I've been messing around with my Pizza Dough recipe for the past 3 days 🐱
The goal was to scale the recipe to two portions (∅25cm) that taste best after around 16-24h resting time. I like my dough fairly thin, but more chewy than crispy. I also go heavy on the toppings, so it should have enough structure to hold them up by itself after the first two bites or so. Most Pizzas here are topped with 250-ish grams of chicken, pickles, pickled red onion, bbq sauce and whatever canned corn-mix I had on hand.
The first Pizza had way too much dough, and I had it in an initially cold pan on a pizza stone. It stayed very soggy in the middle 😕 I also only put oil in the pan, no flour. So it got super stuck.
The second one was light years ahead, way thinner dough and I blasted the pan on my induction stove until it sizzled before putting it in the oven without a pizza stone. The bottom turned out exactly how I like it!!
It still got a little stuck in the pan, as I used oil and too little semolina flour.
Pizza 3 was the best one! I went very heavy when coating the pan in regular flour (instead of semolina, i dont like the texture) and pulled up the crust on all sides so that it wouldn't stick so much. It didn't, and I kinda like the look! This one I also blasted on the stove beforehand and put in the oven with no Pizza stone.
The (current) dough recipe:
- 150g Pizza flour
- 150g water
- 1 tsp olive oil
- 1/8 tsp dry yeast
- 6g salt
- 3 tsp vital wheat gluten (sold as Seitan base)
-> mix everything to a very watery crepe-dough consistency and let sit for 20-30 mins
-> add 100g more flour and knead to a Pizza dough
-> let rest for at least 12h, but 16-24h is even better
-> bake it as hot as your oven will allow, mine has a Pizza setting that does 250°C
I'll probably tweak it even more when I get into the mood for half a week of Pizza again 🐱 I'm thinking that I should be able to get the exact same result from using regular 403 flour but with 4 instead of 3 tsp of the vital wheat gluten. But I might have to scale up the water as well in that case, hmm
What’s the purpose to the vital wheat gluten? I’ve never heard of anyone adding this to bread dough before.
It's kind of a short-cut/fix to not having the best quality flour. Usually good Pizza flour should have a high protein percentage (I've heard values in the 13-15% range), but that's really hard to find. My Pizza flour has 12%, my general purpose flour has 10%.
Vital Wheat Gluten is just the purified Protein from flour. It's 80% Protein, so I add a bit to bump up my flour's overall Protein content. The result is that the flour can absorb more moisture, and gets more stretchy and stable. Adding too much would probably make the dough tough and rubbery... but I'm kinda into that tbh. It would be interesting to see how much is too much 🤔
Ah ok! So it’s to assist in the formation of glutton.
These days I always buy my 00 flour online. If you’re in the US you should be able to buy cheap 00 off amazon or other online retailers. I always buy in bulk.
I'm in Germany, so Italy is close enough that I could get the proper flour from local Italian Stores ^^
It's twice as expensive as GP flour tho, so I usually don't really feel like it haha