Love those pizzas on the grill...!

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stuff happenin' in the fridge...


It's only been a day but very tempted to grab a little bit and make a thin crunchy breadstick out of it just to try it out...
 
ummm.... yep, well....

followed the Vara way, sort of.


first one:
cranked the propane grill all the way up since it was obvious that the kitchen oven would not do what varaetc says it must, at least without his mod (and the :princess: did not like the oven mod idea).
So, burned and stuck the bottom and the inside was not quite cooked enough. But it did balloon nicely. My first basketball pizza...

second one:
turned the heat down. Bit more oil on stone. Not burned but still a bit undercooked tasting after some time, although starting to turn into a hard biscuit, strangely...


more practice needed, obviously. It's good, I've got plenty more Blob in the fridge...


dough is pretty soft and wet still, kind of a handful to deal with when you're a noob and don't have a peel .... but tastes good.

As stated above, this is not a trivial skill to acquire, there are some subtleties to this... I will be more appreciative of the good restaurant pizze I'll have, from now on. I was at a pizza restaurant yesterday. They had a wood-fired brick oven. Had to ask. He said they were running it at 625F. But when asked where they couldn't say. He whipped out an IR pyrometer but couldn't make much sense of it, funnily enough...
 
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e9999: Any idea what your stone temp was?

You oiled your stone?!

At pie making time its a fine line between dough that is too sticky and one that is too dry. You'll know when you've added too much bench flour to the dough as it gets almost impossible to stretch.

The other thing to know: The elapsed time between stretching the dough and getting the pie on the stone needs to happen very, very quickly. If the dough sits very long, especially with sauce atop, its going to be more likely to burn on the bottom and be soggy/somewhat raw in the middle.

A couple hundred more pies and you'll have it down :D ...and no I'm not "there" yet either :lol:
 
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spressomon said:
e9999: Any idea what your stone temp was?

You oiled your stone?!

At pie making time its a fine line between dough that is too sticky and one that is too dry. You'll know when you've added too much bench flour to the dough as it gets almost impossible to stretch.

The other thing to know: The elapsed time between stretching the dough and getting the pie on the stone needs to happen very, very quickly. If the dough sits very long, especially with sauce atop, its going to be more likely to burn on the bottom and be soggy/somewhat raw in the middle.

A couple hundred more pies and you'll have it down :D ...and no I'm not "there" yet either :lol:
Click to expand...


about 600F or so probably maybe 650F?. Not sure. Tried my IR pyrometer but it maxxed out. It read 600F at the side of the lid (a la Weber).

Yes, a very thin coat of oil, just rubbing an oily paper towel after the first one fused to the (ceramic glazed) stone in places. It worked fine and didn't stick the second time.

Tried almost no flour on my improvised stretching bench/peel and it was sticking so had to add more. Didn't stretch it very thin though. And it was shrinking back a bit when I tried.


eh, I might have to stop by for a demo and comparison tasting next time I'm driving up North...


added:
Progress! More flour on the working table and "peel". So no oil and no sticking.
Tried 2 more. One thin, one thicker. 600F on the dial. about 7mins. Cooked fine but bottom not charred enough. Thin better than thick. More experiments needed...
 
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e9999 said:
OK, so I gotta ask the trivial (for a change :) ), you get the dough out, stretch it out in the general shape of a pizza, top if off with the goodies and then what? You figure out a way to slide the whole shebang onto a red hot pizza stone without getting burned? How? Should I get the flat shovel out of the shed? Or make my very own wooden gigantic spatula?
Click to expand...

I got the peel pictured below for less than $20. Works like a champ when I'm pushing pies through my egg at 650*


null_zpsd8055041.jpg
 
Posted on the Breakfasts thread as well.

Tried a grilled breakfast pizza. It was pretty good. I somewhat followed the below linked recipe.

I used bacon, chorizo, and canadian bacon, cilantro, shallot, pepper jack and havarti cheese and some smoked jalapenos.. (Man, its good to be home and have access to ALL my cooking and grilling equipment!) Also, used Pillsbury's Grands biscuits for the dough..

http://acozykitchen.com/grilled-breakfast-pizza/

I didn't get a pic, but will the next time I make it. YUM!

Here's the recipe pic to give you an idea....

J

Grilled-Pizza.webp
 
success on the handmade dough pizzas... Varasano's dough still good after almost 2 weeks...
they are getting better...
I can see how one could get sucked in the subtleties of the trade if one had ever so slight OCD compulsions... (Not that I do, of course... :) )
 
Quit to get ahead

Ok...after the last pizza dough making session a few weeks ago I was questioning whether it was really worth the trouble or not. So I quit.

For a couple weeks :D.

I re-read and re-thought about the interplay in sourdough starters between the acidity, yeast and the bacteria. One way to boost flavor, relative to the same starter culture, is to let the sourdough become more acidic. Previously I poured the hooch off the refrigerated/near dormant starter, and re-invigorated the starter with more flour and water...and repeated until good yeast activity was apparent.

This time I opted to use the starter that included the hooch. From what I've read increasing the acidity can benefit flavor...but typically at the expense of pronounced leavening from the yeast. To counter this I added a small amount of dry yeast to the final dough. Whether today's pie dough was an anomaly or not...only time and repeated dough making sessions will tell...it was very successful!

But there definitely was an increased flavor component in today's pies (dough).

This is what I used for the dough:

Jeff's poolish recipe
395g bread flour (used KA): 260g for autolyse and 135g to finalize the dough)
120g water
450g starter (this was made from Ed Wood's French starter...which is relatively mild)
.75g dry yeast
12g salt

I made the dough last Thursday afternoon and baked the pies this afternoon. The dough was about as perfect as I've ever experienced on the bench. Easy to work with but still had nice spring.

During the heat soaking process of getting my kamado up to pizza baking temp I actually hit 1000 degrees! The attached photo is with the thermometer clocked! But after re-stoking and inserting a 1.25" thick ceramic stone near the bottom and the pizza stone in the top I ran the bbq at 650 to 750 for pie baking. I've never calibrated the thermometer so not sure how accurate it is...

The other thing I did was use one of the grids that came with my bbq to elevate the pizza stone into the dome of the cooker. This really helped keep the bottom crust and ingredient top baking at about the same rate!

dough.webp


kamado at 1000 degrees.webp


pizza dough and bench.webp


pizza dough on peel.webp


pizza on the kamado.webp
 
I'll admit, those look better than mine...
(especially cooked at 140F...)


back to the stone for me...
 
Wow.

I could eat that now.

i have never poured off hooch.

I had started a dough over the holidays, and got it out today. So about 10 days of a delayed ferment. Bread sticks were made and declared by the wife (who is difficult to impress about anything) that it was the best bread she had ever had. And it was crazy good.

Added yeast is a well respected technique. How much did you add?
 
Cruiserdrew said:
Wow.

Added yeast is a well respected technique. How much did you add?
Click to expand...

Added .75g to the dough on top of the .5g in the poolish for ~1000g dough. I'll use this amount the next time as it was perfect I thought...
 
I bought a Vision Grill (kamado) from costco on clearance for $200 this past fall. I'm still going to build a dedicated pizza oven this summer but a Large Green Egg pizza stone in the Kamado works great. I've been too busy to make dough so we've been throwing a Papa Murphy's chicken pizza once a week or so. 650 degrees for 5 minutes and they are perfect. A buddy of mine has a gas fired cement pizza oven and I'll man it when he's throwing big parties. We push that oven over 750 and cook 10" pizzas in a minute and a half. MMMM
 
Ok...got inspired by a clam & bacon pizza made at Joe's Squared and aired on Diner's Dives and Drive-ins.

For the test run I was happy, overall, how it turned out. A couple tweaks next time should move me from 2nd or 3rd ring to bullseye :D

Searched all over for shucked fresh clams and found these shucked fresh frozen clams at Whole Food's: Sam's Clams. And they are UNBELIEVABLE...some didn't make it to the pizza...mmm...mmm...good raw :) Luckily I have some left over that will be the cause of clam chowdah tomarra ;)

Anyway...if anyone cares:

"Sauce": Two heads of garlic, roasted, mashed and combined with a little olive oil, salt & pepper and creme fraiche.
Toppings: Fried diced bacon, raw clams and smoked gouda cheese.
Dough: Italian sourdough starter culture (thanks Andy!) and Jeff Verasano's Neapolitan dough recipe.

Next time I think I'll add another head of garlic and just combine the roasted mashed garlic with olive oil and a little cream, heavy or 1/2n/12 to thin...and I think it will be even better; the creme fraiche was a little too thick.

And although we liked the smoked gouda I'll cut the cheese by 50% and/or switch to real Italian fontina...just gotta twist it up you know!

photo 1.webp


photo 5.webp


photo 4.webp


photo 3.webp
 
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OK, enough lollygagging around, got to get me some more dough going...
 
Any difference with the starter or dough? Your Pizza looks awesome! Actually better than that.
 
The Italian you gave me is very nice...the French I have has been relegated to waffle duty...UB flour and all ;). Thanks again for helping me through the challenges I had with all things beginner sourdough starter!

I didn't have quite enough large pieces of lump today...and couldn't get the temp north of about 675* (dome). You might not think there would be a perceptible difference between 675* and 750-800* but the crust doesn't bubble up quite as much and the texture is a more dense when baked at the lower temp...but the taste is the same regardless.

I just r'cvd the SF starter...will get that going soon for try out.
 
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