What does it take to make a great pizza at home?
This is some solid advice... thanks @chefanthonyd.An authentic wood fired pizza oven. Barring that you can do a great pizza at home in your standard oven. When you get ready to make pizza place a pizza stone on the center rack and be sure to preheat your oven at its highest temperature setting. That should be in the neighborhood of 550 degrees F. When I say preheat your oven that does not mean wait until the little red preheat light goes out. All those tell you about is the air temperature inside the oven. A properly preheated oven means the ceiling, floor, walls and door are all preheated. That way when you open the door to put the pizza on the stone your air temperature recovery will be very fast.
Because I teach techniques, I found it useful to make a short video on using the BBQ Grill for making homemade pizza. Let me know what you think.I am in favor of Pizza from Rome Italy. It is made with a sour dough starter and special flour which includes Italian 000 (2/3) and classic European artisan bread flour (1/3) that has some ash and is made from hard winter wheat. Also necessary are sea salt and a little olive oil. If the flour is not right, the crust will never be great. See King Arthur for these flours.
My bread starter is fermented until the lactic acid makes is smell sour, which involves feeding it over a minimum of three days (room temperature), or longer if your yeast is not the instant variety.
King Arthur has an excellent pizza blend as well as a flavor enhancer that enriches the doughs flavor.
I let the mixed dough mature a whole day or more in the refrigerator, then rise again at room temperature until it doubles its size. This also improves the nutrition of the crust.
The pizza is best in a very hot wood fired pizza oven. I use my BBQ grill equiped with a ceramatic floor tile and a wood smoke box at 600~650 F.
degrees. A thin crust pizz cooks in 6 minutes or less.
You should go to Italy then and see what they put on their pizza you'd be shockedI'm on the purist side when it comes to pizza - no more than three toppings. No BBQ sauce, no chicken, no avocados, no calamari . . . My kids order this BBQ chicken thing (they call it pizza) and I shudder when they eat it.
A kindred spirit!Made pizza for dinner last night - let the dough raise twice then fresh sauce, four cheese Mexican blend around the edge, mozzarella on the rest, pepperoni, mushrooms, red pepper, shaved garlic - delicious.