Passionate About Pizza: Making Great Homemade Pizza by Curtis Ide Read Free Book Online Page B

non-pizza.
     
    Deciding Which Flavor Combination To Use
     
    You will need to pick the flavor combination you want to put on the pizza before you begin so that you can make sure you have the ingredients for the pizza. On the other hand, you might make a pizza with whatever you have on hand; that, obviously, will determine the flavors!
     
    What You Will Need
     
    Equipment you will need:
     
Measuring Cups
Measuring Spoons
Large Mixing Bowl
Large, Sturdy Spoon
Heavy-duty Mixer (optional)
Plastic Wrap
Rolling Pin (if desired)
Saucepan
Pizza Pan, Stone, or Screen
     
    Ingredients you will need:
     
Flour
Yeast
Salt
Sugar
Water
Cheese
Sauce Ingredients
Toppings
Herbs
     
    Order of Preparation
     
    This book lays out the recipes in the standard order of steps you should follow when doing the work all at once. You make the dough first. When the dough starts rising, the oven is turned on to preheat it. While the dough is rising, you prepare the sauce and toppings (or fillings), and the oven and baking stone (if you are using one) comes up to temperature. After the sauce and toppings are completed and the dough has risen, you assemble the pizza and then bake it.
     
    This order is straightforward and you will get used to it. Nevertheless, it is not the only way to make a pizza. By now, I only use this method when I am making pizza on a weekend for the family. If I am making several pizzas or if I am making pizza on a workday, I alter the order of the work a bit.
     
    You must perform some steps before others. Obviously, you have to make the dough before it can rise. In addition, the dough must rise before you shape it and you have to assemble the pizza before you can bake it. You cannot change nature. However, you can choose the order in which you do some things; some sequences are better than other sequences. You can even work some magic and greatly cut down the time from starting preparations to finishing the pizza after you get the hang of it. However, since you are the boss in your pizza kitchen you are in charge! So, do what seems natural or right to you and it will be just fine.
     
    Making Things Ahead
     
    There is no need to get in a huff trying to do all the work at once. For example, you can make the sauces and toppings at any time before you need them. You can buy pre-cut or pre-shredded ingredients. You can freeze or can your sauces in convenient portions. You can freeze kneaded dough and defrost it when needed. You can even (sigh) buy prepared sauces, toppings, or even (gasp) pizza dough.
     
    Fitting Things In
     
    You can benefit by taking advantage of the time some of the steps naturally take to reduce the hassle. As you will see, it takes at least an hour for the dough to rise, but you can also let it rise longer. Need to run a quick errand? No problem! You can leave dough to rise for one to three hours with no adjustments. If you are going to let it rise all day, you might want to reduce the yeast by half and omit any sugar in the recipe. Of course, if you have a bread machine with a timer, you can have the dough ready, mixed, and risen whenever you want!
     
    You can use the time-bake feature of your oven to preheat the baking stone for you while you are away. I set mine to turn on one hour before I am to arrive home, so that I can quickly shape the pizza and pop it in the oven. Alternatively, have your spouse preheat the stone for you.
     

Baking Stone
     

     
    A baking stone is a circle or rectangle made of unglazed ceramic material about one-half of an inch thick. You generally place the baking stone in the oven with the oven turned on about an hour before baking the pizza so that the stone can heat up to oven temperature. Typically, rectangular pizza stones are approximately fourteen inches by sixteen inches and circular stones are sixteen inches in diameter, but there are many variations available.
     
    The high heat and porous surface of the baking stone simulates a bakery or pizzeria oven