The Art of the Pizza

Tonight, I made a pizza. I make pizza at least once or twice a month. It's something we really like and I have never had a slice from a pizza joint here in France that was up to my very critical standards. When I was a kid in Detroit, we had a pizza place on Schoolcraft Road and Kentfield run by a old Italian man who had a brick oven. I was very choosy about the topping...pepperoni! The most memorable part of the pizza was the crust. Light, crispy and the edges were full of big bubbles and the bottom was dusted with semolina. I guess the place closed in the late 60's when the proprieter died. My buddy Mike who lived on the next block from the Pizza place opened his own chain of Pizza Boys in Detroit in the early 70's. I used to come up from Toledo and hang out with him once and a while and learned how to throw a pizza. He made pretty good pizza, but it was not the same....I have to admit that in Toledo, I never found a pizza that came even close to my standards and I gave everyone a chance to prove it!
I began to think that my pizza fantasy was just that...an idealized memory of a perfect pizza that never was. When I lived in New York in the East Village, a restaurant called Two Boots opened on Avenue A in tthe late 80's. Two Boots because it specialized in Cajun and Italian Cuisine. They specialized in Pizza! They made really good pizza and the secret was the crust. It was just like I had imagined I remembered it! Light, yet with a real bread taste, crispy and thin with the big bubbles in the edges. The sauce was great, the slice with coppola ham and roasted peppers became my favorite comfort food. They even opened up a Pizza joint across the street because it was so popular. They are still there, On Avenue A and East 3rd Street. Two Boots To Go, Pizza and video rentals all over under one roof! I had a few slices in March of this year and it's still as good!
So, in my quest to make the perfect pizza, I have been experimenting with the crust.
Slowly through trial and error and always imagining how I could get it better, I have finally figured out how to make the crust of my fantasies! I found that the most important ingredient is time!
Try this, it's so simple!
In a big bowl mix:
One packet of yeast
One cup of warm water
A cup and a half of flour
Use bread making flour, in America unbleached is the best...I use a variety called type 55 here and get it from a small flour mill in a near by village named Ayen.
So mix the yeast, water and flour together and cover the bowl with a towel and lut it in a moderately warm place for an hour.
The mixture after an hour will be foamy and spongy.
Into it mix...I use a wooden spoon...
1/8 cup olive oil
less than a teaspoon of salt
then I add another cup of flour...
I flour the work surface and turn the dough out on it and start to knead it, lightly flouring it until it stops being sticky to the touch. The trick is not to add any more flour than is neccessary. The dough should be very soft. Knead it for around 10 minutes. Then I form it into a ball, put it back into the bowl, cross the top with a sharp knife, recover it with the towel and put it back into the warmish place.
The forget about it until it is time to make the pizza. If you can give it 2 hours, that's pretty good! I usually start pizza dough after lunch.
When you make the pizza, I use semolina on the surface, I take the dough out of the bowl and the next secret is to handle it as little as possible! Since it has sat for so long, the dough has had time to form real gluten strands which give it amazing elasticity. If you dare, you can throw it like a pro. If you are a novice, no problem, just start letting gravity do the work, keeping the thickness of the dough even as you stretch it thinner and thinner. I always have more than I need and uuse the extra to make a little bread loaf...I braid it and put coarse salt over the top and bake it at the same time I do the pizza.
Do I have to tell you what to put on it? Tonight I had sauce that I froze last summer. A simple sauce with garlic and basil, then mozzarella cheese, thin slices of hot chorizo sausage, some emmenthal cheese, slices of ripe red pepper and then a nice sprinkling of parmesan.
Into a very hot oven for about 25 minutes, the bread takes a little longer!
The best slice in France!