Assembling a pizza
An awful lot of people love a good pizza and many people grab one from the Pizzaria and never think about how it is made. They just grab a slice and gobble it up.
However, it doesn't turn out like the picture above unless you first start with an unbaked pizza like this one and cook for 10-15min at 450-500C
Now pizza's don't come pre-assembled. There is a layer of cheese on top (in this case about 300g of shredded cheese)
Under the cheese you will notice that's where the toppings go. In this case I had about 60g of Pizza pepperoni and about 60g worth of pizza salami. I was thinking to add peppers and mushroom but I wasn't eating it and the kids aren't big on vegetables.
Of course no pizza is complete unless those toppings go onto a layer of pizza sauce. Now you can make pizza sauce using about 400g of tomato, spices, water, and a considerable amount of time to simmer. Or I could go and buy a container of pizza sauce for 99c. Considering the tomatoes alone would currently cost $2.49 to make one can worth of pizza sauce....I took the easy way out and just put the pizza sauce on top of the dough.
Without the dough there is no pizza. All those wonderful toppings are just a goopy mess unless they have a bread foundation to build on. However, even the pizza foundation just started off as bread dough which is rolled and stretched into its shape. Before that its just a basic ball.
How to make the pizza dough
However that simple looking ball of bread dough would be as hard as a rock unless it was filled with yeast to make the air which fluffs up the dough. Before that its just a lump of water and flour (with some salt and starter added in). Before sitting in a warm area (23C) for about an hour it looks a lot smaller and denser.
However, even getting it to this stage takes a lot of work and the recipe isn't exactly exactly exact. The ingredients are very simple: 2 cups of flour and 1 cup of liquid. The liquid is a mix of starter and water. A pinch of salt makes for a better tasting, stronger bread but isn't actually required.
When you start the mix looks like a sticky, gross mess.
- Flour, Water, and Starter.
- Mix it all together for a sticky. Gross. Mess
Anyways. After mixing the water, flour, and starter for a while with a kneading action you will eventually end up with a ball
The ball will almost always either be too dry or too wet.
Too dry?
It will feel a bit like a rock. Hard and unyielding. Need to add water. Unfortunately you can't add very much at a time. In this case it was too dry so what do I do? I wet my fingers in a bowl of water and then work the water on my hands into the bread. The bread goes from slimy to stick to dough as I knead it.
Add water, knead through slimy to stick to dough, check the consistency of the dough and then add more water and repeat over and over again. How do you know when the dough consistency is right? Well, some people do a stretch test to see if you can stretch it thin enough to see through without breaking. Others do a drop test in water, if it floats its ready. As for me I do the sticky test. If the dough is sticky enough to hold my hand but eventually fall off without leaving dough behind its ready.
Of course if it starts the other way...very stick and won't make a good ball then you have to add flour little by little until you reach the just sticky enough stage.
It's more "art" and "science project" than it is a recipe. Bakers will tell you that you can just "feel it" when its ready which I always found infuriating because I love actual recipe's.
What is the starter?
Now some people may just want to go out and buy some bread yeast as its typically easier than starter. Of perhaps just use some baking powder and oil. It's faster than starter. However, starter isn't at all difficult and its very cheap to make, but it does require an ongoing commitment.
What is starter?
Starter is just a mixture of flour, water, and yeast. As long as you feed the yeast every day it just keeps on growing. In my case I have 2 cups of starter. I remove 1 cup of starter when I want to make bread and replace the 1 cup of starter than I took out with 1/2 cup of flour and 1/2 cup of water. Well, that's what the recipe told me but it made a very thick starter. I've decided to replace the 1 cup starter with 1/4cup flour and 3/4cup of water. It is really your call...the big thing is make sure your yeast gets enough food so it doesn't die.
How to keep the yeast from dying?
Keep the yeast growing and you can bake bread (or cinnamon rolls, or pizza, or ???) everyday with little problem. But how do you keep yeast growing? They are simple creatures: All you have to do is feed them (add flour), keep their living conditions moist (add water) and keep them from getting cold (22-29C). They don't die at lower temperature but they go dormant or grow very slowly at lower temperatures.
Which means at 25C you need to feed the starter daily because they grow quickly.
Which means at 4C (fridge temperature) you need to feed the starter weekly because they grow very slowly.
Making Starter
Now for sougdough you are going to try and capture yeast from the environment (air) which isn't difficult but does take patience (about a week). In my case I had a package of yeast that expired two years ago.
Expired yeast probably wouldn't have the potency that I would want to make a loaf of bread but probably still has enough viable yeast to make a starter. So this is what I did.
In a clean glass bowl
Add 3/4 cup of flour
A package of expired yeast
Add some water (3/4 cup)
Stir it all up
Cover it all up and incubate at 22-29C
Now most people just cover it and leave it at room temperature which works most of the time. However, it is Canada and wintertime so things might grow slowly in a cool house so I "cheated" by using a makeshift incubator. (It's just a cheap crock pot with a thermal sensor which gives the crock pot electricity when its too cold and turns it off when it is the right temperature).
When the liquid froths up and you see bubbles that's a sure sign the yeast is growing and turning flour into gas to make your dough rise.
Why would I go through all the bother of making bread??
I mean I can go out and pay $3.69 and get a nice soft loaf of white bread 650g. You would be right, bread is fairly cheap to buy.
It is even cheaper to make though.
Assuming that I keep my starter alive and use it everyday to make some bread that means that my yeast cost is part of my flour cost.
Flour is very cheap.
It is $9.97 for 10kg which is 10,000 grams.
To make bread all I need is yeast (from flour). The flour (cheap), Water (free here) and a tiny bit of salt (even cheaper than flour).
The ingredient cost to make that 650g of bread?
Somewhat less than 4 cups of flour (500g) plus water to make up the remainder of the loaf.
$9.97/10,000g = roughly $0.50 for a similar size loaf of bread.
It is 87% cheaper to make bread than to buy it. Sure I need to use my halogen oven to bake the bread for 20min (.6kWh) but that only adds about 9 cents to the cost of a loaf. Yes, it takes time to make the loaf and effort on my part. However, I know I'm getting a preservative free, hand crafted, baked with love fresh bread ever time.
Nutrition wise, taste wise, and economy wise I think making my own bread from starter, flour, water, and salt just makes sense.
But I got sidetracked
Of course I usually use the starter to make bread. However, on the day I was going to make the creative sunday post my son wanted pizza so I had to change plans. The bread dough could also be used to make many other creative foodstuffs.
I'll look into what else I can do in further posts.
For today though...
A tasty pizza made from simple ingredients. It took a fair amount of time but not much skill, and much cheaper than getting at a restaurant.
Hope you liked the post.
If not....
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Well, leave a comment and tell me why not :)
I always like getting comments.
Oh yeah, and what better article to throw a #PIZZA reference in. Hey Pizza bot are you out there :)