Pizza dough

When I was little, I both loved and feared pizza night in equal measure.  I loved helping my Mom make pizza, everything from squishing the dough into the pan to all the spreading and sprinkling of toppings, it was one of the few meals that Mom let us help prepare and it was fun.  I also feared it because it meant I would often have to eat pizza and they tasted awful.  Once the meal preparation was over and the pizza was in the oven, the dread would start to set in.  Sometimes Mom was nice and let me have a sandwich for dinner instead, after all it's not like pizza was good for you, so I guess she didn't feel the need to force the issue all that much but I remember having to choke down that meal more times than I cared to and it pained me everytime.

I don't want to sound like my Mom was a bad cook she had her ups and downs like most home cooks, I'm going to place the blame for this one squarely on the shoulders of chef boy-ar-dee, their pizza kits were horrible things.  Inside that green box was of a sachet of dough mix, a long skinny tin of sauce with little slices of extra-hot, skinny pepperoni floating in it, and another tin of grated parmesan cheese that was probably full of additives to stop it from melting when they sealed the tin.  Add to that the less than stellar quality extra toppings and plastic cheese from the fridge and you have a recipe for a grim meal.  There's a limit to what you could expect in a small town in northern Canada in the 1980's but that early experience was so off-putting to me that I was labelled a funny kid that didn't like pizza.  I don't know what prompted Mom to stop buying those kits, I remember a few different pizza situations as I got older, between pre-made pizzas from the grocery store and my when Dad got a new job with a company that gave meal vouchers when employees worked overtime that could be redeemed at local take out places, I remember the calibre of pizza improving.

Thinking back I'm trying to remember if I really was that much of a picky eater as a child.  I quite happily ate fried liver and drank goats milk, you can't say a child who will do that is that picky, but there were a lot of foods I just didn't want to put in my mouth.  Now that I'm grown up I've been adventurous enough to try most of my hated foods again, either as a whole dish or as separate ingredients and most of what I didn't like I have narrowed down to them containing mayonnaise (or mayo-like sauces), but I also didn't like intensely spicy things or fatty foods that produced a slimy cling in my mouth.  I would say the jury is still out on my picky eater child status.  Once I stopped hating pizza, I can remember still having a few incidents of being a brat about what I would or would not eat on my pizza, but a lot of foods I didn't like have gained my affection slowly and now there's very few things I won't eat.  I also believe that even if you don't like something right away you should give a food more than one chance, except mayo that one has had hundreds of chances and it's still vile.

I don't think I was missing out on too much back then by not liking pizza, the selection of toppings that I can recall was so limited that if it was still the sum total of the pizza experience I don't think I would bother with it all that much now.  Thankfully that's not the case and I look at everything from vegetables to seafood as a potential pizza topping, spinach and potato - yum, aubergine and bacon - yup, clams and zucchini - that's good too, if it sounds like a good combination I'll try it on a pizza.  On my last trip to Italy I think I ate about 20 different types pizza and I was only there a week!  All of it was pre-made sell you a slice to take away hole-in-the-wall-establishment food, but the variety on offer and at most places the quality of ingredients just blew my mind, and you can ask for a slice any size you want, they charge you by weight.  Wandering around a historic city looking tourist sites of immense cultural significance interspersed with breaks for munching lots of little slices of thin crispy pizza the size of a half sandwich is one of my definitions of happiness.

Pizza Dough

In a measuring cup mix
225ml warm water
7g dry active yeast
1 tbsp white sugar
mix to dissolve the yeast and wait for it to start foaming

Using a stand mixer with a dough hook, in the bowl of your mixer add
375g plain flour (or bread flour or if you want to get fancy Italian Tipo00 flour)
1 tsp salt
2 tsbp olive oil
and the water/yeast mixture

Turn the machine on low and let it work magic until the dough is smooth and elastic, about 10 minutes with a sturdy machine.

And you're good to go!  I don't do the rise-knock back-rise again process with pizza dough.  I normally make about 6 individual pizzas out of this about 9 - 10 inches diameter but they're never properly round, I like my crust to be thin and crispy but my greedy eyes want it to be the size of my plate, you can make however many pizzas of whatever size or thickness you like.

Make sure your oven rack is in the lowest position in the oven.  If you have a pizza stone use following your manufacturer's directions.
Pre-heat your oven to 400^F (around 200^C) or hotter if  your oven goes higher and you're brave enough,  the hotter the better.

Divide the dough into your chosen portion and roll out to your desired size.  I sprinkle a handful of cornmeal on the countertop to roll my pizza dough out on top of and use flour on the rolling pin, but it's your pizza so do as you like.

Slide your pizza onto your baking tray then start loading it up.

Decorate with sauce or not, toppings and seasonings of your choice, cheese or not, good ingredients will make a better pizza than poor quality ones and you have just gone to the bother of making the base from scratch, I'd say you deserve good toppings.

I don't think you have to cover every visible bit of the surface with toppings but it is nice to get something yummy in every bite.

Bake for 7 - 12 minutes, keep an eye on it through your oven window, it can go from perfectly done to burned really fast but if you take it out too soon, it won't be done on the bottom.

If I'm not going to eat all the portions of pizza dough at once (and let's face it, on my own I'm not) I usually roll them out to size before freezing them.  I transfer each base to a sheet of baking paper, stack the papers up with the pizza bases on top of each other, trim away the excess paper and wrap the stack in plastic film.  I then put the stack onto a baking tray or cutting board so it stays flat and put it in the freezer.  The baking paper stops them from sticking together.  Once they're frozen I can reclaim the board.  Then I have a bunch of dinners half-way made waiting for me, if I take one out of the freezer before I start to heat the oven, because I roll them so thin, they usually thaw in the time it takes to pre-heat the oven.  You don't have to thaw it to start spreading the toppings so it's ready to go by the time the oven's fully hot.  Faster than ordering from a shop.

Bread - a tribute to Mom

I don't have my Mom's bread recipe and I'm not going to ask for it, I found out a year or so ago that she used to monkey with it every time she made it.  And by monkey I mean she'd sometimes make the recipe as directed, other times she'd rummage through the fridge where anything starchy and white, like leftover mashed potato, would be viewed as filler and she'd mix that into the dough - no lie, she's admitted this.  Which explains why sometimes we'd have loaves of bread so fluffy and huge that a single slice would look like a giant cross section of a mushroom and had to have the sides trimmed to fit into the toaster and other times they'd be so squat that you'd need four miserable little slices the density of roofing shingles to make a full size sandwich.  So now we all know.
 
But despite her varying successes I love fresh bread on a deeply rooted level, the warmest, homiest, safest, most emotionally soothing of all smells is fresh bread.  So many times I can remember coming home from school to home baked warm crusty bread and thinking that my mom was some sort of magician, and I feel so highly accomplished when I make bread myself.  While loaf bread is highly practical, I have to admit that it was fresh baked buns that were my favourite, in our family there was many a war over getting the crust slice of the loaf, buns were all around crust.
 
So it's a given that my Mom's bread recipe is not going to be recovered and even if it could be who knows which version would emerge.  If I'm honest, I don't even think it's necessary to get back to her recipe, I just want to be able to make a medium density loaf of white bread or a batch of buns with a reasonable hope of consistent results.  Also, I'm not going to be a purist to laud the merits of kneading by hand (you learn the texture of the dough better /  it's good for your arms), I paid good money for a high-end stand mixer that is supposed to be a 'tough' machine, I let it do all the hard kneading.  This is my recipe for bread, the result of a few years of trial and error, mixing and matching several recipes to get the right loftiness, softness and crustyness of the home-made bread of my childhood memories (I block out the funny bread when I reminisce).  Lastly, I'm sorry for being all over the shop with the measuring units, that's what happens when you mix recipes.
 
 
Bread
 
Mix together
1/2 pint of water
1 tsp sugar
14 gram dry active yeast (2 sachets if you're using them)
Put in a warm place for 5 - 15 minutes to check that the yeast is alive and happy to work for you.  I used to mix the dry yeast straight into the flour, because some yeasts you can do that, but I think one time a box of yeast got a bit old and it stopped working so well, a nice frothy head of yeast bubbles makes me feel assured that the rest of the work isn't going to go to waste.

 
Measure into the bowl of your mixer
400 grams white flour - all purpose / plain flour works fine, bread flour does too if you have it
1/2 tsp salt
 
Give it a little mix to distribute the salt then pour in the yeast liquid, attach the dough hook and start the machine.
 
When the dough starts to come together add
1 tbsp of vegetable oil
 
Then let it run on low speed for about 10 - 20 minutes until it becomes smooth and elastic.  I always used to wonder what that meant, smooth and elastic, this is my conclusion:  basically it goes from looking/feeling slightly clumpy and sticky to a solid wad of dough and looks almost like there's a bit of a sheen on the surface it'll want to stick to itself more than to the bowl.  The difference is minimal in the photos, hope they help though.

 
Then put it back in your warm place covered with a clean tea towel.  I don't bother with all the take the dough out, wash and oil the bowl, form it into a nice round ball, cover with oiled cling-film, what ever else you're supposed to do, you can if you want, I just plunk it by the radiator and leave it there for half an hour, give or take, until it's double in size.

 
The fun bit, gently punch it down to knock out the big air bubbles, then scrape it out of the bowl onto a lightly floured counter and give it a few kneads by hand then roll/stretch the dough out into a log. 
 
If you're making a loaf turn the log 90^ so the length faces away from you and starting like a snail but pushing down like you're trying to compress a sleeping bag, roll it up into another log - if you rolled it perfectly to the right length (wow, well done!) give the ends a good pinch to seal up the roll layers, if not tuck the ends under to shorten it to fit or roll/stretch it out if you need to lengthen it - put it seam side down into a greased loaf tin.  It will relax a bit when you drop it in there, the dough should half fill the tin, be level on top and touch all four walls of the loaf tin, if it doesn't, take it out and manipulate it until it does, roll/stretch, tuck, punch with your knuckles, cut some away, whatever you need to do.
 
If you're making buns divide the log into 6 to 12 even sized pieces (however big you want them), then one at a time, with a claw hand over each piece roll it in circles on the counter into a ball until the surface is smooth (I'm still working on my two-at-a-time-two-hand technique) circle away from you with the heal of your hand circle back using your fingers, then place evenly space on an greased baking tray.  You can give it a push to flatten it out a bit if you want a lower wider shaped bun.
 
Put your dough back in your warm place covered again with your tea towel for half an hour, give or take until double in size - don't let it over-rise thinking 'yeah - big loaf' it will deflate in the oven and disappoint greatly.
 
About 15 minutes into your wait for the dough to rise, take a peek under the towel to see how fast things are working to gauge when to start pre-heating the oven.
 
 
For both bread and buns pre-heat the oven to 200^C, at this point make sure that your rack is in the middle of the oven.
 
When the oven is hot and the bread is ready to go pop it in the oven, for buns bake for 15 minutes at 200^C, for a loaf turn the oven down to 180^ as soon as you close the oven door and bake for 30 minutes, the higher initial temperature helps to make a nice brown crust on the top early in the bake and that should help the loaf rise straight up out of the tin rather than bulging sideways over the top (doesn't always work but ya gotta try).  It's done when you knock on the bottom of it and it sounds hollow.
 
I've never done the trick of putting a pan with some water in the bottom of the oven to add steam for an extra crusty loaf, I've heard too much steam can mess with your oven's thermometer and I don't need an extra variable in my bread making just yet.
 
After they're done, transfer to a wire rack to cool as soon as you can to stop the steam condensing against the tin/tray and softening the crust.  A loaf of bread will not react well to being cut open while too warm, leave it alone, let it cool properly to keep as much of that steam inside the bread as possible, that's what makes it soft.  Buns on the other hand, as long as they haven't merged together in the rising you can rip one open, melt some butter in there and munch away.  Be careful not to burn your mouth but you're not going to ruin the batch by eating one, which might be a contributing factor to them being my favourite, that and the all around crust.