Pizza Update + Making My Own

Once again, I’ve having to apologize for not wrapping up the Atlanta Pizza Days. There are two more pizza spots I want to hit up this week, so we’re pretty much on the home stretch, but it’s clear the wind is out of my sails at this point. For the most part, my goal has been accomplished – I have a very good idea of the wide array of pizza styles and execution that this city has to offer, and I’ve formed an opinion about the kind of pizza that I like. I’ll dig into this more when I write up the summary from this fiasco.

However, this does not mean I’m giving up on pizza, I just plan on going back to primarily making my own. With that thought, I whipped up some dough on Saturday and had some pizza for lunch today. I’m still using a modified version of Varasano’s recipe, the main differences being that I don’t have a good mixer so I don’t mix it for nearly as long as he does, I don’t use live yeast culture, and my oven only cooks at 550.

I’d like to address these problems soon, probably starting with the mixer, then the yeast, then possibly breaking the latch on the oven. Regardless, today’s pizza was some of the best that I’ve made in a long time. The dough had been in the refrigerator for about 48 hours. I used less salt in this batch but all the other quantities were pretty much the same. You can see some past dough attempts here.

My dough never looks as smooth as Jeff’s. It is all wrinkly, it’s more dense, and it doesn’t expand as much. I’m hoping the mixer + yeast will help with this problem.

I used the Trader Joe’s Roma tomatoes to make the sauce. The tomatoes didn’t look very good – I had to remove the exterior and the cores from all of them and I threw a few tomatoes out altogether. The sauce ended up tasting really good though. I used the immersion blender to make it and it ended up slightly chunkier than usual. It was the normal raw Roma sauce of tomatoes + sugar + salt + oregano + parmesan.

For the toppings I used cubed mozzarella, green onions, and some Italian country ham that I picked up from Whole Foods yesterday. This stuff is great and it’s on sale right now for $10.99 a lb.

I preheated at 550 for about 45 minutes, cooking the pie in about 5.5 minutes.

I was really happy with how the dough came out. It had some nice color (not a char, but at 550 I’ll take it), it bubbled up a bit on the endcrust, it was chewy, flavorful,  I used the right amount of salt, and used the right amount of sauce because it didn’t get soggy despite how thin it was.

Lately my dough really reminds me of the dough at Shorty’s, which was one of my favorite spots during the Pizza Days. I guess I’m just partial to this style, but now I’m ready to take the dough to the next level. Expect to see some more posts on this during the coming months.

If you try making some pizza yourself, I’d love to see some photos and if you’d like I’ll throw them up here so everyone else can share in the pizza love.

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