Coming Close with Pizza at Home

Music rooms and parlors are out...the focal point of the house is now the kitchen, with a central island key for either prepping or cooking, around which people can gather. The cook(s) can make like they're giving a demonstration in front of an audience, or they can put everyone else to work, allowing each person the surface area needed to pitch in and still face one another. 

With that setup pizza is the perfect thing to make for a casual and social kind of dinner or get together. People stand around talking while they go to work concocting pizzas of their own, waiting anxiously to see how their creation evolves in the oven, hoping to impress everyone.  And when done right I think you can beat a lot of local places, brick oven or not.  Below are some things I've learned on the way to considering myself an aspiring pizzaiolo.

Make your own dough:
Unless you can get dough from your neighborhood artisan pizzeria that uses its own 25 year old natural yeast starter, your own creation will be the most rewarding. Working it from start to finish will develop your skills and it will yield something that much better than store bought. Plan on mixing the dough and letting it ferment overnight before actually cooking your pizzas.

Crank the oven up:
Nicole and I have our first ever gas oven, which is good and bad. We know that home gas ovens heat inconsistently, but they also get up to it faster than electric, and usually can get hotter overall. You're not baking a loaf of sandwich bread or muffins, so go 500 +. If you have convection, use it, and give your oven, regardless of type, 1 1/2 to 2 hours to get good and hot.

Use a pizza stone:
For better texture on the crust and more thorough cooking from bottom up, it's a good investment. Put it in the oven when you begin preheating it, as it'll take at least an hour to get primed. Put it on the lowest or middle rack of the oven to keep it close to the heating element. This will cook the denser crust quickly and get it well browned, while the toppings will have more indirect heat that allows for melting without burning.  While you're at it get a wooden or metal peel too for transferring the pizza to and from the stone.



We need an island

 Get Your Raw & Cooked Ducks on the Pond: Sometimes you want crunchy bell peppers, sometimes you want the more syrupy sweet ones already roasted our sauteed.  Keep that in mind when you're getting your mis en place ready if you have predetermined creations to execute.  A goat cheese pizza, for instance, might be better with onions previously caramelized and extra sweet rather than raw and pungent. 

Sausage is a bit of a risk to finish cooking in the 10-15 minutes I suggest it'll take for the pizza, so I pre-cook mine until just done, then let the surface brown when it's applied as a topping.  Prosciutto, when cooked, gets intensely salty, so you may want to add it right when you pull the pizza from the oven for a nice bit of textural contrast with the cooked toppings.  Arugula will sufficiently wilt from the residual heat when it hits a pizza that's just pulled from the oven, but retains its fresh pepperiness.             

Go individual:
Dividing the dough into 6 or more "individual" pizzas will yield better results than making one or two big pies, plus it allows for more personalization and a better flow. With them coming out of the oven every 10 to15 minutes, everyone gets to sample a small slice or two without filling up too fast.

Less is more:
Remember that good pizza is about the dough, the bread, not the lamb spread. A lot of people, when presented with a blank canvas of raw dough, want to put every topping they're craving on the first pizza.  But loading too many toppings can result in a mess that becomes soggy and improperly cooked, not too mention has too many things going on flavor-wise. I think you'll find a couple to a few quality ingredients cook best and make for the best texture. And try to keep a good border of an inch or so around the edge free of toppings so as to create a more bella figura.

Avoid Sogginess:
Going off the last point, overloading, especially with watery veggies, can lead to a soggy pizza where the top of the dough is gummy and undercooked, and the pizza limp. Fresh mozzarella is a frequent culprit of this too. People want to do the apizza faithful a favor by sourcing the freshest balls of cow or buffalo mozz suspended in brine, but it doesn't usually work out on pizza. The high water content can't usually be overcome by home ovens, leading to a milky ooze of water pooling in places on the surface of the pizza.   I suggest cutting it into small cubes and drying it for several hours on absorbent paper prior to pizza making.

A dryer form of whole milk mozzarella will make things easier.  It might be a challenge, but try to find a source of high quality fresh mozzarella that is not too watery--you may have to experiment with a few.  If you can get your oven up to 700° F or 800° F it will be able to evaporate the excess liquid and enable toppings to cook and brown, but most of us don't have that kind of equipment, so keeping liquid minimal is important.    

You don't need a complex tomato sauce that's been simmering for hours:
Traditional Pizza Margherita is made with San Marzano tomatoes, crushed or pureed but uncooked before they go on the pizza. The heat of the oven reduces the tomatoes, enhancing the sweet and acidic qualities, concentrating the flavor and making it saucy. I don't season my pureed tomatoes with anything but salt after spooning it on the dough and I find, even in the home oven, that it lends the pizza that authentic fresh tomato flavor. I add minced raw garlic on top of the tomatoes and any herbs as well at that point if I want something more aromatic.

Keep your damn hands off:
Just for a few minutes after retrieving the cooked pizza from the oven. This will allow any excess liquid to evaporate or be absorbed, and the structure and flavors will continue to improve as the pizza continues to cook a little. It also cuts down on the tendency for toppings to go one way and the crust the other, not to mention a burn to your tongue and mouth that will have you smarting the rest of the nizzight.

Bacon works really well on pizza...no need to pre-cook it either!

Experiment:
There's always enough dough to make one or two crowd-pleasing plain cheese pizzas, but from there the possibilities are almost endless. Most cheeses will work on pizza, it's just a matter of finding the right complimentary vegetables or other toppings to go with them. It's rare for a pizza to be so poorly done to be inedible, so be fearless. I do personally draw the line somewhere though...take a cue from the guy in the Polaner All Fruit commercial and don't call cooked dough with chicken and barbecue sauce on top pizza.