Pizza Test #1

I tried the broil-method pizza today. In case you haven’t been following, it’s an effort to get one’s home oven as hot as possible without breaking the lock on it and entering the 800-degree “clean” cycle (from which there is no return.) Then, one puts the pizza on a preheated stone as close as possible to the elements on 550-degree heat to try to duplicate the blast-furnace temperatures of coal and woodburning commercial pizza ovens.

Today’s experiment was a success. Not a resounding success, but a success nonetheless. The remarkable thing about the whole thing is its simplicity. I’ve mentioned that the way I used to make pizza, I’d par-cook the dough so it would support the ingredients better. This is because recipes I used to follow actually recommended cooking the pizza at 425 degrees! Or less! This is like boiling your spaghetti in hot tap water. The entire pie, if one loaded it with the usual ingredients, was one soggy mess. Thus, the pre-cooking.

What came with that was docking, or making holes all over the dough to prevent bubbles. Now I know that we want bubbles. Just that we want them only in certain places, namely, the outer crust.

One glaring limitation of the home oven, in addition to its lack of heat, is its narrowness. You won’t be baking any 18” pizzas any time soon.

The max seems to be 14”, so that’s what I aimed for. This, however, proved to be a mistake; hence, the not-a-resounding-success part. You’re already pushing it to expect to make a New-York-style pizza in a home oven. Trying to make a big one is an even bigger mistake. But I digress.

I have a pizza stone called a Hearthkit. It’s a blah-blah-blah make your oven a professional one blah-blah-blah. It seems to help a bit but I’m sure any pizza stone will do.

I positioned it on the top rack of the oven, as close to the elements as possible while still having access to it, and preheated the oven at 550F (broil) for 90 minutes.

I used frozen pizza dough from Pain Doré (I will get around to making my own dough as soon as I establish this method of pizza making as the right one.) Since I wanted to make one large pie instead of two medium, I lopped off about an 8th of the dough and used the remainder to make the pie.

I brought it to room temperature; after that it was fairly easy to manipulate.

You will have your favorite method of shaping the pie. I used a combination of a roller, the knuckle method and the steering-wheel method. It was good enough. The pie came just to the border of the cutting board — maybe 14”.

I loaded it up with the sauce — Aylmer whole tomatoes, tomato juice discarded, garlic and basil added and puréed with a hand mixer — and Mozza di Bufala cut into chunks. I’m a bit of a glutton and I like lots of toppings, so for me Kalamata olives, green pepper, red onion and Rosette de Lyon salame was showing restraint.

Once the pizza was assembled, there was no way I would have been able to get it onto the stone in one piece without this marvelous pizza peel (pictured.) Or gotten it off, for that matter. The pizza slid effortlessly onto the peel, soggy and all, and perfectly off onto the stone.

Cooking time was about 4 minutes — not bad for a home oven. The crust was crisp almost all the way around, my mistake being to try to make too big a pie. The very middle was still slightly undercooked. Next time, it will be two pies instead of one.

The pizza was lissome, crispy-yet bendy like NY-style pizza, thin, and very tasty. When it comes out of the oven, be sure to put it onto a wire rack instead of a cutting board or plate; this will prevent it from steaming where it sits.

I’m very impressed with this method and the pizza peel and will most definitely try to perfect it very soon.