Topping tasting

Less of a post, more a set of pictures from the weekend's tasting session.

A couple of good friends came over on Saturday and we used the excuse to test out a few toppings we'd been wanting to try. I'm not going to ramble on about which was our favourite, not just because each of us ended up picking a different one, but more because I've got a much more interesting topping related post in the pipeline which should be coming your way soon...

In the meantime here are some pictures of the weekend's creations:

Photos credited to said good friend

Due Sardi

It'd been ages since we'd made pizza, too long, ages since we'd even had pizza. But a Friday night in recovering from the dreaded lurgi seemed like the perfect excuse to try out some of the delivery places in the area.

The restaurant of choice was Due Sardi, the takeaway arm of Amici Miei (reviewed much more eloquently here) where we'd had a couple of excellent meals previously so our expectations were high. Things started well, I called through our order and it arrived, warm, within half an hour. Here's what we went for:

Margherita - Tomato Sauce, Mozzarella, Basil.

The benchmark for any pizzeria. A prize to anyone who spots the basil

Napoli - Tomato Sauce, Mozzarella, Olives, Anchovies

 Another classic and personal favourite.

Completa - Tomato Sauce, Mozzarella, Pepperoni, Gorgonzola, Onion, Avocado & Cherry Tomatoes

More out of curiosity than anything else.


They looked quite good, some reasonable blistering and signs of charring although overall I'd have preferred another 30s in the oven. The toppings weren't bad either, generous quantities and a good salt kick from the anchovies and gorgonzola on the Napoli and Completa. For me the jury's still out on the role of avocado on a pizza and as well as looking a bit brown by the time it arrived it didn't really add anything here.

The real let down was the crust though, perhaps my favourite part of a pizza, this was a real disappointment. Dry, bland, chewy to the point of distraction and lacking rise or fluffy texture.

Having said all that these were still a reasonable set of takeout pizzas and given we demolished them all they can't have been that bad. I sometimes wonder that I've been spoiled of late and that combined with my initial high expectations probably worked against them. So perhaps I should give them another try?

Here are the details:
Cost: A very reasonable £23.65 including delivery
Verdict: The dough was the let down.
Will we be back: Perhaps, the excellent meals we've had at Amici Miei previously have probably earned them a second chance

How the leopard got his spots

…not from an Ethiopian as in Kipling's version, or in the usual fashion for Neapolitan pizzas but get them he did and we were pretty proud of last night's pizzas.

Yesterday was another day of tests, tweaking and perfecting. We were using Caputo Tippo 00 flour for the first time, we tried out three different dough hydrations (all with the Franco Manca recipe mentioned in the last post). We trialled three new topping recipes, all classics in their own right originating from some of the best places in the US. But we were also testing out a new method of making pizzas. Something I hoped would achieve the charred edges but chewy interior which we'd been aiming for. That's what I was most excited about. That's what I'd like to talk through here.

The technique itself I actually dreamt, yes, I now dream of pizzas - does that make me fluent?! The idea being to cook the base quickly and achieve the rise and 'oven-spring' in the crust as it's placed on hot stone for 60-90s; at that point though, I would take the pizza off the stone on a metal peel and use the lower firebox section in Bertha to caramelise / carbonise - take your pick. That was the plan anyway.

Here's how it looked in practice:

initial bake on the stone

finished off by the fire

And for once, it was a plan which worked. As tasty as our previous efforts had been, they'd always looked a little anaemic. We'd brought them out early to avoid drying out the crust and burning the base, but in doing so, we'd missed the speckled charring or leopard spots which add so much flavour - a hallmark of greatness for the best pizzerias. 

Check out these beauties though:

The texture was amazing too, fluffy, chewy and just what we'd been aiming for. We were chuffed.

I've love to go on about the flavour, to talk about the specific toppings, as these were three recipes I'd had my eye on for ages, although our sinuses had other plans. We both had stinking colds and as visually appealing as these all were, we couldn't taste a thing. What's the sensory equivalent of a rain check? We're going to have to make all of these once again.

Here are the recipes though if you're having better luck on the mucus front:

Brussels Sprout and Pancetta Pizza (à la Motorino)

 Pizza Sorrentina (Kesté Pizza & Vino)

 Rosa Pizza (Pizzeria Bianco)

D-Day

Saturday was D-Day, Dough-Day to be clear, we didn't venture to Normandy. The aim was simple, to try a variety of dough recipes with a view to finding our favourite. We were sticking to classic Neapolitan pizzas which happen to be both our personal favourites and notoriously difficult to perfect. The dough has fewer ingredients typically than New York, or square pan Sicilian styles, but the higher temperatures required in cooking mean there's a fine line when aiming for a charred exterior but soft chewy cornicione - or crust to you and me.

I'm an engineer by background and the geek in me took over as I insisted on minimising the variations between each pizza so we could be sure that all we were testing was the dough. Each pizza was formed from the same flour (not Caputo Tippo 00, which I know I'd be marked down for in Naples, but Stoate's Organic Stoneground Strong White flour - I've got a 25kg sack of the stuff which I really should use up before ordering another). The same toppings were used, this was classic Neapolitan style so it had to be margheritas. The oven was held at the same temperate, well, within the relms of what's possible on a small domestic wood fired oven. We heated Bertha so the temperature of the stone read ~300 °C with a flue temperature of 400 °C. Ideally I'd have liked this higher as traditional Neapolitan ovens tend to run around 500 degrees, however there the heat source is from one side and they have a much more even distribution. In Bertha the fire is directly below the stones, so the bottom of the pizza tends to cook much quicker than the top. As a result, we ended up having to take them out early to avoid burning the base, which means the crusts lack the telltale leopard spot charring typical of Neapolitan pizzas, but you can't have everything… I'm already planning to experiment with the blowtorch to rectify this.

finally... almost pizza time

Margherita was the order of the day

time to cook

Bertha in action

Anyway, back to the dough. I ended up trying 4 variations, a sourdough recipe with a strong pedigree, as I believe it's used by Franco Manca, "The Best Pizza Dough Ever" recipe from 101 Cookbooks, which stems from acclaimed baker and author Peter Reinhart. We also tried a no knead recipe from the Slice pizza blog and finally another Peter Reinhart recipe (I'm a bit of a fan) from his Crust and Crumb book, which started with a pre-ferment, poolish or sponge, so was a bit different to the others. Four dough recipes - can't be that hard I thought. Error. Each required several day's preparation along with an elaborate mixing and resting schedule, so out came the note book again. I didn't help myself by selecting mainly US recipes either, how many millilitres of water are in a cup… (well it turns out it depends on your cup, that'd be 236ml for a US one or 250 for a metric one - I worked on the assumption that they're patriotic about their cups in the US, so went with 236).

my scribbles, complete with pizza stained tasting notes

Here's a summary of the different doughs I made:

	Working Name	Origin	Pre-ferment / Special Preparation	Ingredients
1	Sourdough	Franco Manca, Margot's Kitchen	Active sourdough starter (Clare) 20h ferment	Water: 250ml Flour: 425g Starter: 7.5g Salt: 4.5g
2	101	Peter Reinhart, 101Cookbooks	Overnight rest for dough	Water: 196ml Flour: 284g Yeast: 1.5g Salt: 6g Olive oil 28g
3	No Knead	Serious Eats	Room temp rise 8-12h Refrigerate to prove for 2-4 days	Water: 242ml Flour: 373g Yeast: 5.6g Salt: 7g
4	Poolish	Peter Reinhart, Crust & Crumb	Active poolish Overnight rest	Water: 89ml Flour: 224g Yeast: 0.5g Salt: 7g Olive oil: 56g Poolish: 140g (Flour: 126g, Water: 236g, Yeast 1g)

As you can see from the ingredients column there was considerable faff to sort the ratios into manageable quantities, if we'd stuck to the original recipes we'd have ended up with enough dough for 32 pizzas, which even by our gluttonous standards seemed ambitious. This way we had just over 500g of dough from each recipe so we could make two 250g pizzas.

On to the pizzas themselves, and confusingly in the order we ate them:

No Knead:

Our thoughts: Very light and airy, best rise, crust like fluffy white bread, not much flavour.

Poolish:

Our thoughts: Sweet. Less rise, more 'crumb' texture. Tastes like potato cakes! More caramelised, could work well with blue cheeses and figs.

101:

Our thoughts: Better rise than Poolish, lighter than No Knead, still little flavour.

Sourdough:

Our thoughts: More complex and substantial, interesting flavour. Sweeter tomato mixture would work well to balance the sour flavour from the dough.

Summary

So there you have it, 4 different dough recipes with some surprisingly different results. I don't believe you can say which is the best, that's too subjective, but what we can say is which was our favourite, and that was the sourdough by quite some margin. It had a far more interesting flavour and added more to the overall taste rather than being just a receptacle for the topping. The dough was also one of the easiest to make too. Guess I shouldn't be too surprised that the recipe from the award winning Franco Manca came out on top, but we learned a lot along the way.

The first pizzas turned out so well we didn't feel the need to repeat the process, so after stuffing ourselves with an extra sourdough pizza we took the spare dough and made some focaccia (mmm… salt and olive oil) and a loaf too: