Pizza Crust

Pizza is something I've always wanted to be better at.  Over the past year or so I think I've improved quite a bit.  I like Chicago style pizza as well, but this one is a nice crisp thin crust.  The most important thing is to have a good pizza stone, and also helpful is to have a peel that you can use to slide your raw pizza onto the stone.  The other secret is, I think, to knead the dough long enough to really be elastic.  The recipe I use is based on Alton Brown's, but as is often the case with his recipes, you do have to be careful.  The one that's easiest to find online has way too much sugar and salt.  There are two errors in the recipe from I'm Just Here for More Food, which I've corrected in my version below.  The flour in the book's recipe was off by a factor of two, and it called for a children's aspirin instead of vitamin C (I skip it completely).

Pizza Dough

1¼ cups warm water
2½ tsp. salt
1 tsp. sugar
4 cups (454 g) flour
2½ tsp. yeast

Mix the ingredients in a stand mixer with dough hook, then knead on 4 (out of 10) for 5 minutes.  Work the dough into a ball, put in a bowl lightly greased with olive oil, cover with a towel and put it in a warm place, until it doubles in size, about 1 hour.

Divide the dough in half, then work one half into a pizza crust, them place on a pizza peel dusted with cornmeal or semolina.  (The other half can be refrigerated for a few days or frozen if you don't need both.)  Top and slide onto a preheated pizza stone in a 550° F oven.  Keep an eye on it, it should be done in 5-6 minutes.

My biggest remaining problem is that the cheese starts to burn before the crust is completely done.  What I've done the last couple times is take it out and turn the oven off when the cheese gets done, then after having the first piece, if it could use a little more time, slide the rest back on the pizza stone for a few minutes.  That tends to get more cheese & sauce on the pizza stone than usual, making it harder to clean.  Next time I think I'll try 500° F for slightly longer.

Chicago style pizza

I've recently become enamored of Alton Brown's recipe for pizza dough. Makes a nice thin crust pizza at 550° F on a pizza stone. On the other end of the pizza scale, I've been wanting to perfect my Chicago Pan Pizza recipe. I attempted it this weekend for the first time in a long time. Influenced by this recipe, I tried it with these proportions for the crust:

1 cup water
2¾ cups flour
¼ cup cornmeal
½ tsp. salt
¼ cup olive oil
2 tsp. yeast

After running it in the stand mixer with a dough hook for a while, the dough was still too sticky, so I threw in some more flour. Probably still not enough, I'd cut down the water in this recipe. Also, double the salt to 1 tsp. Otherwise, pretty good. Cover with sliced mozzarella, mushrooms, sausage, a can of diced tomatoes and grated parmesan, in that order. I would use a full pound of mozzarella next time, and maybe a little more tomato sauce with the diced tomatoes. It's getting there.

Chicago Pan Pizza

I adapted this recipe a few years ago for a 12" cast iron pan. It works OK, but could still use some improvement.

crust:
⅔ cup water
2½ cups flour
⅓ cup cornmeal
½ tsp. salt
2 tbl. olive oil
1½ tsp. yeast

Knead or use dough setting of bread machine. After 1st rising, roll out and shape into 12" cast iron pan that has been coated with olive oil and dusted with cornmeal. Top with mozzarella, cooked sausage and canned diced tomatoes. Bake at 450°F.