No Oil Crisis Here

When it comes to pizza dough, it looks like a small amount of oil goes a long way.

Day before yesterday, I made a 12″ pie with 225 grams of flour and no oil except for some applied to the outside. I found the crust leathery, which is what I wanted, but not quite as crunchy as I desired.

Having obtained the leathery crust I was shooting for, I started to feel I didn’t want it after all. I decided to try to make it slightly less tough, with more crunch.

The pizza before last was made with a teaspoon of cheap olive oil, and I thought it wasn’t tough enough. Pizza with no oil was too tough. I decided to try half a teaspoon.

I fermented the dough overnight in a fridge, and today I baked at 550° on a quarter-inch steel. I baked it slightly longer than usual. You can see the result below.

I think this is what I’ll stick with for a while. It was a perfect pizzeria-quality pie, except of course better. All of the ingredients are sold at my local Publix, so I don’t have to worry about local availability.

I used about 4 ounces of Boar’s Head sliced mozzarella and 2 ounces of Cracker Barrel extra sharp white cheddar. I cut the cheese in small pieces, tossed it to mix it up, and applied it.

The cheese was good. I found I wasn’t thinking about it while I ate the pizza, and that means I didn’t see anything wrong with it. I believe the cheddar loosened the mozzarella up and added some zing.

I also used big chunks of Publix bulk Italian sausage, which is now my default pizza sausage. Much less aggravation that sausage in a casing, and it cooks beautifully.

Next time, I’ll cook the pie for 8 minutes instead of 9. This one was wonderful, but it didn’t need to be quite so well done.

Now that I have a grip on dough management, I can make dough up to three days in advance. That will give me flexibility. I may make a ball now for day after tomorrow.

I’m thinking about making mozzarella. I read about making it at home, and it seems like a good way to get it the way I want it and save half of the cost. I learned that you need unhomogenized milk to make it, and that’s expensive, but you can make your own unhomogenized milk by adding heavy cream to skim milk. If I can make low-moisture mozzarella at home, I should be able to get a better product without shelling out 10 dollars per pound.

I have read that you can make mozzarella from queso blanco. Evidently, queso blanco is what you get if you start making mozzarella and stop before you’re done. If this is true, I could make nice cheese without all the work of starting with milk.

Once I can make cheese, I think I’ll be stuck. There won’t be anything left to figure out. Maybe at some point I’ll develop an interest in high-temperature pizza. That would supply fodder for new projects.

After writing all this, I had a revelation. I figured out why my thin pizza hasn’t been as good as my Sicilian.

Back in 2009, a recipe for astounding Sicilian pizza simply fell into my head, and since then, I have been making the best Sicilian I know of. I have never had a restaurant pie as good. I have improved my recipe a little, but even the first version was beyond compare.

Once I had Sicilian under control, it was natural to try to conquer thin pizza. I already knew how to make a pretty good thin pie, but it didn’t bring me the same level of ecstasy as my Sicilian. Over the years, I have made a lot of progress, and for a long time, I’ve been making thin pies better than restaurants do. I was still never quite sure I had the perfect recipe.

A few minutes ago, I had a revelation. I now know why I do better with Sicilian than thin pizza.

Sicilian pizza and other forms of pan pizza are objectively superior to all types of thin pizza.

Why didn’t I see this sooner?

Sicilian combines a crunchy, fried, buttery crust with a thick layer of delicious fresh bread. If you want, you can spread cheese all the way to the sides and get magnificent baked cheese all the way around your crust. There is no way to make a thin pie give you all that potential for joy. A thin pie has a small rim, a fat rim, or no rim, and it can be puffy and soft or crunchy. It’s not fried. You can’t make it buttery. The crust under the sauce and cheese isn’t crunchy and aromatic like Sicilian crust. It’s like burned leather. It has almost no bread flavor, because it’s so thin.

Sicilian pizza is Godzilla. Thin pizza is Japan. It’s that simple. It doesn’t matter how well you make your thin pizza. It’s still not going to be as good as Sicilian. Even Pizza Hut pan pizza, which is made with fake cheese and spray-on butter, is better than a really good thin pie.

I have been striving for a goal I had already reached.

I think now I have pizza peace. I’m sure I’ll keep messing with thin pizza variations, but I’ll give up the idea that it will ever make me as happy as Sicilian.

I had the feeling I should get a propane oven that reached high temperatures, but that’s stupid. The best New York pizzerias cook at around the same temperature I do. A hotter oven would not make things any better.

I already make the best garlic rolls possible, so I have nothing to strive for in that area. When it comes to pizza and rolls, I believe I can be content with small changes from now on.

Let’s just hope I don’t go Neapolitan. I don’t want to open that can of elmintiasi.