The Pizza Quest

The Menu:

There is something so special about pizza as a dinner. After we cook pretty much every other day of the week, for 7 years, our normal scene has been to order a pizza on a Sunday night and watch a movie. Now, to be clear, we make seriously delicious food, and I have made a pizza or two in the past, but our usual go to was to order out for a pizza. Nothing like an easy Sunday night meal to wrap up the weekend. Even though I have made pizza in the past, I have only attempted one, the clam pizza inspired by the pie at Tom Douglas’s restaurant Serious Pie. In a bar one night, I was seated next to a chef who worked there and she gave me the basic recipe. Even though we made a serviceable version of it, the way we did it, was that I purchased raw pizza dough from a local pizza place (by bribing the person behind the counter). I had a few failed attempts to make pizza dough under my belt, and have just never really spent much time developing my pizza dough skills. Till now.

What inspired me was that we got sucked into our Pizza Quest by watching the Netflix show Chef’s Table: PIzza. Being that I fancy myself as a chef, I set about trying to perfect a pizza dough. I had previously made an effort to make a great pizza dough in order to make the Serious Pie Clam PIzza that we enjoy so much, but my dough was always suboptimal, so it was not a pursuit until we saw the show on Netflix, I went into overdrive and in the end, made the decision to acquire the artisanal flour from Hayden Flour MIlls, where they are reviving forgotten native grains from the ground up in the Arizona desert.  They use a stone milling technique to process the flour. Stone milling is an old world process where the whole grain is crushed into flour by rotating stones. Unlike modern roller mills that tend to shave off and discard the flavor and replacing natural nutrients with chemical enrichments, their process of stone milling in small batches preserves the natural oils of the grain, creating a more flavorful, nutrient-dense product. While it’s hard, labor-intensive work, they believe it’s well worth it. And so do I!

Making pizza dough with the highest quality, natural, hand-cultivated flours that are never bleached or enriched, and always freshly milled quite literally changes the experience. My dough recipe is inspired by Seattle chef Joe Heffernan. I make it more or less exactly the same way it is written. More or less exactly, and its perfection every time.

With the dough perfected, we then set about creating and recreating pizza’s that we love. It’s also tapped into our creative juices in the kitchen, which is a bonus!

Working with the dough and figuring out a process to make the pie, get it onto our heated pizza stone and have it keep its shape was an interesting challenge. But we figured that out. I lay the dough on parchment paper which sits on our cookie sheet, and that allows me to both slide it onto the stone, and get it off the stone without any problem.

Next came the topping choices. At first I was making slightly smaller pies so we would make two pies on Saturday night and 2 pies on Sunday night, which means toppings for 4 pizzas. That seemed unworkable, so instead we are now making 2 slightly larger pies, one each for Saturday and Sunday.

We are getting better at baking our thin crust pizza’s in our oven. We recently got a new oven that goes up to 550 degrees Fahrenheit, and I have experimented with where in the oven the pizza stone sits. In our oven, it works best if it’s in the middle on the lower of the middle rungs. We have also found that two other things matter. One is that it is important not to overload the pizza with ingredients. Having a “less is more” frame seems important in this exploration. The second thing that matters, now that I have perfected the pizza dough, is the cook. Remember, we heat the oven up with the stone in the oven so it is already hot, and I prep the pizza on parchment paper making it easy to slide it onto and pick up off the stone with our cookie sheet. We also have to consider that the time for the perfect bake is different for each pizza, but so far, at no point is it less than 7 minutes. So, starting at 7 minutes we check the bake and add more time, in either one minute or 30 second increments based on the color of the edges. To put it in a nutshell, we are getting really good at this!

The thing we learned about the ingredients through trial and error, is that often, less is more. We are learning.

We are definitely getting better at all three elements, getting the dough made correctly, not overloading the pizza and baking it correctly. Pizza is now on our menu as a regular go to dish. What makes it great is that you cannot buy the ingredients for just one pizza and there is a fair amount of crossover for ingredients. For example, we purchased Feta Cheese for one pizza, but used it for 4 others before we used it up. This means that on the whole, our grocery bill is much lower week to week even only making 2 pizza a week. For comparison, when we order a pizza, after delivery and tip we are spending over $50 for one meal. That is not terrible when eating restaurant prepped food for two, but it’s not something we do regularly. By comparison, the cost of the flour and yeast for two pizzas is under $3. The ingredients vary, but when you consider that various ingredients can be used multiple times before they are used up, the total cost for one pie is very generously, $10. Take the pie we made last night. Every ingredient on there is available for another pizza or two. We have Burrata, and romano, and tomato sauce, and garlic, and oregano, and pepperoni, and basil, and a bottle of hot honey all to use again. So, it is a very economical way of eating, and because we are making a thin 14″ pie or so, even half of that pizza is not so much food that it is very caloric.

Because we are so enamoured with Pizzas, we made a choice to try a “Week of Pizza”! I thought we would get sick of it by the end of the week, but we most certainly did not.