You Know Who is in the Details

I got a nice comment on my Sicilian pizza recipe. I felt I should point a few things out.

1. You don’t absolutely have to have a stone to make this dish. If you get the right pan and find the right distance from the lower heating element in your oven, you will end up with a perfect crust, without removing the pie from the pan. It will fry on the bottom with no problems. I like to touch it up anyway, purely out of neurosis. If your pan is not perfect, you will want a stone to correct the crust.

2. You don’t need a mixer to make this dish. Just all the dry ingredients in a bowl; make sure you use instant yeast, not “active dry yeast.” Add the water and mix until you have dough. It does not have to be kneaded. You don’t even have to mix it very well.

If you don’t have a Publix supermarket near you, I can’t tell you where to get the pan I use at home, but here is some info from an email their customer service sent me:

At the present we do not have a new supplier for = our Publix Premium Bakeware 9 x 9 Cake Pan (GTIN-4141562056). We last received a shipment for this product in April 2008 and that product is comprised of:
99% Steel / 1% Aluminum Powder
Whitford Non-Stick Coating K4326 Champagne Gold Pewter.

Maybe you can find the same pan under a different name. High heat doesn’t faze it, so I’m not afraid to use it in the house with Marv and Maynard.

3. If you have given up looking for Stanislaus tomato products, fear not. Buy Cento D.O.P. San Marzano tomatoes and mash them up, or use Cento “Italian” tomatoes, which are supposedly better.

4. Costco mozzarella cut 50/50 with sliced provolone will send you straight to heaven, but you can also get good results with sliced mozzarella from your grocer’s deli counter. I suggest adding some grated cheese if you do that, because it seems like no other mozzarella has Costco’s wonderful flavor. I realize how crazy that sounds.

5. The cheapest olive oil you can find is probably best. The other day I learned that extra virgin isn’t really intended for cooking. I never liked the cardboard aftertaste it gave my pizza, and it turned out there was a reason it didn’t work. The chemicals that give extra virgin its flavor burn easily and then taste bad. I now use pomace oil, which is so cheap they don’t even call it olive oil. It has no off flavors at all, and you can get it for around $15 a gallon. That’s less than half the price of Costco extra virgin. Mike used it in garlic rolls the other day, and it was fantastic. I like extra virgin in rolls, but this stuff works great, although with less flavor.

For a 9″ square pie, I use 1.5 cups of flour, four ounces of mozzarella, four ounces of provolone, and around 5 ounces of sauce. You need a lot of sauce and cheese on Sicilian. You might consider increasing the dough.

This is not hard to make. You just make the dough and put it in a covered, oiled pan to rise a little, and then you shape it to fit the pan and let it rise again, and then you bake it right over the heating element at 550. Pop it out and put it on the stone for a little while to crisp up, and you’re done. The pan I use never sticks at all, so getting the pizza out is no problem.

I use cheap GFS (Wear-Ever) pans at church because I don’t want to spend a lot of their money, but the Publix pan is much better, and I didn’t have to bake seasoning onto it.

You could roll the pizza out and make it fit the pan at the start, avoiding the second rise, but for my purposes, this would work out to be harder and messier than the method above. I have to make lots of pizzas, and I don’t feel like messing up a counter with a rolling pin and flour. If you’re only making one pie, you may find the rolling pin saves you time and labor.

I know of no Sicilian that even comes close to this one. I have had lots of pizzas in lots of places, and nothing compares. This may not be the world’s best pizza, but it is definitely adequate.