Real pizza ovens are much hotter.
At the point where you're getting the dough from the restaurant, why not just get the pizza from the restaurant?
For me it's a few things.
1) the kids love putting "their" toppings on "their" quadrant of the pizza, and wow, like a lot of things in life, when you make your own there are 0 complaints.
2) You can really put premium toppings that no pizzeria would spend on our even stock.
3) You can get it fresh out of the oven, like "burn the top of your mouth (again, you dummy) cheese napalm" fresh.
4) You can put as much or as little of any combination of cheese as you like, and it doesn't have to be the powdery pre shredded dry-frozen stuff that a lot of pizza places use.
5) Really it takes like 5 minutes to dress a pizza, heating your oven up to whatever it's highest settings is takes longer.
6) You can barbeque your pizza.
7) It's usually pretty cost effective when you consider most delivery places are charging $15+ for a large (14") pizza with a few toppings. Plus you save the tip and the emissions from a delivery driver (provided you buy a few and pick them up on the way home!
If you want top quality ham, organic tomatoes, etc, there is no restaurant in town who does that.
For $17 you can get decent dressing though.
If you put the decent dressing on top of your (great) $3 dough you bought from the restaurant, you get a decent pizza ($17 street value) for $9 spent.
> what part of the rest of the pizza-making process can you do better than the restaurant?
I have had success with heating a large cast iron pan on the stove top to ~700F, dropping the dough in that, adding toppings when it's ready and then finishing it in a broiler or well preheated oven. These guys show how it's done, without words, better than I can describe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXAW2GseICs It is pretty damn good technique. They're using 00 flour, high protein (available at Italian markets in any big city).
One thing you can do at home better than the pizza shop, however, is to use crazy good artisinal toppings, dialed in exactly how you like it.
unless it's about the topping selection
Customize it to your personal liking. Tastes differ greatly re: salt, tomato variety, amount and kind of cheese, presence or absence of olive oil or basil...
I also get my sauce from them also.
Not that I wouldn't get a great satisfaction from making the perfect dough myself but there's plenty of other activities in life that once can work on for satisfactions. Dough isn't a top priority for pizza.
(Now for the perfect sourdough loaf that's another story).
If so, thank you for your service. It's working.
On a serious note, Github could be a good place for blogging because you can get CI to check your code examples, and even to lint your spelling, as well as get readers to supply PR's to fix any errors they see.
I have yet to get any comments, but I suspect that's because most people don't know it's there.
- As Outlook: https://pcottle.github.io/MSOutlookit/
- As Word: http://pcottle.github.io/MSWorddit/
- As Code: http://codereddit.com/
Sure, Github's repo interface probably isn't optimal, but it's not much worse than a minimal personal blog/template. And if you're not concerned with the dev pieces you've at least got the actual no-frills content right there in front of you.
Regardless for the Mozzarella, stretch it into really small pieces and wrap it in kitchen paper for at least an hour. That way you don't create a watery mess on the pizza.
The whole joy of making Pizza at home, is that it's pretty easy so you can really just yeet any old ingredients available on and just see what sticks (Or more realistically, smells right)
Due to the yeast and eating the pizza just after cooking, the star of the show is the dough. Making the dough is fast, fun, easy, and shockingly, astoundingly essentially just dirt cheap! With the dough and sauce ready, making a pizza is faster than delivery, carryout, or even frozen.
So, I've wanted a pizza for one, one pizza for a whole lunch or dinner. I end up with a pizza about 6 1/2" in diameter with sauce, Mozzarella cheese, and pepperoni. It's darned good. It's a filling meal, about 600 C (food calories).
Shock #1: The cost of the flour is, in the US, shopping at Sam's Club not counting the cost of the club membership, via 25 pound bags, sit down for this, 9 US cents per pizza. Shopping at usual US grocery stores, the cost is about double that, 18 cents per pizza.
Shock #2: The 9 cents was so surprising that last night just out of curiosity I added up the cost of the ingredients for one pizza, just under 40 cents.
Shock #3: With the ingredients ready, can have a hot pizza ready to eat in 20 minutes with less than 15 minutes of being busy with the work and the other 5 minutes, say, reading Hacker News!
Shock #4: Don't need or want to use an oven! Still get the coveted crisp bottom crust from a high temperature oven with a pizza stone, but are done with the pizza even before an oven could get hot!
Yesterday I typed in some extensive notes as part of what software developers know well -- now that I'm making these pizzas, only myself and God understand how I'm going it, and without my notes in six months only God will still understand. So, I have the notes.
Here I will give a brief version.
The ingredients are:
For the dough, flour, water, yeast, and salt.
For the sauce, canned crushed tomatoes, tomato paste, some of the usual seasonings, and a little olive oil.
The cheese is just common shredded, part-skim Mozzarella.
The pepperoni is, well, just four slices of pepperoni widely available sliced.
The three most important tools are a common microwave oven, a restaurant style stamped steel saute pan with a bottom round and 7" in diameter and with a LONG handle, and a small burner on a common electric stove with power level set on medium.
Briefly here's what to do:
First make a batch of dough and divide it into 8 pieces, one piece per pizza. And make a batch of tomato sauce.
For the dough, use 1 Kg of flour. Likely by a little should prefer "bread and pizza" flour, e.g., at Sam's Club. To a bowl of about 5 quarts, add 1 T (tablespoon) of active dry yeast (either the standard stuff or "quick-rising" intended for bread machines). Can get the yeast in little paper envelopes -- the contents of one envelope, about 8 grams, works fine. Or can buy yeast in jars of about 4 ounces -- for that just use a tablespoon. Then add 700 ml of water at 110 F. Mix. Add 1 1/2 T table salt. Mix. Quickly before the salt kills the yeast, add the flour in roughly (can be VERY rough) 1/3rds. After each 1/3rd, mix with a kitchen cooking spoon. Will end with a lot of moist, sticky dough with little pieces not yet stuck to the main mass. No need to use fingers.
The proportion of flour to water, e.g., the 700 ml of water for the 1 Kg of dough for the flour I have, is critical. Should measure carefully. Since the water content of your flour may vary from mine, or may vary from one source of flour to another or just with the humidity where you store your flour, you may have to adjust the proportions a little. The flour I'm using may have relatively high water content; if so, you may have to use a little more water.
Put about 1/4 C (cup) of flour on a pastry board, spread the flour roughly to a rough circle roughly 1' in diameter. Scrape and or roll the dough out of the bowl and on top of the flour. Sprinkle about 1/4 C flour on the top and sides of the dough.
Now knead the dough for 8 minutes; the kneading completes the mixing of the flour, water, yeast and salt; 8 minutes can make a nice pizza; more than 8 can result in a pizza a little tough to chew.
To knead,(A) Using hands and fingers, press the dough to roughly (can be very rough here) twice its area on the board. (B) Pick up the far edge of the dough and pull it to you to fold the dough in half. (C) Now the dough is likely wider than long; if so, then rotate it 90 degrees. Repeat (A)-(C) for 8 minutes.
The first few steps of all of (A)-(C) will get the dough into one relatively smooth mass. About this time fingers and hands may be coated with dough; in this case rub hands and fingers to let the dough fall to the main mass. From now on will have little or no problem with a lot of the dough sticking to hands or fingers.
BIG, HUGE, point: When you start, think of the outside surface of the dough. Well that is ALL you EVER touch!!! The inside of the dough is sticky, but you NEVER touch it! See, as you fold the dough, you are making the outside surface that was next to the board ALL the surface. As you keep doing (A)-(C) for 8 minutes, the outside surface from the board will get stretched enough to start to become sticky. Okay, then add a few T of flour but ONLY to the board and UNDER the dough, NOT to the top of the dough!
After 8 minutes, the dough will feel elastic and start to spring back. The usual test is to press the dough with a finger and get some spring back. You are DONE. Put the dough back in the bowl (don't have to bother to clean the bowl), cover the bowl to keep kitchen air away from the dough (the kitchen air could dry the surface of the dough too much), and let the dough rise, that is, let the yeast grow and generate CO2. The dough will rise well at any temperature from a refrigerator to 100 F or so. But at 115 F, the yeast will start to die. Let the dough rise until roughly (can be very rough) double in volume.
Now divide the dough into the 8 pieces. Flour the pastry board again, use fingers to separate the dough from the surface of the bowl, and roll the dough onto the flour. Dust the surface of the dough with 1-4 T of flour. Form the dough to a long log, say, the length of the diagonal of the board. Cut the log in half; cut each piece in half; cut each piece in half. Now have 8 pieces, hopefully all about equal in weight. For the cut surfaces, touch them to the board to lightly flour them. Put each piece in its own covered bowl, e.g., the 24 ounce, covered, plastic bowls from ZipLoc (mine are years old -- maybe they are still for sale). Apply, snap on, the covers, let the dough rise, say, each piece to half fill its bowl, and refrigerate until ready for a pizza. Note: Pressure from the CO2 can pop off the lids; so occasionally snap the lids back on, again, to keep kitchen air from the dough.
For the tomato sauce, in a 3 quart pot, add 3 T of olive oil and lightly cook however much garlic you like. Add two cans of crushed tomatoes, 28 ounces net weight per can. Add 12 ounces of tomato paste. Add whatever seasonings might like, salt, pepper, oregano, basil, parsley. Mix. Heat slowly with occasional stirring to sterilize the mixture, say, to 180 F, cover, let cool, and refrigerate.
For a pizza, take a microwave proof plate about 7" in diameter, with fingers gently separate the dough from its bowl, place the dough in the center of the plate, and spread the dough to a disk about 7" in diameter (larger if you prefer a thinner pizza and have a larger plate) with a rim. Microwave on high for 1 minute; for even heating, rotate 180 degrees and microwave on high for 1 more minute. The dough will puff a LOT. Using a fork, gently separate the dough from the plate and place the dough in the saute pan with the flat side of the dough, the side that was next to the plate, down. Maybe press down some on some of the larger puffy parts of the dough.
Add and spread about 2-4 T of the tomato sauce. Add and spread about 1 ounce of the shredded Mozzarella, in volume of the loose shredded cheese maybe a little less than half a cup. Put on four slices of pepperoni. Put a lid on the pan; put the pan on the burner; wait about 13 minutes.
So the steel pan yields the desired crust on the bottom. The lid creates a small oven that cooks the rest of the dough and heats the sauce and pepperoni and melts the cheese.
Want the bottom of the pizza to be crisp but not burned. Want the rim of the pizza puffed and cooked enough not to be raw but also not too tough to chew; want the sauce hot and the cheese melted. I get these results, but with your equipment, not exactly the same as mine, you will likely need some trials (I did a lot of trials with my equipment).
Use a spatula to move the pizza to a cutting board and cut it into 4 slices, each with a piece of pepperoni. Slide to a luncheon plate, call your significant other to share this, and start a second one!
For the plate I use in the microwave, that is from a very old collection of from some frozen dinners. The plates are essentially paper with some plastic. They are about the right size and are microwave proof, and the dough, once heated in the microwave, does not stick strongly. A glass pie plate might be a good alternative.
The pizza, once cooked, won't stick strongly to a well seasoned saute pan.
Making the batch of dough takes only about 20 minutes and is fun.
Most of the time for making the sauce is just opening the 3-4 cans.
Each pizza is ready in a little less than 20 minutes. Eaten just after cooking it's GOOD.
From my notes from yesterday, here are the costs for the main ingredients and the total cost (US cents) per pizza:
9.524 Flour
1.100 Yeast
0.684 Olive Oil
5.320 Crushed Tomatoes
2.213 Tomato Paste
11.900 Mozzarella Cheese
8.462 Pepperoni
-------
39.203
It's fast, easy, fun, cheap, and good!
In a pinch (in Waipio Valley, Hawaii) I made 30 little pizzas of Pillsbury flour (scooping runny dough, almost batter, from a bowl), cheddar cheese, and Wesson oil on parchment on a stone perched atop a big, inverted soup pot under a broiler. It came out great! I wouldn't do it that way again, but most details matter less than you would expect.
As in my post just above, I have good news for you and everyone else: By actual experience, for about a dozen recent trials, done need to let the water "soak" into the flour at all. Instead, just as I documented, just add the flour to the water in 1/3rds, mix after each 1/3rd, and then proceed with the kneading, rising, dividing into 8ths, let rise again, and get on with making pizzas. The dough in the pizzas is terrific, puffy, fragrant, etc.
I adore Neopolitan pizza and have always considered it better than anything else. However, judging by the ratio of "regular" pizza places vs Neopolitan pizzerias it would seem i'm in a minority.
I was never quite sure if the relative lacking number of Neopolitan pizzarias in the US is due to different taste preferences of the consumer, it simple hasn't caught on yet or it maybe more difficult/expensive and therefore prohibitive?
There's a fetishization of Neopolitan technique that, while natural, has diminishing returns in terms of variety and innovation. Small brewers don't all slavishly recreate age-old European beer recipes...
If you knead your rested dough balls just before rolling it reactivates the yeast without needing to add sugar to the mix. Just make them a little thicker and they will puff up the same.
But I have the feeling a good oven that can get really hot is just as important for good pizza as the dough.
I don't think there are many consumer grade ovens that get to pizza-oven temperature :(
1. Use a preheated pizza stone or similar (e.g. cast iron pan) to get as much radiant heat into the crust as possible.
2. Position the pizza stone close to the upper heating element and/or switch to broil for the last few minutes of cooking.
I love the idea of Github becoming a more popular place for recipes. I translate many of the recipes I end up cooking into Markdown files[1], and love that Github renders them in a way that I can still share with my relatives.
The real win though is that with git for VC, you can update these recipes with the smallest changes and notes each time you cook it, knowing that each time you're getting closer to the perfect version of each meal. I hope this idea catches on enough that people might one day submit issues / PRs for each others recipes much like we do with open-source code.
May try this dough out myself soon since I'm still on a baking kick from all the Christmas cookies. Will open a PR / issue if I have any suggestions from the experience!
Would set us up nicely for automated chefs :)
A little tip, if you want to make Neapolitan pizza, and you don't have an oven that can reach 460 Celsius, you should add extra virgin olive oil, this will raise the amount of time in the oven before the pizza becomes biscottata (crunchy and hard), in a professional oven the Neapolitan pizza cooks for around 2 minutes, and if the oven is not in the right temperature and so you need to cook it more the pizza becomes crunchy.
I recommend watching this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cq90lUQUCUo (it has English subs).
https://slice.seriouseats.com/2010/10/the-pizza-lab-how-to-m...
I made a few searches online and was surprised that new york / new jersey was not among top 10 zipcodes.
https://welcomematservices.com/top-10-zip-codes-for-pizza-re...
If you really wanted all the listings I know the national-restaurant-association (NRA) has all of this data. You can also find the full data set on yelp as well. https://www.yelp.com/dataset/documentation/main. the json data set indicates a category value you can use too. Zomato didn't have the data source, kaggle's datasets were limited, didn't find anything on data.gov worthwhile. You can also find number of people living per zipcode from public datasets on data.gov
Also, Hoboken, NJ is technically two zipcodes.
> Also, Hoboken, NJ is technically two zipcodes.
Anyway, re: your first link, the data source sounds very questionable:
> Scoring of the Top Ten U.S. ‘Pizza Hoods’ in 2016 was determined by internal data on number
> of pizza restaurant redemptions through Welcomemat Services as well as the number and
> strength of pizza restaurants and businesses in each zip code covered by the brand
I've had best results with a 8mm thick backing steel and the broiler method in a home oven, but some day I want a wood fired oven :-)
I need a farm with water buffalos, and enough space to grow my own grain, haha!
Regardless you have to be careful, since people are very opinionated and might not know all the variables of your pizza. An experienced baker understands the dough and can react with changing variables.
How about a docker container for baking pizza?
Somehow I always end up with to stringy dough after it has risen and it would tear to easy when handling. I might give it another try with these instructions, thx.
100 ml of tepid water
275 ml of flour (yes, mililiters)
1 full teaspoon of salt
2 grams of yeast
Minimum of 4 hours of dough risingHeathens! shudders
Pun intended
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5h3uzIs4C2w&list=PLURsDaOr8h...
Useful app if you go down the pizza dough rabbit hole: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pizzapp/id1228158792
https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1017931-pizza-dough
Low-moisture, full-fat cheese is essential. Again, you could drain mozzarella di bufala, but that is one more step. Finally, sauce is what you can really play around with. I've gotten good results using just a tablespoon of tomato paste from a tube, or premade "pizza sauce" or cooked down marinara pasta sauce.
I make the pizza on a pan, stick it in there to start, then pull the pan as soon as I can shake the pie free. Depending on how it cooks I'll use the broiler as well. Turns out great.
I cut down on the salt a little, and add a bit of olive oil since I don't have a proper high-temp pizza oven, just an ordinary ~275C home gamer unit.
Forum with far too much information on Pizza dough and preparation + Experimentation on how to imitate famous Pizza e.g. reverse engineering Papa Johns
http://www.pizzanapoletana.org/public/pdf/disciplinare%20200...
Most popular mistakes are:
- too much yeast - no salt - cheap ingredients
No pun intended