Plus Frozen Dough

Time to bless you with more pizza information.

A week ago, I was interrupted while making pizza. I took the risen dough and wrapped it in foil and stuck it in the freezer. Today I needed lunch, and I remembered the dough. I thawed it out and used it.

In the past, I’ve noted that dough improves with age, but I was too lazy to experiment and give definite results. This week I experimented accidentally, bypassing laziness. And the results were excellent. The crust had more flavor and a better texture than my usual one-hour dough. So I’m going to do what Mike does. I’m going to make a pile of dough portions and freeze them. This will make pizza more convenient and less messy, since I’ll only use the food processor once.

I plan to freeze the dough in disks, not balls. A disk will thaw faster, and it takes less work to turn a disk into a pizza. Mike uses balls. He also hits them with microwaves for about 45 seconds to thaw them. That probably won’t work as well with disks, because they have thinner parts which may overcook. I went 40 seconds today, but that was as far as I was willing to take it. I had to leave the dough out for maybe an hour and a half before I could turn it into a pie.

The dough was coated with olive oil twice. First, when I made it. I put it in a Pyrex dish with a light coating of oil, and I let it rise. Then I was interrupted, and I froze it. When I took it out today, I applied a little more oil to keep it from drying while it thawed. It worked great.

It seems like pizza dough gets better and better the more it rises. If you go too far, you can always punch it down.

I think I made this pie with bread flour. I can’t remember.

Second thing: I have new information about improving bad cheese. I’m using Gordon Food Supply’s mozzarella/provolone mix, which is fairly good but too low in fat. In the past, I’ve added a small amount of butter to improve it. This keeps it from burning, makes it chewier, and prevents it from tasting like vinyl. Today I added butter to one half and olive oil to the other half. I used between a teaspoon and a tablespoon of fat for four ounces (weight) of cheese. Just enough to coat it. I didn’t use a real measuring spoon, but I would guess I used two teaspoons per four-ounce half, and it was ample.

The olive oil side was better. Butter can make the cheese too rich. The olive oil added flavor without making the cheese too greasy. And the cheese laid down better when it melted. So I highly recommend it. Just don’t overdo it. This will be a lot easier than driving to Costco to get their flawless mozzarella. I have a feeling it will also work on supermarket cheese.

This pie was truly excellent. I think I got my mojo back.

I may also divide my sauce into two-ounce portions and seal it in vacuum bags. It’s almost a month old, and it’s going to go bad if I don’t do something. Those gallon cans are so wasteful. The Stanislaus people should wake up and start selling small retail cans.