use expensive jamon as opposed to the supermarket standard. This raises a question of how salty a pizza sauce is: professional chefs tend to use a lot of salt as they know it “enhances” a dish. Ingredients vary hugely in the amount of salt they contain: compare a Parmigiano with mozzarella for instance. Different cultures tend to use more salt than others, and palette is personal and trainable. I use as little salt as I can get away with. One of our guests automatically smothers everything in salt.
Mutante Dos: No mozzarella, use Tierno blends of Spanish cheese with or without Emmental. These are all low in salt compared with mainstream cheeses. We have played with clumping or discrete lumps of cheese. I prefer lumps, others prefer clumps. Also the issue of whether it either melts out to a flat surface or not, forms grease droplets, or picks up char. Another taste and visual appeal issue. (Pictures attached to make the point)
Mutante Tres: Use fine leaf basil, not broad leaf. It’s commonly available here being more hardy in hot dry conditions and it continues growing outdoors in winter. The attached picture in the pot is from the start of January outdoors, and the flowering stalks from October. The result is quite different and every pizza bite has some basil in it with a very heady perfume. Occasionally we have visually confused oregano for small leaf basil. Attached is a comparator pizza picture with both types of basil.
Mutante Cuatro: No Pizzeria 00 flour, flour being one of the German / Spanish straight flours or a blend (see earlier on blends). This is partly about texture: our eaters say cake lovers like 00, chewy sour bread lovers like T-55. But I have control: I make the blends and my eaters are laboratory guinea pigs being tested every week. Nothing in it. Frankly, we have given up trying to tell the difference: there are easier tricks to play such as time and hydration.
Mutante Cinco: Decent Spanish tomatoes. Aha… a lead into Toppings….
But which of the Mutantes delivers the most ? It’s personal to some degree, but there is a consensus on a winner.
Pizza Toppings
Below is topping information additional to that provided in the recipes. Apologies for any duplication.
We constantly experiment with ingredient substitution, not being receptive to the AVPN viewpoint when it gets to toppings. The Mediterranean is a big place with wonderful ingredients throughout, just as every region in the world is, in the eyes and palette of the individual.
We vary the proportions of the cheeses per individual pizza to match the strength of the topping flavours. The Emmental is a low cost “industrial” production general purpose cheese, not a high end version. Cheap mozzarella prices start here at the price of Tierno mixture and Emmental.
We have available locally a range of mozzarellas, we have tried more expensive Italian variants, including with buffalo milk. We were surprised and a little disappointed. Marketing ? Cooked cheese on a pizza does not taste the same as when eaten uncooked at room temperature. We really enjoy eating mozzarella uncooked.
The Gran Padano is usually replaced with old hard Spanish cheeses. (Parmigiano is a variant of Gran Padano, the latter more widely available in Spain) The Spanish cheeses are usually blends of sheep goat and cow milk.
We finely HAND CHOP all of the hard cheeses: a cheese grater provides pieces too thin for our topping finish: we want to see melted tiny “blobs” of these cheeses on the finished pizza for taste, charred or not, and appearance. Otherwise it is invisible and just provides umami. The old cheeses vary noticeably in taste, and cost around 60% of the price of a cheap Gran Padano. They are around 25% more expensive than Tierno.
If you look at the 2019 World Cheese competitive rankings (which the US won with a cow cheese), you will see a dominance of Spanish cheeses which are predominantly sheep and goat (three of which we use entirely by coincidence).
On the subject of umami, we have occasionally sprinkled, and I do dare say it, monosodium glutamate (MSG) onto tinned Peruvian artichokes and "bland" batches of onions during topping preparation. Likewise we use celery salt rather than sea salt when preparing toppings, for that extra "je ne sais quoi".
Pepperoni, being a US product, is not available here: the Spanish are particularly proud of their own spiced and plain sausage types, chorizo, salchichon and loganiza being well known.
Chorizo is widely used as a generic name outside Spain and Portugal, but even here there are many different varieties here which can be hugely different. The name by itself gives no idea of what the sausage will be like, other if it is from Spain or Portugal there will be pork and pimenton in it. A pork product. I have heard of a Mexican chicken chorizo.
Sausages here are raw, air cured or smoked, air cured from the hot south, smoked from the cool north. Often we find them too greasy to use on a pizza. We use a very finely sliced moderately spicy chorizo with care, crumpling up individual pieces so they do not lie flat on the pizza, and can catch char on their edges. We have a favourite loganiza which is high in pork content and low in fat, we pre-fry that to get maximum char. We have not found salchichon or morcilla (black pudding) to work well.
Jamon: enough said on that earlier. We saw a TV programme where a single small curing attic had more than 8 million Euros worth of jamon curing. Crazy stuff.
Vegetable toppings: the only ones which are not allowed are sweetcorn, carrots and parsnips, sweet potatoes and regular potatoes. We did try potatoes with skins.
We have a huge range of fresh vegetables locally with extended growing and cropping seasons. Two of our supermarkets have local distribution centres so their fresh produce is only a few days old, the other chains have national distribution centres in the middle of the country, we do not buy from them as it may be up to 5 days old. Local markets are open most days and produce is often a day old. A big cooperative close by sells “seconds” from its packing centre as you watch the produce come in from the fields.
BUT once the vegetables have been toasted on the pizza, they are no longer fresh... and often look like distant relatives of the pre-cooked topping. So does it matter if they are a few days older ? I don’t know.
A general principle we follow is to DRY OUT toppings when they are being prepared, to reduce excess water. This includes queso, cebolla, pimientos, alcochofas, calabacin, alcaparrones, guindillas, aceitunas and lacon. Certain toppings we generally precook and season (salchica, embutido, bacon, langostinos) some toppings are prepared both precooked and raw (cebolla, pimientos, champinones).
The prepared toppings (and sauce) are removed from the refrigerator a few hours before use to WARM UP.
A question - why put a home pizza with a wet cold topping into the oven ? Illogical. We are at home not in a restaurant.
We find that certain topping combinations fit different pizza disc types, cooking temperatures and duration: reflected in the recipes. For instance, a spicy meat based pizza (caliente pizza) works best for us with a minimal cornicione, and a good degree of surface char. A pizza with a raw egg added (fiorentino, desayuno pizzas) has to be cooked at a low temperature: especially as the entire topping except the egg has been pre-cooked. The egg is usually just skinned over at the end, very runny.
Pizza sauces
We have two sauces, one is a tomato base, the other a mixture of the tomato base with one of sour cream, cream cheese or greek yoghurt, to make a rose sauce we call salsa rosado. The proportions vary, we mix to taste: we seem to be putting in less and less tomato into the rosado over time. The tomato base has evolved and has been pretty stable for the last 2 years.
We have gone through the usual experience: local fresh pera tomatoes (pear tomato: what you may call a plum tomato) and cherry tomatoes, many different tinned varieties, and some cases of DOP tins from the San Marzano valley. Also the preparation of the tomato salsa: straight out of the tin or fresh slices, hand crush, potato crusher, hand mill, stick blender, variable speed food processor blender…. Then the flavourings to put in the salsa. So what did we learn about tomatoes ? A personal view:
The Mediterranean countries are full of pera tomatoes and EVERY country, let alone region, claims they have the best tomatoes. Some of the best tomatoes we have had come from the former Portuguese colony of Goa (now in western India).
The Italian tomato variants "of pizza tradition" were established in, and came from Spain: Spain and Portugal spread tomatoes all over the world.
For instance, one of our local markets has entire individual stalls selling just tomato varieties, often with the same variety (usually pera) having differing prices depending on age, taste and the amount of soil on them (they are grown close to ground: plants are in the soil, not hydroponics). The quality of fresh pera tomatoes in our region is so high, it’s called the salad bowl of Europe.
I am absolutely sure the same is correctly said in southern California, perhaps even more so. Good tomatoes are not exclusive: they are a global phenomenon (except for those Dutch hydroponic things).
In our opinion, fresh tomato slices or cherry tomato halves are sadly too wet to use as a topping. The cherry ones also tend to fall off when placing the pizza in the oven (my problem). Chunks of peeled, de-seeded fresh tomatoes work, look good, but are largely tasteless on a cooked pizza. Preparation pain with no eating gain.
Spanish tinned whole peras need some “water” removal to make a sauce we like. They vary substantially by brand. Some of the cheapest brands of tinned pera tomatoes are far, far better than expensive ones: you just have to shop around to find a good batch ! I vaguely remember reading a comment like that in this forum some years ago, it was spot on. We have a favourite brand.
Typically with a 800g tin (large) I strain off the liquid with a sieve, let the liquid stand for a while and remove 100 - 150g from the top of the liquid as it separates and clarifies. Then recombine the rest and use it. This liquid tastes GREAT though: used as a consomme in Michelin level cuisine… and by us.
The DOP San Marzano’s were poor: huge amount of juice, fleshless toms. What is the fuss about ? Clearly the AVPN is there to promote the interests of Napoli: as a former marketeer I thoroughly support that. It may be that we did not have ‘the best’ San Marzano’s, but buying DOP: they have to deliver a level of quality.
We avoid tinned diced tomatoes: they are too coarse and need water removal then blending, but cost more. Not the best sauce, for us a consistent failure from one brand to another.
We have settled on a Spanish tomato triturado, which is a tinned de-skinned de-seeded crushed tomato paste/sauce coarser than an Italian passata (passata means mashed, but the ones I have bought in several different countries have been very fine, almost a Bloody Mary mixer). The triturado has not been dehydrated, it contains the usual 0.5% salt and inevitable citric acid. It is stocked in all local supermarkets as a TOP seller, usually on palettes in 800g tins. We have a favourite brand. If you dilute it with around 30% water and blitz to make it finer, but not aerated, it makes an evil Blood Mary base too with a bit of added green olive jar juice.
To the tomato we add celery salt (essential, a devastating condiment) freshly ground coarse black pepper and sometimes, a little dried basil or oregano, EVOO and Jerez vinegar (aged sherry vinegar, similar to Balsamic for flavour without the added sweetness: a lighter subtle character). Generally we run with just the salt, pepper and dried basil and put it in the blender for a minute on a VERY slow speed to make it a little, not much, finer so it spreads more easily. In 2019 nearly every week it has been the celery salt and pepper only. The sauce stands for several hours before use after the blender. I am not convinced of the effect of adding anything other than celery salt and pepper.
We have found that no matter how we prepare it, a sauce made from fresh tomatoes (skinned and de-seeded) cannot remotely compare with a good tinned tomato. Ah well. Sometimes the truth is not what you want it to be. At least the vitamin content is similar. Tins are tops.
Stephie
