Monday, July 12, 2010

Cook's Illustrated Pizza

Cook's Illustrated Pizza
  • Can you make better-than-takeout deep-dish pizza at home, in a reasonable amount of time?
The Problem
  • We began our quest for a good, homemade deep-dish pizza because most of the deep-dish pizzas to be had at restaurants or from takeout services simply aren't that good. Many of them, unfortunately, are oily disks of tasteless, soggy, heavy dough, overwhelmed by even greasier toppings.
The Goal
  • Because these pizzas are 75 percent crust, we wanted a recipe that would give center stage to a crust that was really good: rich-tasting, slightly chewy, and golden brown. We also wanted a recipe the home cook could produce in a moderate amount of time. We didn't want anyone wishing they'd gone for the greasy takeout version instead just to save time.
The Solution
  • The secret to a perfect crust came from an unlikely source: a potato. Also used in a recipe for focaccia dough that we liked, the potato contributed moisture as well as extra richness and sweetness to the dough. We cut down on the time required to ready the dough for baking by putting it in a barely warmed oven for the first rise. While the first rise usually takes an hour, this dough was ready to work with in only 35 minutes. Covering the pizza pan with oil before loading it with dough made for a densely caramelized crust that looked and tasted delicious. Finally, to keep the toppings from weighing down the crust and making it soggy, we precooked it for 15 minutes, giving it a chance to rise and firm up a bit. This practice ended up benefiting the toppings as well, which now had just enough time to heat through and melt or brown.
Chicago Style Deep Dish Pizza Recipe
  • Deep-dish pizza was born in Chicago, where it boasts a distinctively rich, flaky, biscuit-like crust. The problem? No pizzeria in Chicago would tell us how to make it.
The Problem
  • Bad deep-dish pizzas are doughy and tasteless, while recipes for the good versions are staunchly protected by the people who make them.
The Goal
  • We wanted a facsimile of the best of Chicago deep-dish pizzas: a thick crust with an airy, flaky inside, lightly crisp outside, and a rich taste that can hold its own under any kind of topping.
The Solution
  • The recipes we came across in our research sounded an awful lot like classic pizza dough: Combine flour, cornmeal, salt, sugar, and yeast in a large bowl, then add melted butter and water, transfer the ingredients to a stand mixer, and knead them into a dough. Allow the dough to rise, divide it in half, and let it rise again until doubled in size, then press the dough into a 9-inch round pan on a baking stone in a 500-degree oven. Our first impression when we followed these steps? Not bad. The butter flavor came through, and the cornmeal added a nice earthiness and crunch, but we wanted a crust with more flake and less chew. It occurred to us to try laminating. This baking term refers to the layering of butter and dough that creates ultra-flaky pastries through a sequence of rolling and folding. After melting part of the butter, we mixed it with the dough, allowed the dough to rise, and rolled it into a rectangle. We spread the remaining butter over the surface and rolled the dough into a cylinder to create layers of buttery dough. To amplify this effect, we then flattened the cylinder into a rectangle, divided it in half, and folded each half into thirds, like a business letter. There was just one small setback. All that handling caused the temperature of the dough to rise, so by the end of the process, the dough had warmed so much that almost all of the butter had melted, leading to a crust that was more tender and breadlike than flaky. The solution? Moving the dough into the refrigerator for its second rise so that any butter that had melted or gotten overly soft could firm up again. Our only additional tweak was adding oil to each pan to crisp the edges, which worked so well that we didn’t even need to use a pizza stone. With our crust all set, we considered the pizza’s other components. We favored freshly shredded mozzarella for its smooth texture and the way it formed a consistent barrier between dough and sauce. And we decided to use a thickened version of our Quick Tomato Sauce, which creates surprisingly complex flavor in a mere 15 minutes from canned crushed tomatoes. Spread over the cheese, this bright-tasting sauce won rave reviews from tasters.
HOW TO COOK HAMBURGERS :

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