There are an insane amount of Pizza Recipes. Go online and have a look. They will tell you ingredients to blend, how to knead, how to rest your dough… and the rest!
Food & Wine came out this month with a perfect margarita pizza. What a great place to start, since they tell you everything and they tell you nothing, except that you need to be cooking pizza at home! lol And I probably agree with them.
But I see it two ways: Buy a couple of balls at your favorite pizzeria and you’ve got the hard part knocked out. But just in case you are a home cook in your experimental phase, I will tell you a couple of my reactions based on what they are telling you about how to create dough.
- Telling you it’s part of 10 dishes every cook should know, puts you instantly into stress out mode. And that’s not what I want from you. I want you to feel it’s a fun experiment that’s going to be ez-breezy, and you probably won’t get it 100% right the first time, but that’s ok. It took me years of experimenting to finally perfect my NY Pizza. But hey! No matter what, I have it down now!
- They don’t tell you why you combine certain ingredients, and other ingredients afterwards (it’s because salt kills yeast, and add the salt in at the end, before creating dough balls). It’s sort of like making a hollandaise sauce. You combine in such a way that you don’t ‘break’ the sauce, or end up with scrambled yolk…
- They say to drizzle oil on the top. Really? And they don’t mention is should be olive oil. Have you ever had pizza drip yellow onto a napkin because it’s too oily? That’s because they topped it with oil like that, usually way too much.
Here’s what I know for sure: The reason we add olive oil, which can be drizzled on the dough to brown the crust, is because it releases the lycopene that exits in the tomato or tomato sauce. Food & Wine tell you that? Probably not. But that’s ok. It’s why you have me!
And then they really don’t talk to you about the cheese. Most people over cheese it. Yes. You want to sprinkle cheese on, but you want to see sauce that went down before the cheese, in between clumps of cheese. Ever take a bite of a slice and have the entire cheese rip from the top of the slice into your mouth? That’s why. You need a sprinkling of cheese with tomato sauce patches in between.
So there you have it. How to really make your best pizza at home.
One more thing? Lightly sprinkle chili powder on top. It gives you both the right color and the right flavor.
Amen. The truth is finally told! Feel free to help your friends out and re-tweet or forward this blog! Now that’s how you really make friends!
Happy Eating,
Chef Marian