Pizza 1.0
Idea Behind the Experiment
To be honest, finding an excuse to make pizza in our household isn’t hard, and if I’m being honest you could apply the same to tacos. In fact, I think Jackson’s first food words were pizza and tacos. Pizza is a dish that has a variety of preferences (most of which I think are just wrong). You have everything from Chicago deep-dish to NY thin crust. There is pizza with marinara sauce, garlic sauce, cheese sauce, alfredo sauce, BBQ sauce, etc. In our household, we are big fans of pizza, and I think the best pizza style in the world comes from Naples, Italy.
During my Navy days, I remember one of my first port visits was Naples, Italy. I recall our liberty group (the group of people you go out into ports within the Navy) wanted to find some good pizza, so we hailed the first cab we found and asked for “Buona pizza”. The driver dropped us off at a pizza joint, and after that, it changed what I thought of pizza. The waiter came over and I remember we ordered a sausage pizza and a chicken spinach pizza. I’m not sure how we came to decide on those types of pizza, but that’s what we ordered. We also ordered the most expensive bottles of wine (which wasn’t much) since we were all single Navy guys. This wasn’t to say that we were making much for money, but being dumb and single makes you allergic to keeping money. The pizzas that were brought out I can still remember to this day, and I compare every pizza I taste now to the pizza I had then. It was perfect, yet I can’t remember the name of the restaurant or where it even was on a map. It probably didn’t help that we were throwing down bottles of wine, and after tipping the waiter handsomely he brought out what tasted like an apple infused liquor for us as thanks.
For our honeymoon, we booked a 16-day cruise with Royal Carribean that would start in Barcelona, Spain and end in Dubai, UAE with three days in Barcelona and three days in Dubai. One of our stops would be in Naples, Italy and Jen would get to experience the same flavors that I was able to experience. This time I had a smartphone to look up the best pizza in Naples since I couldn’t remember the name of the restaurant from the Navy. I found a ton of pizzerias, but one restaurant stuck out in multiple pizza lists called L’Antica Pizzeria de Michele. We were able to walk and find it, and also found a giant line with close to 50 people. Apparently this is normal, but we were starving so we walked across the street to Pizzeria D’Angeli Napoli. I can’t imagine pizza being any better than what we found because it was incredible. These are the types of pizzas that we would use as a standard to judge other pizzas.
The Process
Now my original intent was to buy some “00” flour from Italy and make pizzas this was. Unfortunately finding “00” flour isn’t very easy, but we found a dough kit with “00” flour in it so we went with that. Now my patience with dough as we’ve found out is not great, so Jen has the job of official dough roller. There are many ways you can roll/toss pizza dough and I’ve seen all chefs use whatever method works for them. You can toss the dough if you’re into that sort of thing but if you’re not it’s easiest to either stretch or roll the dough. I have even seen an episode of Ugly Delicious where the chef uses a wine bottle to roll the dough. We decided to roll the dough as the elasticity of the dough makes stretching a time-consuming process. I’m a fan of imperfect pizzas as you can tell by the pictures. I pizza doesn’t have to be round, and the rustic look of imperfect pizzas just adds to the presentation. We were aiming for around a ¼” thickness for the pizzas. They will rise slightly, and we were going for a nice crispy thin crust.
Meanwhile, I would be preparing what we would be topping the pizzas with. We decided on two red pizzas and two white pizzas. One red pizza would have pepperoni, while the other would have crumbled hot Italian sausage. One white pizza would have grilled chicken with a balsamic glaze, while the other would have grilled chicken with a Buffacue sauce (Buffalo and barbecue sauce). For the sausage it was fried up in my cast iron skillet, and using the grease from the sausage I then pan-fried up chicken tenderloins seasoned with salt and pepper. The pizzas were all topped with either shredded mozzarella or mozzarella slices.
After putting the pizzas together we placed the pizzas on perforated pizza pans and cooked them at 450 degrees for about 10 minutes. I recommend using pizza pans because they are perforated so you get a crispier crust, and I also advise placing the dough on the pans before loading with toppings. Otherwise, you have a super-thin crust that is hard to place on the pan.
Lessons Learned
The choice of buying shredded or whole mozzarella is up to preference, but I’ve found fresh mozzarella definitely melts differently and can have a different flavor. If you buy a hunk of mozzarella just beware that it holds a lot more moisture. To remove the moisture just cut into slices and dry beneath paper towels with something heavy on top. After you dry you can shred or just lay on top. I’ve found that shredding the sliced mozzarella gives the best result.
For the next attempt, I plan on buying actual “00” pizza dough. The main point of this experiment was to figure out the thickness of the dough and to see what ingredients work best. On a previous pizza, I used balsamic on the precooked pizza which turned into a watery mess. On this attempt, the reduced balsamic glaze turned out much better.
Useful Gadgets
For the most part, there aren’t any must-have gadgets, however, there are a few tools that make the process much easier. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.
The first of these is a good rolling pin. You want a pin that rolls easily across the dough, has a decent weight to it to reduce the amount of strain you have to use, and the pin should have enough room for your fingers to grip. There are some very low profile rolling pins that don’t leave as much room for your fingers. You could also try using a French rolling pin that is essentially a small tee ball bat. I went with the rolling pin below after reading a lot of good reviews about it.
The next tool that can help with cleanup, and make it easy to separate pieces of dough is a metal scraper. You could use anything that has a straight edge and is durable, but a scraper is cheap enough that it shouldn’t be an issue.
The last tool I would recommend is a good pizza pan. Every pizza cooking surface is different, so I recommend using what works best for you. We used to use a pizza stone pretty frequently, but when cooking multiple pizzas it’s not as easy. The stone also needs to be preheated, unlike a metal pizza pan. I bought a couple of pans like the ones below. They are cheap enough that you can have a couple, build the pizza’s right on them, and they have holes which helps with a crispier crust.
