Qmckenna’s Weblog

My life long love of pizza continues—enhanced in the near term by Mary’s gift of a pizza stone and peel for Christmas.

This is my current pizza crust—it is an amalgam of the recipe from Nate Appleman’s A16 cookbook and the excellent King Arthur Flour cookbook. Make it today for tomorrow:
24 ounces water; 100 degrees
1 tablespoon active dried yeast
pinch sugar
17 ounces bread flour
17 ounces all-purpose flour
2 ounces olive oil
1 tablespoon salt
4 plastic bags (bread/food storage type)
Approximately ¼ ounce additional olive oil

Put water in mixing bowl of a stand mixer with dough hook, add the yeast, pinch of sugar and a pinch of the flour. Allow the yeast 10 minutes to rehydrate; it should be fully dissolved and beginning to foam around the edges. Add the flour and mix one minute on low. Add olive oil and salt, mix until well combined, but not yet a smooth dough. Turn off mixer and let dough rest 10 minutes. After the rest, knead dough 10 minutes on low speed. Dough should now be smooth. Allow dough to rise until doubled in the mixing bowl, 45-60 minutes. Punch down, turn out to a lightly floured surface and divide into four equal pieces. Put a few drops of olive oil in each bag and spread around. Place one piece of dough in each bag. Twist the neck of the bag to close it. The dough will rise in the bag—do not seal it as the bag might explode. Allow the bags of dough a slow second rise in the refrigerator for approximately 24 hours. The dough will keep for several days and is better after 48 hours.

To use:
Remove dough from refrigerator. Preheat oven to 500 degrees. Drop dough out of bag onto a floured work surface. Divide in two for small 10” pizzas. Top with your favorite stuff. Bake on a pizza stone or the backside of the heaviest cookie sheet you have (if you could stack two together that’s even better—the idea is to get some thermal mass in the oven so that when the pizza hits it doesn’t cool too much).

Notes: Good fresh yeast is important. I buy commercial active dry yeast from the restaurant in 1 pound vacuum sealed bricks. I store it in a Lexan container in the freezer. I cannot use it fast enough and generally throw out about the second half of the brick when it is a year old. Maybe I’ll bake more this year. It costs $3 a pound and is more convenient, better quality and a hell of a lot cheaper than the little packets from the store. Date the yeast when you put it in the freezer—a year is all you get (date your baking powder and baking soda too—a year is good for them too. I baked a birthday cake for Mary a couple of years ago that didn’t rise, at all, and I think it was the baking powder).
You can change the flour to all all-purpose or all bread flour if you don’t have the other one.
Weighing baking ingredients is much faster, easier and more accurate than volume measures. A cup of flour weighs about 4.25 ounces (so this recipe uses 8 cups). A decent scale isn’t super cheap, but you can get one for $50. Make sure it is easy to adjust the tare weight (to zero the scale when you put a bowl on it to hold the flour). Spring scales allow you to turn the dial to reset to zero, it is fast and intuitive. You have to figure out digital scales…