For Indiana, I choose three of their top agricultural products: pork (bacon), corn and blueberries, along with a tangier Fontina cheese.

Now, I know what you’re thinking:  “blueberries!?  On pizza???!?!?”  Frankly, you’d be surprised how sweet fruit interacts with more savory elements.  One of our favorites around here is sliced grapes with bleu cheese, an extraordinary combination.  You want to avoid the sort of dessert-with-dinner-on-a-pizza effect and go for something that blends the flavors, creates a balance and interaction.  The sweetness of the corn melded nicely with the blueberries; along with them, the bacon and the fontina together created a sort of trio of tastes.  I need to turn to my 80 year old, vegetable-hating mother-in-law for a testimonial who took them both for a blind taste test.  She loved the taste of the Indiana pizza, though was stumped by the ingredients, which I think speaks to the way the tastes came together.

We loved ‘em both and because of the ample pre-game snacks ended, had left-overs we all agreed were great the next day as well.  As much as we liked it, I don’t think any of us would have chosen the Indiana pizza over the New Orleans pizza.  New Orleans wins again.

Lots of dough

I’ve been relying on Antimo Caputo tipo 00 flour, a flour famous for its elasticity.  Because of its high gluten content, it’s an ideal pizza-making flour.  After a few packages that just didn’t seem particularly fresh, however, I took a break from the Caputo flour to try a few others.  Frankly, though the date on the Caputo flour didn’t suggest it was problematically old, there was a significant amount of clumping and a slightly metalic smell that put me off.  There are many reasons why we’re drawn to local products, and one is certainly freshness.  As we turn from factory-farmed meats and vegetables, we re-encounter remarkable heirloom fruits and vegetables, revel in the amazing color and flavor of local eggs, and rediscover great flavors in meat from locally-raised animals.   Why not flour?

On a recent night, we had over several friends to share wine and conversation, as well as to get some feedback on different types of flour.  In addition to the eight of us, my 13-year old daughter had several friends over for a sleepover.  Making pizza for twelve, including two vegetarians, gave me the opportunity to work through some key variations.

I used three types of flour.  For my local flour, I chose an all-purpose organic unbleached flour from Westwind Mills, from Linden MI.  For a truer pizza flour, instead of the Caputo flour I went with a King Arthur rendition that they compare to “tipo 00″ and call an Italian-style flour.  And for run-of-the-mill, I went with the standard King Arthur all-purpose flour.

I varied the toppings a bit, but tried to keep a baseline for comparison.  I made margherita pizzas with buffalo mozzarella for the main point of comparison.  Of course that worked for both vegetarians and meat-eaters.  For the next round of pizzas, I did two:  one was the classic Italian thinly sliced potatoes (local and organic, of course) with Fontina cheese, rosemary, and coarsely ground pepper; the other was a prosciutto, tomato, fresh mozzarella pizza topped with arugula.  The first pizza worked for everyone, and particularly the vegetarians; the second was for the meat eaters.  For the kids, I went with a more conventional tomato, fresh mozzarella and kalamata olives. I cooked the margherita pizzas in the Big Green Egg, and the rest in the oven with a pizza stone.

Margherita with KAF Italian-style flour

Margherita with KAF all-purpose flour

The unanimous conclusion was that the KAF Italian-style flour was the best.  Everyone liked the flavor of the Westwind Mills flour, and for reasons I’ll explain in a moment the KAF all-purpose flour pizzas were often the prettiest.  However, everyone thought the Italian-style flour resulted in a lighter crust with a flavor they associated with pizza.  The Westwind Mills dough had a more bread-like flavor–everyone liked it, but it just seemed wrong for pizza.  What surprised me the most, not having worked with the KAF ‘tipo 00′ flour, was how the flours handled.  Even though I’ve been adding an appreciable amount of whole wheat flour to the Caputo flour crusts, they’ve had that wonderful elasticity that makes it possible to create a nice, thin crust.  The KAF Italian-style flour split repeatedly and extensively, perhaps suggesting that the gluten content isn’t nearly as high as the Caputo flour.  In contrast, the KAF all-purpose flour had incredible elasticity and made for easy handling:  making the pies and making them attractively was a breeze.

potato, Fontina and rosemary

prosciutto, arugula and tomato

I’m inclined to give the Caputo flour another chance until a nice, local ‘tipo 00′ comes along, and I think the poor elasticity of the KAF Italian-style flour was a killer for me in terms of its long-term potential.  I loved the smell and flavor of the Westwind Mills flour, but it didn’t stack up as pizza–much too substantial or even beefy, and surely a great bread flour.

This is an earthy pizza with strong flavors.  We were aiming for something without a lot of milk fat and instead for something with a bit of animal fat–perhaps something like the lardo pizza we’ve read that Mario Batali makes.  It’s a wonderful Fall pizza, with a dry and aromatic quality that echoed the unseasonably 50 degree November night.  Along with this we drank a very nice bottle of (Giovanni Almondo, 2006) Nebbiolo.  This one was cooked on the Big Green Egg at around 650 degrees.  For the dough, for example, see my notes in this blog.

Because we couldn’t easily find lardo, we used a bit of Tracklements’ duck breast prosciutto we had in the freezer.  You don’t need much.  This particular piece was about two inches wide, and I sliced it on the thicker setting with our mandoline and it produced the ideal amount, about 10 generous slices.  (TR recommends slicing it slightly frozen.  The meat thaws very quickly.)

For goat cheese, a richer and fattier variety is ideal.  Goat cheese isn’t particularly fatty, so a newer goat cheese will give you something that melts well and blends with the other ingredients.  Frankly, I think part of the success in this particular pizza comes from the way that the ingredients blend together without losing their distinctiveness of taste.  In this case, we used a round of fairly new Crottin de Chavignol.  I sliced it in tiny wedges and even though the rounds are small, I was able to get enough tiny slices to give good coverage to the pizza.

Ideally, for mushrooms, you want something earthy as well.  Our local market had some really pretty blue oyster mushrooms, which I sliced in reasonably substantial slices.  Pizzas on the BGE can cook quickly, so to avoid the possibility that these would come off essentially raw, we sauteed the mushroom slices quickly in olive oil.

A few other elements helped bring all of this together.  I  spread about 1 T of olive paste on the crust before beginning the toppings.  A tiny bit of fattier cheese will give an even quality to the top; this one uses about an eighth of a cup of grated Fontina cheese, added after the duck breast and mushrooms.   Scatter the leaves from a couple of stalks of rosemary over the top and add a few twists of ground pepper and a bit of salt (fleur de sels is great).  Finish with a generous grating of parmesan.  Drizzle with some hot pepper-flavored olive oil after it finishes cooking.

So, a few notes:

1. Smaller pizza stone:  Earlier, I recommended a larger (16″) pizza stone like the American Metalcraft PS1575, despite warnings by none other than the guru of the ceramic cooker, the Naked Whiz, that the larger stone may result in scorching your gasket.  Indeed, my gasket is long gone and not really missed, even for low-and-slow cooking.  Nevertheless, after breaking my fire brick stone in an adventure I’ll explain later, I went for the 14″ stone from BGE, which I believe contributed to my being able to get a higher temperature more easily.
2. Raise your grid; skip the plate setter:  You need to get your pizza stone up to the level of the opening of your BGE.  Most of my early efforts were done with the BGE plate setter.  I recently switched to using a raised grid, without the plate setter, and this had two very beneficial results.  First, there was a clearer path to the dome, and with the heat’s upward path impeded, you seem to get a hotter temp more quickly.  Second, with little or nothing between your stone and the first, the stone seems to get hotter.  Without an IR thermometer, I couldn’t swear to it, but the difference in the crust was obvious from the first time I did it.
3. Give your dough some time:  I’ve refined my dough recipe and wrote about that earlier.  The proportions have turned out to be dead-on, but one thing I’ve added to that process after having read it in a number of places is letting the dough proof for 14 hours or more.  Yeah, I know, sounds like a complicator, but it’s actually a simplifier.  Get everything set up to divide the dough (the first 30 minutes of so worth of work), split it into two plastic containers and pop them into the fridge overnight.  When you’re a couple of hours away from cooking, take them out and transfer them to covered bowls.  They’ll get to room temperature and rise a bit more, and will also have even more elasticity.

Here are a couple of pizzas that illustrate what I’m writing about here.  The first (at the top of this post) is a standard pizza margherita.  Note the slight bit of char on the crust, which was very tasty.  The dough sprang up and got that wonderful loft within a minute or two of going onto the stone.  The total cooking time was four and a half minutes, and though it could have possibly gone a shorter amount of time, everyone agreed that it was soft, neither dry nor underdone, and tasted wonderful.   The second, here, was a mixture of some locally cured red pepper bacon (Tracklements) with buffalo mozzarella, topped with some fresh local arugala.  You can also see, here in the cut-away, the nice job the crust did, also in 4.5 minutes.  The temperature inside the dome of the BGE was about 600 degrees.

I mentioned earlier breaking my fire brick pizza stone.  I thought I might experiment with trying to simulate the wood-burning oven by keeping the top on and propping open the lid of the BGE with fire-proof ceramic wedges.  This was a disaster.  The pizza blackened on the bottom, the heat seemed out of control and irregular, and even the pizza stone–even though it was fire brick–cracked down the middle.

• 400 g of flour.  Primarily Caputo 00 flour, with a few tablespoons of organic whole wheat thrown in
• 240 g of filtered water, heated just a bit (maybe to 85-90 degrees), just to get it warmer than room temp
• 2 t quick rising yeast
• 1 T sea salt

1. Put the water in a mixing bowl and sprinkle the yeast on top.  Let it sit a few minutes.
2. Measure out 75% of the flour, including the whole wheat, and mix in the salt.
3. On a relatively low speed, mix in the flour for about 2 minutes
4. Cover with plastic wrap and let sit for 20 minutes
5. Uncover and start mixing again on a low speed.  (I’m using something in the “2″ range on our Kitchenaid mixer.)
6. After about 5 minutes, begin mixing in the remainder of the flour.  This should take about 3 more minutes.  In the last minute or two, increase the speed a bit to about “4″ on a Kitchenaid mixer–nothing speedy.
7. Cover and let sit for 20 minutes.
8. Turn the fairly wet dough out onto a floured surface and divide it into 2 balls.  Each will weigh about 310-315g.
9. In two bowls, each sprayed lightly with olive oil, put each ball of dough and cover with plastic wrap.
10. In a warm spot (we use the side oven, turned off, but getting the ambient heat from the big oven warming up), let rise for about 90 minutes.
11. Turn each of the balls of dough out onto the floured surface.  Stretch the top of the dough from each side, around to the bottom, and join.  Cover and let sit for about 20 minutes.

At this point, the dough will have considerable resilience and can be worked into two 13″ pizzas easily.  I roughly shape them into small (6-8″) circles, with more dough in the middle, and begin stretching them out or using one form or another of tossing to take them to 13″.

Here’s a picture of the Super Bowl pizzas.  The crust was browner than it appears here.  Chalk up the whiteness to the flash.

Like the Wife of Bath, I’d like to think that experience is where it’s at, with the first-hand exploration of great challenges rebutting authority.  Sadly, again like the Wife of Bath, I find it’s all a bit more complicated than that, and particularly so when it comes to pizza. Yeah, experience is important.  Critically important.  On the other hand, there’s plenty a person would never encounter without our authorities, without proficient guides.  Earlier in my blog, I wrote in a particularly earnest way about my pizza dough recipe and techniques.  Indeed, I find many authorities that give the same weak attention to the subtleties of a good dough.  Those authorities are reputable pizza cookbooks, cookbooks that I continue to value for, at the very least, their creative attention to toppings.  Nevertheless, there is a need for deep and powerful attention when it comes to pizza crust, and I’d like to set the record straight right here and now, and repudiate that earlier recipe.

The tradition that I’d like to invoke here is that of Vera Pizza Napoletana.  I’m more agnostic than most about the things I crave.  I prefer East Carolina barbeque over anything to the west, south or north, but I love my pig enough that I’ll gratefully and very happily eat any of them.  I’ll also readily acknowledge that there are many good pizzas that are not defined by EU regulation.  Nonetheless, if you’re going to strive for something, VPN is the apex of pizza making and the thing worth striving for.  So, with regard to repudiation:  none of that foofy stuff in the dough, forget the wine, honey, oil and all other novelties, and go for that simple  flour, water, yeast and salt mixture of Vera Pizza Napoletana.

My family has been witness to an extraordinary phenomenon, as I’ve worked my way from success to failure and back to success again.  As I said, it would be great to say that we can chalk all of this up to experience, but authority really does come into play.  It was experience that helped me to develop an approximation of a great pizza, with small variations on the dough and different approaches to cooking (e.g., see my Big Green Egg pizza post).  I ratcheted it all up, trying for a decent VPN, and produced a number of attrocities that were hardly edible.  The web is a wonderful place, and at this point I’d like to acknowledge a few of the authorities that help make a difference when you’re striving to make a great and authentic Napoletana pizza.  First off, there’s Forno Bravo, a source that’s extraordinary not only for its helpful recipe and tips on techniques, but also for its sourcing of ingredients and supplies.  I also need to give recognition to Jeff Varasano’s site, which is a wonderful source of information on techniques (particularly related to hydration–see his notes on autolysing).  Ironically, Jeff’s site is a paean to the very experience that I’m calling into question here, and I have to disagree with Jeff’s assessment of, say, A16.  (Sometimes, I think, our hearts overrule our taste buds.)  And then there’s A16 itself, and though there’s no web presence to help the budding pizza maker through, their cookbook (A16:  Food and Wine) is a fine source from a finer restaurant.

I’d like to heartily recommend these sites, and particularly the Forno Bravo recipe and Jeff Varasano’s review of techniques, and then adding to this consultation of authority as much experience as you can muster.   Don’t rely on what I’m writing here.  Use the Forno Bravo recipe, consider their advice to measure by weight rather than by volume, borrow Jeff Varasano’s technique on autolysing and pay attention to hydration.  Start by using a hot conventional oven and, of course, a pizza stone, and don’t mess with the Big Green Egg while you’re trying to get your technique down (too many variables).  Remember that even if you’re going to hack your self-cleaning oven like Jeff, your dough won’t get that nice finish on the bottom unless you go with wood-fired cooking, and once you perfect your technique with the dough, that’s when you want to throw your Big Green Egg (or whatever else you can lay your hands on) into the mix.  Consider the value of these authorities as you develop your experience.

I’ll close with a fine example and tale from the other night.  I made two pizzas for our growing household (Maria and I, Nick staying up later, and Maria’s mom with us for the winter months).  I made a more conventional pizza for the less ambitious:  Maria’s mom is skeptical about exotic toppings and just prefers pepperoni.  This one I cooked at 550 degrees in a convection oven on a fire brick pizza stone.   At the same time, I made a pizza for Maria and me.  The toppings consisted of a few tablespoons of what you might call a tapenade (more in a moment), a similar amount of arugula pesto, and generous amounts of freshly imported buffalo mozzarella.  The tapenade was an experiment that included 1/4 c of kalamata olives, a couple of anchovies, 1 T of capers and a single chipotle pepper in adobo sauce, all blended with a small amount of olive oil and salt.   This one was cooked on the Big Green Egg, and the difference in the crust was remarkable.  Both were great, but I can only imagine what we’ll be able to do one when we have a wood-fired pizza oven.

We use James McNair’s New Pizza cookbook for this recipe, reducing all of the ingredients significantly (particularly the pancetta–halve it) to keep the toppings lighter.  Check out the recipe here on G3’s website:  http://gastronomical3.wordpress.com/2007/09/15/transitions/.  Of course I’m a sucker for the pancetta, and the way that the leeks respond to the heat and begin to melt slightly into the mixture of ingredients is amazing.

Re the Big Green Egg, I’m still working on getting this right, but using a very high heat for short cooking periods is working well.  Most take about 10 minutes, tops, and though it’s possible to avoid the small amounts of black you see in the crust pictured, we actually like the taste and try to go for a tiny bit of scorching around the edges.   650 degrees is ideal, and having everything pre-heated is critical.  Of course my BGE gasket is toast, but I haven’t missed it.

I’d also like to use this opportunity to publicly swear off the foofy recipe I published in one of my earliest entries.  I’ve become convinced that simple is better or, better yet, simple is perfect.  I’ve become devoted to the Forno Bravo pizza dough recipe, a simple mixture of flour, water, yeast and salt.

If you’re devoted to making pizza, you know heat is a big part of success. Our home oven, part of a big dual-fuel setup, uses convection and does a solid 550 degrees without resorting to crazy stuff like hacking the latch for the self-cleaning oven. (Yeah, believe it or not, it’s been done.) A colleague with a similar obsession has complained that his oven doesn’t reach these temps, and pictures of his pizzas show it. It’s gotta be hot and it’s gotta cook quickly: you want it brown without the pizza getting dried out. And although heat is a key piece, what every pizza maker knows s/he really wants is a wood-fired pizza oven. Now this is not as absurd a dream as you’d think. There are several models designed for home use (see forno bravo or le panyol, for example), and at least one I’ve run into is designed so that you can use it indoors–maybe it doubles as an inefficient heat source. However, as technically feasible as a home wood-fired oven is, it feels like a big investment. I can dream, of course.

In the meantime, we recently ran into something called the Big Green Egg. This thing, a kamado-style cooker, generates extremely high heat, serves primarily as a grill, doubles as an oven (and a smoker), and (though still pricey) costs a lot less than a wood-fired oven. Maria and I grill a lot and wanted to incorporate things like spatchcocked chickens into our repertoire, so we decided to give the Big Green Egg a shot.

My first effort at this was relatively successful, with a few problems that leave me opportunities for refining things. I should note that it’s relatively easy to get the Big Green Egg up to a mighty 650 degrees and the BGE has available to it accessories (like the “plate-setter”) that makes this process pretty straightforward. With the plate setter in place, I went with an American Metalcraft PS1575, a pizza stone made from fire brick and thus much safer for these high heats. (The PS1575 is supposed to be 15.75″ in diameter. Mine was a full 16″ and may have contributed to some minor damage to my gasket.) This left ample room to slide the pizza onto the stone without losing ingredients over the side. At 650 degrees, the pizza cooked in slightly more than 10 minutes. As you’ll see in the two pictures below, this created a nicely cooked crust with a little (and very tasty) burning below, and browned toppings. For this first effort, I stuck with a classic margherita:

This was, without a doubt, the best home pizza crust we’ve ever done, and considering the number of pizzas we’ve cooked, that’s saying something. The crust was noticeably more flavorful and the whole thing did have a slightly smoky taste. I’ll admit that I expected the pizza to be no different from the ones we’ve cooked in the oven, but I was definitely wrong.

As usual, I won’t try to reproduce the wealth of information on the web about cooking a pizza on a Big Green Egg. The very helpful Naked Whiz site does a very nice job covering all elements of cooking pizza on the Big Green Egg, including addressing issues of the size of the pizza stone.

What challenges lie ahead? I’ve had a hard time getting my BGE over 650 degrees and would like to try a slightly higher temperature. In putting the pizza into the BGE, I need to get in and out a little more quickly to avoid losing temperature. And I’m going to need to explore what the issues are around the gasket burning, a problem that might be related to the size of the stone, but which was just as likely to be a result of the gasket having been poorly installed (and protruding into the BGE).

Temperature: While the dough is rising, pre-heat your oven with the pizza stone inside it. Here’s one of the big challenges. Of course you’d prefer a wood-fired pizza oven, but that’s not gonna happen for most of us. You’ll want an oven that holds a very high temperature and keeps fairly even heat. I tend to run our electric convection oven at about 530°. This allows the crust to brown nicely in a very short period of time and avoids drying out the crust. Although putting the pizza stone at the top of the oven will make sure it’s in the hottest part of the oven, if you’re able to get the temp up that high, it won’t really matter, and having a few extra inches of working space in sliding the pizza off the peel can be helpful; put the stone on a middle rack with lots of room above.

Tools: In addition to the oven, you’ll want a few things like a nice pizza stone (a good, heavy one will hold the heat better) and a decent peel. It also helps to have a brush (to brush oil on the dough).

Dough: Getting a good dough is about balance. If your water is too hot, it’ll kill the yeast; too cold, and the yeast won’t become active enough. In my opinion, ditto on the flours: too much white flour, you’ll lose out on texture and taste; and, for my approach, too much whole wheat and semolina, you’ll miss out on the delicate flavors that balance against everything else. All that said, I’ve found that the preparation of the sponge is one of the most forgiving parts of making a good dough.
Yeast “sponge”
   approx. 2t active dry yeast
   a little less than 2/3c of warm water (about 105°)
   1T whole wheat flour
   1T honey
   about 2T white wine
   about 1t olive oil
Combine these ingredients, minus the white wine, and let sit for about 5 minutes. The yeast should begin to foam. (If the yeast doesn’t foam, it may be because the yeast was too old or because the water temperature wasn’t right. If you suspect the culprit was the yeast, the only solution is to toss the sponge and the yeast and start all over.) After the yeast begins to foam, add the wine and mix well.
Flour
While the yeast is activating, combine the following dry ingredients in a bowl:
   1/2c semolina
   1/3c fresh organic whole wheat flour (it’ll give your dough a nice, almost nutty flavor)
   about 1/2c unbleached white flour, preferably organic
   1-2t sea salt
Mix the sponge into the flour mixture and turn out onto a floured surface. Knead 5-10 minutes, until the dough has a springy, resilient feel. In addition to the unbleached white flour you mixed in at the outset, as you’re kneading, add as much additional flour as you need to have the dough be just a tad less than sticky. When you’ve kneaded enough, you’ll be able to push the dough down with your hand and it’ll rebound in a few seconds. Drizzle a small amount (1/2t) of oil in a bowl, roll the ball of dough around the inside of the bowl, and let rise for an hour in a slightly warm, draft-free place. I place a slightly damp towel over the bowl and put the bowl in the unused side oven in our two-oven range. After the dough has risen to about 1.5-2 times its original size, put it out on the counter with a bit of flour and knead it down so that the air is out of the dough–about two minutes.

Rolling out the dough
You’ll want to avoid using a rolling pin to roll out the dough, as a rolling pin is likely to take too much of the air out of the dough and give you a harder, less flavorful dough. Start by pressing the ball of dough out with the heel of your hand until it begins to form a flatish circle, and then continue to press the dough from the inside out, again, with the heel of your hand. Rotate the ball around as you press outward. Occasionally sprinkle the ball with a small amount of flour and flip it over, using the flour on the bottom to keep the dough from sticking to your surface. Once it reaches roughly half the size of your pizza, tossing the dough (spinning it as it goes up) in the air actually helps to stretch the dough without taking more air out of the dough. Continue to rotate the crust on your surface, pushing outward with the heel of your hand, until it’s reached the size you’d like for your pizza, about 14″ in diameter.

Finishing up
Put a liberal amount of rough cornmeal on a pizza peel and the toss the dough onto the peel.
Brush a thin coat of olive oil on the dough, particularly the outside eadges.
When you top it, avoid being overgenerous with the toppings, particularly the cheese. A thinner layer is better for the flavor of the dough and the toppings.
Especially if you’ve been able to get 530° for your oven, cook for about 10-12 minutes. I try to turn the pizza from back to front about halfway through, even though the convection oven evenly distributes the heat, as the back of the oven still cooks more quickly.

In the process, the oversized and very soft dough resulted in this very rustic look. Among the 52 pictures, you’ll find a more recent version of the same thing, done with more competence but less of the chaotic beauty of this first one. Incidentally, we decided to stop taking regular pictures of the pizzas at #52, so you’ll only find an occasional update on the smugmug site.

At this point, before going further, I need to acknowledge, more than by name, the contributions of my partner in all of this. Maria is the master (mistress?) of the toppings, assembling amazing combinations of herbs and tomatoes, as well as, frequently, other layers like pesto. The pizzas wouldn’t be what they are without her contributions.

After my dogged pursuit of the great crust, I’ve concluded that having it work right depends on a host of things, including the right ingredients, good “tools,” a great oven, and skill with the dough. I’ll post my version soon.