More Homemade Pizza

It's been a busy weekend, and it's not even over yet! I have a few things to write about, and just looking back over my posts from the last week or so I realized there haven't been too many about cooking. I'm watching the Italy vs. New Zealand match, so I think I'll make this post about the homemade pizza I made a couple nights ago.

I was reading a post on Smitten Kitchen about shaved asparagus pizza that looked so good, and I noticed a link to a simple pizza dough within the post. Even though I was very happy with the last pizza dough recipe I tried, I thought I should try this one too. And while this recipe calls for regular all-purpose flour, I bought 00 flour at Fox & Obel I've been wanting to use for pizza dough.



So what is 00 flour? Italian flour is measured by how coarse the grain is - Tipo 2 is the coarsest, while Tipo 00 is the finest. Tipo 00 is used for Neapolitan pizzas. While I'll never come close to achieving the real deal without a wood-burning oven, I thought why not at least try out the flour. So here is Smitten Kitchen's recipe:

1 1/2 cups flour (can replace up to half of this with whole wheat flour)
1 teaspoon salt
3/4 teaspoon active dry yeast
1/2 cup lukewarm water (may need up to 1 or 2 tablespoons more)
1 tablespoon olive oil
cornmeal

Stir dry ingredients, including yeast, in a large bowl. Add water and olive oil, stirring mixture into as close to a ball as you can. Dump all clumps and floury bits onto a lightly floured surface and knead everything into a homogeneous ball.

Knead it for just a minute or two. Lightly oil the bowl where you had mixed it, dump the dough in, turn it over so all sides are coated, cover it in plastic wrap and leave it undisturbed for an hour or two, until it has doubled in size.

Before resting:


After:


Dump it back on the floured counter, and gently press the air out of the dough with the palm of your hands. Fold the piece into an approximate ball shape, and let it sit under that plastic wrap for 20 more minutes. I doubled the recipe, so at this point I cut the dough in half to make two pizzas.



Sprinkle a pizza stone or baking sheet with cornmeal and preheat your oven to its top temperature (mine went up to 550). Roll out the pizza - I used my hands to press it out until it was about this big:



And then I used a rolling pin the rest of the way.



Add your toppings:




And bake for about 10-12 minutes. I made one pizza with fresh ricotta, roasted cauliflower, and bread crumbs:



And the other with just a little sauce, grated pecorino brigante (a very soft pecorino), and coppa. After cooking I topped it off with some baby arugula and cream of balsamic - a bottle of syrupy reduced balsamic vinegar which I found at Whole Foods. The drops kind of look like bugs on the arugula.




They were both really, really good. The crusts on both were light and crispy, even more crispy on the coppa pizza because that one cooked on the bottom rack right above the heat. I changed several elements from the last pizza dough recipe - the flour, the oven temperature, and the rolling pin method. It's hard to say which made the difference, but I thought this dough was crispier. And I am just now realizing I still haven't written my recipe for roasted cauliflower. I'll do so this week.

I should make a note that the cauliflower pizza was inspired by Grandaisy Bakery's cauliflower pizza which is my favoritest favorite best most wonderful pizza ever. And yes, that is a grammatically correct way to describe your favorite pizza.