Spill your secrets?

In reply to z31maniac :

My Char Broil 4 burner has a thermometer on the top. I have no idea how accurate it is. When I do frozen pizza on it, I open the propane all the way and turn all of the burners on full blast. After about 10 minutes, the thermometer is pegged, well past the 650 that it goes up to. 

When I put the pizza on, I turn off the two middle burners, put the pizza in the middle, and it takes about 5-9 minutes to cook - this is pizza that takes 15-20 minutes in a 450* oven. Kind of an art more than a science to get it right - When I first started doing it, I burned one pretty bad in 6 minutes, and had to leave another on for 11 minutes. I need to get a pizza stone to try homemade; the frozen goes directly on the grill. Pizza stone would also let you leave the two middle burners on. 

following.

My recipe (from memory, I will check later):

370g flour

164g warm water

3tsp olive oil

1.5tsp yeast

pinch of salt

I pre-heat my cast iron pan.  I usually cook at 400F for ~15 mins.   Its not perfect but its pretty good.  I wish I could master the art of stretching it to fill the pan, and also get it to rise a little bit more when cooking.

z31maniac said:

EvanB said:

In reply to z31maniac :

I've had great luck with a propane grill and a pizza stone. Crank it up to max and preheat for 15-20 minutes. Throw the pizza on and it has a perfect crispy and bubbly crust in about 5 minutes. 

Good to know! Although I'm not sure I care enough about homemade pizza to drop the money on a nice propane grill. We have a plain old circle Weber charcoal grill and works well for what we typically do. 

Charcoal works really well with the Pillsbury pizza dough in tubes. Just gotta be quick, like 2 minutes, flip, add toppings, 2 more minutes. 

mtn said:

In reply to z31maniac :

My Char Broil 4 burner has a thermometer on the top. I have no idea how accurate it is. When I do frozen pizza on it, I open the propane all the way and turn all of the burners on full blast. After about 10 minutes, the thermometer is pegged, well past the 650 that it goes up to. 

When I put the pizza on, I turn off the two middle burners, put the pizza in the middle, and it takes about 5-9 minutes to cook - this is pizza that takes 15-20 minutes in a 450* oven. Kind of an art more than a science to get it right - When I first started doing it, I burned one pretty bad in 6 minutes, and had to leave another on for 11 minutes. I need to get a pizza stone to try homemade; the frozen goes directly on the grill. Pizza stone would also let you leave the two middle burners on. 

Nice, I didn't realize they would get that hot. 

ProDarwin said:

following.

My recipe (from memory, I will check later):

370g flour

164g warm water

3tsp olive oil

1.5tsp yeast

pinch of salt

 

I pre-heat my cast iron pan.  I usually cook at 400F for ~15 mins.   Its not perfect but its pretty good.  I wish I could master the art of stretching it to fill the pan, and also get it to rise a little bit more when cooking.

 

Did you just mix standard and metric units ?

ProDarwin said:

following.

My recipe (from memory, I will check later):

370g flour

164g warm water

3tsp olive oil

1.5tsp yeast

pinch of salt

 

I pre-heat my cast iron pan.  I usually cook at 400F for ~15 mins.   Its not perfect but its pretty good.  I wish I could master the art of stretching it to fill the pan, and also get it to rise a little bit more when cooking.

 

Your pie looks a bit like mine.  It can get thick and bready.  I too have trouble getting it stretched to size without tearing holes in it.  You can play with the flour amount--more flour makes it breadier and hard to stretch, it just springs back. 

As long as you're in a warm kitchen, if you want more rise, let it rise a bit after you have it to size, but before it goes in the oven.

58% H20 by weight.

3% salt

3% yeast.

24 hour ferment at room temp, another 24-48 in the fridge.

Wood fired oven, 750-850 F. 1.5 minutes, turn 180 on peel, another 30 seconds.

Neopolitan style, super thin crust.

Once you learn bakers percentages, you don't go back.

Gearheadotaku (Forum Supporter) said:

ProDarwin said:

following.

My recipe (from memory, I will check later):

370g flour

164g warm water

3tsp olive oil

1.5tsp yeast

pinch of salt

 

I pre-heat my cast iron pan.  I usually cook at 400F for ~15 mins.   Its not perfect but its pretty good.  I wish I could master the art of stretching it to fill the pan, and also get it to rise a little bit more when cooking.

 

Did you just mix standard and metric units ?

Not really, since 1 tsp is just a convenient way of saying 5 ml :) It gets hard to measure 1/4 tsp (the amount of yeast in the typical batch of my pizza dough) with a scale. Bakers percentages are useful if you're looking to change the total quantity but they get a little sketchy with really small numbers again.

I was helping my 8 year old nephew do his homework yesterday, and it was all on cups/pints/quarts/gallons. Poor kid. I grew up with metric, that sort of conversion is a non-issue :) By flipping them to metric in my head, I was able to do the math much better than my wife who grew up in the US.

Thank you.  Yes tsp is metric, but its also annoying - I wish smaller measurements were just given in ml instead of tsp/tbsp/cups.  The conversion between those is annoying.

Cups/Pints/Quarts/Gallons don't bother me at all.

In metric-land, what do you call the volume of a beer?   A half-liter? A 250/500?

In reply to ProDarwin :

Well that all depends on if you're using imperial, British, or metric fluid ounces. I had seen a meme showing the differences but it's now buried on my meme site under thousands of posts the same 3 anti Russia memes. 

I keep this in my kitchen above the stove. It's a big help.

A pints a pound the world around, except it isn't. A US pint is 16oz, a British is almost 20, and a metric is I think 22-24 if I remember correctly.

ProDarwin said:

Thank you.  Yes tsp is metric, but its also annoying - I wish smaller measurements were just given in ml instead of tsp/tbsp/cups.  The conversion between those is annoying.

Cups/Pints/Quarts/Gallons don't bother me at all.

In metric-land, what do you call the volume of a beer?   A half-liter? A 250/500?

As always it depends I’m 63 so as a child we learned measures in British standard. Metrification came in my mid teens so I convert on the fly often in my head. Beer gets referred to most commonly as a can or bottle because the size is standardized on US production lines so it gets a strange size such as 355ml. At a pub it’s often ordered as glass approximately 355 ml or pint 500 ml - just so everything is confusing from a macro point of view.

ProDarwin said:

Thank you.  Yes tsp is metric, but its also annoying - I wish smaller measurements were just given in ml instead of tsp/tbsp/cups.  The conversion between those is annoying.

Cups/Pints/Quarts/Gallons don't bother me at all.

In metric-land, what do you call the volume of a beer?   A half-liter? A 250/500?

What is the purpose of a pint? It's halfway between a cup and a quart and serves no useful purpose. And there are two different gallons on the North American continent alone. Don't get me started on how an ounce can be volume or weight, that's just dumb.

I don't drink beer meself, but I think the volume of a beer is a beer though.

What's the factor for conversion between a ton and a metric E36 M3 ton?

Relevant XKCD yesterday

I think I've met an engineer who worked like that.

We used to joke about a speedometer calibrated in "furlongs per fortnight" for old Land Rovers. Turns out that even at old Land Rover speeds, it's still a really big number...

so I've been experimenting and searching

This recipe has quickly become my favorite for a deep dish, I just need to try it as a regular pie now.

The cornmeal really did make difference.

It rolled out and stayed rolled out, which solved a problem I've had with other recipes. Thin, light, crispy, bakes fairly nice and evenly.

worked almost too well for the spring form pan. More cheese, more meat in the future. 

I don't have a picture from my cast iron version this time because it disappeared to quickly, but it was about perfect, at least to me who has never been to Chicago for a real one. Beats the hell out of the frozen and take n bake deep dishes I've got from stores, and the one semi local place that makes them anyway. 

This is sort of a pizza dough related question...  Thinking about going to my local metal supply store and buying a 14" x 14" .25" piece of rectangular A36 steel and seasoning it like a cast iron pan to use as a pizza baking steel.  Will cost about forty bucks.  Anybody try something like this?

I bought a Baking Steel Plus before the winter because we had so much fun with our outdoor wood-fired pizza oven all summer and fall. I was getting pretty good at it and wanted to continue making pizza and having friends over all winter long. Once I found out how well the baking steel worked, I made 3 of them and gave them to family members as Christmas gifts. 
 

14x14 seems small to me. Since you can have it cut any size you want, I would make it as deep as possible and as wide as the grate minus 1" on each side. Mine is 15"x20" and 1/4" thick and I made the others the same size. Once they were cut, I took them to a friend who "textured" one side with steel shot. The hard texture allows air under the dough, crisps it and doesn't allow it to stick like a smooth surface would. Or so I was told and since the one I purchased had a texture, I just copied it.

You'll really enjoy it!