Cooking with Matt

Alright... my first ever off-season update. When I started this blog I had every intention of posting regular updates on a wide variety of topics, yet here I sit 2+ years later and every single post is a race report. So how can I go on calling this The Most Interesting Man in Columbia Heights?  Well...

I pretty much am that one-dimensional and boring. Now I could do the standard training update you routinely see on your typical triathlon-focused blog, but that would be even more boring and repetitive than an endless stream of very-much-identical race reports. It's December. I'm swimming a lot. We'll leave it at that.

Today I'm not going to say one more damn word about triathlon. I'm going to take one small step toward earning my blog title and drop some real 21st century Renaissance man shit on you. We're going to be talking about cooking. Yes, you heard me right. Cooking. I'm going to take you through all the steps necessary to make a boss level pizza from scratch right in your own kitchen.

Before we begin, we have to clear a couple things up. First and most important, proper pizza has thin crust. If you prefer that deep dish abomination they erroneously refer to as pizza in Chicago, you are a weird pervert and we probably can't be friends. I think there are support groups for that sort of thing. Second, this is not a process for the impatient. It is absolutely essential to cold ferment your dough overnight at a minimum. You can Google recipes claiming that you can mix up the dough and throw it straight in the oven, but they are lying to you. Sure, the results are edible, but so is the pizza crust in a can you can get at the grocery store, which happens to be roughly the quality you'll get if you cut corners on your homemade dough.  If you're OK with that level of quality just save yourself a lot of work and get the pre-made crap. Or better yet pick up the phone and have something delivered. 

Now that we've got that out of the way, you're going to need a couple key pieces of equipment. First, you will need a proper pizza stone. This is essential to get enough heat into the crust to cook it properly while at the same time not decomposing your cheese into its constituent atoms. You can't skimp on quality here either. We're going to be firing the oven up as hot as it will go, which for most consumer grade ovens means somewhere between 500ºF and 550ºF and some stoneware can't handle this much heat (I found this out the hard way). I ended up getting this one from Amazon based on the favorable reviews and it's been performing admirably. Next you will need a pizza peel. That's one of those giant spatulas that you'll see guys using in legit pizzerias to get the pies in and out of the oven. If you're a ninja you can probably make it happen without the peel, but having one makes the whole process 1000% easier.

I am not a ninja.

First up... the dough. My dough recipe is a fairly standard New York style, with the proportions arrived at via extensive trial and error (I ended up going relatively heavy on the sugar and olive oil because sugar and olive oil are awesome):

• 2 cups unbleached flour (I just use all-purpose, one of these days I'll get around to experimenting with some of that fancy-pants Italian 00 stuff)
• 1 teaspoon active-dry yeast
• 1.5 teaspoons salt
• 3 teaspoons sugar
• 2 tablespoons olive oil

Start by thoroughly mixing the yeast with 3/4 cup of hot water and let it sit for about 5 minutes. While you're waiting for that, mix up the flour, salt and sugar in a large bowl. Then dump the olive oil and yeast/water mix in and stir it all up. Before long you'll have a sticky ball of goo that looks something like this:

Once it gets too thick for the spoon we have to get down to the messy business of kneading our dough ball. If you have the means this would be an excellent job for a stand mixer, but I keep it ghetto and just get in there with both hands. After a couple minutes of kneading the dough should smooth out and stop sticking to everything in sight. If it doesn't, work in more flour until it does (and it shouldn't take much, a tiny bit of flour goes a long way here). At the end of the process you should have a nice smooth ball of dough:

This much dough would make one enormous pie, so I cut it in half and put both of the dough balls into a container which goes straight into the fridge.  The dough should roughly double in volume after 24 hours. The 24-hour dough makes a pretty solid pizza, but it seems like my best pies have come from 2-3 day old dough.

Fresh balls

Bigger balls

Now that the dough is out of the way we can tackle the sauce. I started by following this recipe exactly, and the results were... meh, OK I guess. But it was lacking a certain something so I ended up modifying the original recipe fairly significantly (again through good old trial and error):

• 28 ounce can of tomatoes (either whole-peeled or diced, I doubt it matters much in the final product)
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 2 tablespoons unsalted butter
• 3 cloves of garlic
• 1 teaspoon dried oregano
• 1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon dried basil leaves
• 1 yellow onion
• 2 teaspoons sugar

From there just follow the procedure in the recipe linked above. Two things they don't mention though: First, drain the tomatoes before you puree them. Sure you can cook off the extra water, but why waste the time?  Second, you take the onion halves out and throw them away at the end (although this should be fairly obvious). I also disagree with their idea of only chopping the tomatoes down to ~1/16" chunks. I've found that a smoother sauce is easier to spread evenly over the pizza, but it tastes the same either way.

Sauce in process

Now that we've got our dough and sauce, we can get started on the fun part -- making the actual pizza. Step one: crank your oven up as high as it will go and let the stone pre-heat for at least 30 minutes. My oven tops out at 550ºF, but I've made a few pies at 500ºF as well with good results. While you're waiting for the oven to heat up, flatten out your dough ball into something more pizza shaped. I'd like to say I do this by tossing  the dough up in the air while humming the theme from The Godfather, but I'm nowhere near that skilled so I just lay a piece of parchment paper down on the pizza peel (this is fairly critical to be able to get the pizza off of the peel and into the oven) then plop the dough down on the paper and flatten it out with a roller. How thin you want to roll it out is completely up to your personal preference, just remember that it will roughly double in thickness as it cooks. I usually get a 12-13" diameter pie out of one of ball of dough.

Dough ready for toppings

Now just top it however you want. Personally I prefer a fine white wine alfredo sauce with free range goat cheese and organic baby arugula... oh wait a minute, I'm not a fucking hippie. I hit that thing with a generous layer of the red sauce we made earlier and finish it off with a big ol' pile of mozzarella and pepperoni. On a more serious note, do not use pre-shredded cheese of any sort. They cake that stuff with cellulose to keep it from clumping together in the bag, which really messes up the way it melts in the oven. You'll get a much better end product if you buy a block and do work with a cheese grater.

Ready for the oven

Once your stone is nice and hot slide the pie onto the stone, parchment paper and all. You'll have to experiment to find your optimum cook time based on the thickness of your crust, your choice of toppings and the actual temp of your oven (consumer-grade ovens have notoriously shitty temp control, on the order of ±50ºF from what you set it at). For my pepperoni pizza in my oven set at 550ºF, 5 minutes and 30 seconds seems to do the trick.

Bam... pizza's done! Nothing to do now but let it cool down for a couple minutes, then slice it up and dig in.  Buon Appetito! (Google tells me that's Italian for Bon Appetit)

Mikey approved!