Top Toppings - what the chefs go for...

A couple of weeks ago I was asked what my favourite topping is:

"Well you can't beat a well made sourdough margherita, then again, I'm a sucker for anchovies and find it hard to look past them on a menu..."

some time later

"...recently I've been making more white pizzas (without the tomato sauce) and brussels sprouts on a pizza was a revelation..."

their eyes have now well and truly glazed over

"MEATBALLS!" they rouse, "Kale, potato, have you tried them on a pizza?"

I clearly wasn't in a particularly decisive mood although it also highlights that you can't define perfect pizza, it's different things, to different people, at different times. What you can work towards is truly great pizza, memorable pizza, and that's what all the guys below specialise in. After my inability to pick a single favourite I got in touch with some of my favourite pizzerias to see what the top pizzaiolos in the UK choose when they have blank canvas of dough.

In no particular order, here's what the pros said:

Restaurant: Story Deli

Chef: Lee Hollingworth

In their words:

"We do pizza. Pizza's fun to make & fun to eat, but we're not about pizza it's just a vehicle that we use we're about organic food and earning a living from using organic food to support farmers & growers who are out there saving the soil. Everything we buy is 100% certified organically grown with the exception of the spring water we use to make the dough - it can't be called organic, but it's drawn from certified organic land, which is the closest I can get & sea salt - it also can't be called organic, but the brand we use is certified by the soil association as suitable for use in organic cooking. I don't use yeast - because there isn't an organic one. There are seven organic pizza flours in Italy having tried them all the one I use is the best for the way we cook @ 405c or 410c. People seem to like our product so I'm pleased.

Me - when I'm by myself - my partner & kid usually hijack the recipe. I always make a pizza around 3 basic ingredients egg, garlic roasted, fresh baby spinach & birds eye chillies adding an ingredient here & there"

Restaurant: Pizza East

Chef: Brian McGowan

In their words:

"My personal favourite pizza topping here is our Veal Meatball pizza. We use a white panna base. The pizza is then topped with torn San Danielle and our own Veal meatball mix. We make our own mix in house each day. Some chopped sage is sprinkled over the top and the pizza is placed in the oven. We hold our ovens at a lower temperature to traditional ovens as our dough has a far higher water content when compared with usual pizza dough. If the temperature is too high the crust will burn on the outside before the pizza is cooked through. The cooking time is normally between five and six minutes. The pizza is then sliced and finished off with some freshly grated lemon zest. Heaven.

This is my personal favourite but our biggest sellers are the Margarita, Salami and our Cotto pizzas. I cannot stress enough the attention that should be paid to the quality of the dough and the freshness of the toppings. If you keep this in mind at all times then you’re well on the road to producing the best pizza possible."

Restaurant: Pizza Pilgrims

Chef: Thom and James Elliot

In their words:

"I think our favourite topping of the last year has to be Nduja [edit: aka The Ninja as I insist on calling it]. It is a spicy sausage from Calabria in the South of Italy, made from the belly and cheeks of the pig, along with a (very) high proportion of Calabrian chilli (sometimes around 50%). It is then smoked and cured. We discovered it on our "Pizza Pilgrimage" at the end of 2011 in a small town called Spilinga.

The fatty cut of meat used means that it also has the strange property of being spreadable. This also makes it amazing on pizza - as the Nduja melts in the hot oven and releases pools of hot, spicy, meaty oil. It needs to be used sparingly for this reason, and we often don't add any olive oil to the pizza to compensate. It works well on a bianca base, but we think it is hard to beat just added to a sourdough Margherita."

Restaurant: Great British Pizza Company

Chef: Rachel Seed

In their words:

"As you may know, we have a very small main menu (6 pizzas) as we use the best quality (local wherever possible) ingredients and make everything ourselves. We also always have two weekly specials, and the most popular have been the pulled pork and BBQ sauce (inspired by our trip to Orlando where we had fabulously gluttonous trip gorging ourselves on delicious street food!) and Chaumes, trompette mushrooms and smoked garlic (all ingredients purchased from a trip across the channel to visit some french markets)."

Restaurant: Santa Maria

Chef: Lucio Miano Petta from Naples

In their words:

"The main thing is...that we are sort of against toppings. For us the best topping is just the fior di latte mozzarella. We are pioneers of the "less is more", the less you put on a pizza, the better. Only this way, you can taste the freshness and lightness of the dough, and the tomato sauce. Toppings would hide the underneath flavours!

Fave topping: just tomato sauce with garlic and origano (Marinara) fior di latte mozzarella (margherita) or going for the buffalo mozzarella (bufalina). Nothing else.

Fior di latte mozzarella, typical neapolitan mozzarella, has a very delicate and light taste. Combined with the tomato sauce, reaches the perfect combination. Has to be cooked in a 450-485 degrees oven for 50 seconds. Over doing it, will become liquid. Buffalo mozzarella, made with buffalo milk typical of the area of Mondragone and Battipaglia. Has a very strong taste, the texture is nearly rubbery and chewy. It's the deluxe version of the regular fior di latte."

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:

Outdoor food tastes better

My girlfriend and I are spending Christmas apart this year which seemed like a perfect excuse to hold our own mini Christmas beforehand. We weren't tempted by the traditional affair, much as we're both a fan of turkey, but liked the idea of an Aussie style meal and a chance to fire up Bertha.

I love winter BBQs and not to be dissuaded by the grim weather we strung a tarp from the back of the house making quite a cosy little grotto or more accurately our own shrine to meat, this wasn't a particularly veggie friendly menu. We'd decided on surf and turf and given the special occasion ordered a lobster from Fin and Flounder and a huge t-bone from Meat N16. I was excited. The lobsters available at the market were smaller than they were expecting but that way I felt justified in ordering a couple of scallops too - this was a once a year treat so why not… The lobster we bought was a beauty, a 700g Dorset Blue still live and kicking and complete with roe. We weren't originally planning on a starter, but combining the roe, scallops, creme fraiche, chives and some blinis we rustled up seemed to do the trick. Bertha did a great job on the scallops, steak and lobster and also threw out enough heat so that we could sit outside enjoying the evening and the sound of rain falling on the tarp. It was a merry mini Christmas indeed.

Strikes me now that this blog has a distinct lack of pizza posts currently, something I plan to rectify in the New Year, although for now I'll leave you by wishing you all a very merry Christmas and a happy New Year.

Introductions - Part 2

Moving on to the next members of the family, this time the little ones, Sanj and Clare. These are our sourdough starters. Sanj, I made from nothing more than flour and water in my old flat, and he takes his name from my old flatmate. Clare, Sanj's more sophisticated other half, came along later when I attended a baking course at the E5 Bakehouse and they both sit happily bubbling away in the fridge in their own booze. We feed them once a week, usually on a Thursday as this way they're pretty lively for baking on a Saturday and they're used every weekend we're home be it for loaves, bagels, pizzas or even naans.

We've toyed with quite a few different recipes and have finally found one which we're really happy with - that warrants a post of it's own. Although if you're interested in starting making your own sourdough bread I'd thoroughly recommend the course E5 Bakehouse run, they're a really friendly bunch and the course packs in loads of information and techniques in one day.

Here's the photo journal of this week's efforts: