Friday, February 7, 2014

The Best Pizza in Italy

Okay, maybe I'm being a little cocky, but I made homemade pizza today and it was the most delicious I've had so far.

Yesterday I went to a cheese store near the Rialto market. I was given Buffalo Mozzarella, which is mozzarella made from buffalo milk. It is the most delicious cheese I have ever tasted. I'm usually not a mozzarella person, just because it is sort of a bland cheese, but I could probably eat an entire ball of this cheese.

I preheated the oven as hot as I could (250 degrees Celsius) and waited about an hour for it to heat up. (I miss my convection oven). I kept a cookie sheet in the oven while it was preheating and sprinkled some bread crumbs (I didn't have any corn meal) on a piece of parchment paper.




 Making pizza dough seems pretty simple, but finding the right ratio of flour to dough to prevent a sticky mess proved out to be harder than I thought. I didn't even attempt to try to throw the dough above my head.
Now my pizzas weren't really round, but they turned out fine in the end. I ended up adding a lot more flour than the recipe said.
Also, it helped the dough rise to place the dough bowl in a bowl of warm water. My dough grew more in about 10 minutes than it did in 1 hour sitting on the counter.


I decided to make two pizzas. The first one with a garlic, rosemary and olive oil base with mushrooms and asiago and mozzarella cheeses. The second I made with a pesto base, spinach, mozzarella and sundried tomatoes. I put garlic olive oil on the crusts of both. I probably could have cooked the pizzas for longer but I like my crust thick and soft.









 

I like cold pizza, so I left it to sit while I went on a run. When I got back I took a quarter of each. The garlic mushroom was my favorite although both were good. The touch of rosemary in the crust and crunchy asiago were perfect.



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