Pizza Perfected

I think we have finally come close to perfecting the art of pizza-making. We've been practicing for a few months, trying out different techniques, and finally last night the pizza was perfect. The things that I think made the difference for us:

1. A good pizza stone - it gets really hot in the oven and helps the pizza to form a crispy crust.

2. Very high oven temp - we can only go to 550 on ours, but it does a pretty good job. Our book recommends going up to 800 if you can.

3. Dylan's delicious homemade pizza dough.

4. We have an unusual technique for getting the pizza from the counter to the pizza stone. After a bunch of trial and error, we've found that it works best to form the pizza dough into a circle, flour all sides of it, then fold the circle into quarters. This is all while preheating the pizza stone in the oven. Then we pull the stone out of the oven, transfer the folded pizza dough to the corner of the stone, and carefully unfold it. We actually assemble the pizza right then and there, very quickly, while the dough is sitting on the sizzling hot stone. I think that because the stone is so hot, while we are assembling the pizza, the dough is getting cooked and crisped on the bottom. Then we throw the pizza in the oven for about 6 minutes. The technique helps us to avoid the messy business of transferring an assembled pizza from the counter to the stone. It works really well!

5. Extended cooking time - we have found that there is a point at which you may think the pizza is done, but if you wait another 30 seconds, something magical happens. The trick is pulling it out just before it starts to burn. There is a definite sweet spot when the pizza is just right, and usually it's later than we think.

Behold our beautiful pizza:


I was telling Dylan, it looked way more delectable in person. If I had a talent for photography, I may have been able to capture it. But there is no way that I could have captured the heavenly smell in the kitchen at the moment that the pizza came out of the oven!

Dinner : Homemade Pizza

For a while now we have been buying pizza dough and sauce from Trader Joe's and making pizzas at home. They always come out OK, but not great. The crust doesn't get really crispy and is a little mushy in the middle. A couple of weekends ago I made some pizza dough from scratch, in hopes that it would produce a better pie. The recipe made four chunks of pizza dough, which we put in plastic bags and tossed in the freezer. The first two attempts with the new dough was better than the store-bought dough, but not by that much. The issue was really how to get the shaped and topped pizza from the counter to the hot pizza stone that was in the oven. We tried making the pizza on the back of a jelly roll with lots of cornmeal to let it slide around, but once the toppings went on it didn't want to slide around anymore and was very hard to move. Once we did move it the crust didn't get crispy.

For this time, we shaped the pizza dough while the stone was heating in the oven. Then when the oven was preheated (to 550), we took the stone out and put the shaped dough on it. Dana then quickly put on the sauce and the toppings and we put the stone back into the oven. We could tell that even before going into the oven the dough was starting to cook on the stone. The result was a nice crispy crust - a killer pizza! This particular one is topped with homemade pesto from Dana's aunt Elaine (Thanks Elaine!), tomato sauce, onions, bacon and fresh mozzarella.





We also had a salad:

The Cow

Well, the Cow is a pretty sweet place. No signs really, down a little alley:


Inside there is a large fireplace:


We had a large "Her Majesty's Delight":


And it delighted! We weren't able to finish it all so had to have some for 'take away' (a.k.a. to go). Tomorrow's breakfast is going to be interesting...