Success through Failure: Homemade Pizza

Marshall loves pizza.  I like pizza, but Marshall loves it.  It's one of those foods he could eat all day every day without ever getting tired of it.  I can only eat pizza when I'm in the mood for pizza.  Now, show me something like Japanese or sushi or Chinese or Mexican - I can eat that nonstop.  We all have our go-to food and pizza is a big thing for Marshall.  A couple of years ago, he was on a homemade pizza kick and so for his birthday he got a pizza cookbook, a pizza peel, and a ceramic pizza stone.  After our first foray into making our own pizza dough, we broke our pizza stone.  According to the almighty Alton Brown, the way to get a good crunchy-but-chewy dough, is to heat up the oven really hot and then make a steam bath at the bottom of the oven, so it's not a super dry heat, but it has a bit of moisture to chewy-up the dough.  Well, this made our pizza stone crack right down the middle.  Who knew?  We tried again, but we both agreed it seemed like too much work, even if it was rather tasty.

Fast-forward to the present time, I kept hearing from my mom and my sister how easy it was to buy the raw pizza dough from Trader Joe's to make homemade pizza.  This sounded great because the most time-consuming part of making pizza is getting the dough made.  This cut out that almost full day of mixing, kneading, and proofing before you can even think of eating it.  We got the dough.  It seemed a little more wet than than we had expected.  So, we thought we'd add a little flour to it and knead it.  It still was super sticky and not like the pizza dough we had worked with before.  We both worked to get this dough into a pizza shape.  Once shaped, we piled on the toppings.  Both of us love pizza with lots of toppings:  sauce, cheese, pepperoni, sausage, peppers, mushrooms, onions, and olives.  We get ready to slide it off onto our [metal] pizza cooker, which had been sitting in the oven getting nice and hot and the pizza won't slide off the peel.  That peel had cornmeal and flour and we were both stumped as to how it was still stuck.  With the oven wide open and all the 500F heat escaping into the kitchen, we grabbed all the spatulas we could find to get the pizza into the oven.  We finally did and this is what we ended up with:

Yeah...we ended up with a very ugly, half-assed calzone, rather than a pizza.  Granted, it tasted really good, but when you're looking for pizza and this is what's on your plate, it's rather disappointing.


Marshall really wanted to get this pizza right, though, so he dug out our copy of Alton Brown's I'm Just Here for More Food (2004) and looked up the pizza dough recipe we had used long ago.  He prepped the dough:  mixed it, kneaded it and proofed it.  Everything was going well.  We learned from our original failure and when it came to topping our pizza, we scaled things back a bit.  This time we went with only a few toppings:  sauce, cheese, spicy Italian sausage and bell peppers.  It stretched correctly and wasn't sticky.  It slipped right off the peel into the hot oven and we finally got a pizza.  It was delicious.  I like Brown's pizza dough, which is the thin crispy type of pizza dough and not thick at all.  There is a bit of chew, but it's not too chewy either.  It was apparently too delicious to photograph and we devoured it before we could snap a photo of its beauty.  Just imagine a lovely pizza topped with tomato sauce, fresh mozzarella, crumbled hot Italian sausage and green bell peppers - delicious!


We can only learn from our past failures.  If we don't fail at least once, how would we know how much we've learned?  I've had those nights were dinner just didn't go right at all.  The recipe wasn't written well or I was too tired and misread a step.  I remember one night trying to make miso soup all from scratch, even down to the step of making my own dashi.  I ended up with a kitchen full of random packing and bits of chopped ingredients scattered about and a soup in a pot that just didn't look right at all.  It was just enough to push me over the edge and I dumped everything and we ordered take-out.  A few weeks later, I tried again and it came out like it should have.  Granted, I don't think I will attempt to make it all again, unless I was truly into it, but the point was I dusted myself off, got back up and tried again.

Here's to more learning experiences!  :)

Pizza Dough
Makes 25 oz of dough, good for four 6.25oz pizzas (good 1- to 2-person size pies)


1-1/4 Cups Water, warmed
1 Chewable Children's Aspirin, crushed
1 Tablespoon Kosher Salt
8 Cups All-Purpose Flour
1 Envelope (7g) Instant Yeast
Olive Oil (for the proofing bowl)
Cornmeal (for dusting the peel)
Toppings of your choice

1.  Mix yeast and salt with all but 1 cup of the flour.
2.  Dissolve the children's aspirin to the warm water, then add to the bowl of an electric stand mixer, fitted with a dough hook.  Add the remaining ingredients and mix for 2 minutes on low, or until the dough pulls away from the sides of the bowl, adding more of the reserved flour by the tablespoon as needed.
3.  Rest the dough for 15 minutes, then knead at 35- to 40-percent power for 5 minutes, or until the dough is well developed.
4.  Remove the dough from the mixer bowl and knead by hand for about 30 seconds, then work the dough into a ball.  Place the ball in a large metal bowl coated with a little olive oil.  Toss the ball around to coat with the oil.  Cover the bowl with a clean kitchen towel and set asdie for one hour or until the dough ball nearly doubles in size.
5.  Fold down the dough, patting it into a disk, and place it back in the bowl.  cover with plastic wrap and park it in the fridge overnight.
6.  The next day, remove the dough and cut it into four equal portions.  Shape these as you did the mother blob, folding the dough in on itself.  If you plan to have pizza that day, leave however many orbs you like on the counter, over them with a clean kitchen towel and leave for an hour to bench proof.  The others should be wrapped in plastic wrap, or stored in zip-top bags in the refrigerator for up to a week.  If you want frozen pizza, you're better off rolling out and park-baking the crust, then freezing.  Thaw the frozen crusts before you finish them.
7.  While the dough is proofing, preheat your oven to its highest possible temperature (or light up the grill, for BBQ'ed pizza).

To prepare the dough:
a.  Lay the orb on a lightly floured counter and partially flatten.
b.  work the disk in your hands, rotating it so you form a lip on the dough.
c.  Start tossing the disk back and forth between your palms.
d.  Now, lay the dough across the back of your hands and gently stretch while rotating.
e.  Now toss with a twist and catch.
f.  The higher and faster the dough spins, the more it will increase in diameter.  If you've never done this, don't get too crazy-just try getting the dough to a foot or so off your hands.  Each time it lands (preferably on your hands rather than the floor) move your hands apart to stretch it a little more.  You should be able to work this amount of dough into the size of a dinner plate and that's more than enough).

8.  Dust the peel (you can easily use a large cutting board instead) with cornmeal and place your dough on top and top it with the toppings of your choice.
9.  Slide the pizza onto the pizza stone (or large baking sheet) in the oven.  These pizzas don't take more than 4 to 5 minutes to become bubbly and golden brown.  Allow to rest for 3 minutes before slicing.
Pizza Dough, Alton Brown, I'm Just Here for More Food (2004), p. 238.


bon appetit!