Pizza-Making ?

[Mike Nolan]

Semolina is made from durum wheat, I"m not sure it makes a lot of difference if you use durum or semolina, which is a coarse ground durum endosperm, in pizza. I've got some bread recipes that call for both semolina and durum, though.

[BakerAunt]

For those of you wishing to make your own mozzarella:

http://www.seriouseats.com/2015/10/how-to-make-fresh-mozzarella-from-scratch.html

[aaronatthedoublef]

Thanks for the link BA.

I make thin crust although I want to try making Chicago style stuffed (which is still thin) and deep dish. I just haven't done it yet.

I've never used semolina. I did use a type oo flour that claimed to be semolina but was very fine rather than being course. Probably a mistranslation equating durum with semolina. I do have some olive oil/semolina cake recipes so I may try it there. My family did not care for it so after I used it up I went back to cake flour as it is less expensive and more readily available.

I do not use oil in my dough. My ingredients are KAF white ww flour, Bob's Red Mill unbleached cake flour, cool water, BRM red flax meal, BRM chickpea flour, SAF Red instant yeast, 365 turbinado sugar, Morton's kosher salt. I'll figure out amounts next time I make it rather than relying on doing it by feel.

I've had sausage with and without sugar that was used either as breakfast or non-breakfast sausage. The Italian sausage I am trying to replicate uses demerara sugar in both the sweet and hot versions which is why I added some sugar to mine.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 10 months ago by aaronatthedoublef.

[aaronatthedoublef]

Sorry.. Posted this under non-white flour bread...

I made pizza dough this morning. It's currently rising on the kitchen counter and will go into the refrigerator this even. Our kitchen is about 67 degrees.

Ingredients and amounts:

3 cups cool tap water
3 cups white whole wheat flour
3.5 cups cake flour
.5 cup flax meal
.5 cup garbanzo flour
2 tsp instant yeast
1 tsp salt
1 tsp sugar

[skeptic7]

Aaronatthedoublef;
Thats a lot of pizza dough! How many pizza's will you make?

[RiversideLen]

Aaron, cake flour is an interesting choice for pizza dough. That makes a very soft crust?

[Mike Nolan]

If you're making thin crust pizza, 9 ounces of dough will make a 12" pizza.

[aaronatthedoublef]

It is a lot of dough. Normally this would last us for two/two-and-a-half weeks. I make pizza on Sundays and I usually make five pizzas with at least part of the last one reserved for lunches and snacks the next day. We are having guests for pizza tonight so I will be making pizzas for 10 people. I do not know how much they will eat so I want to have at least one pizza per person. Any dough that is left over will go into the freezer and I will use it next week. My pizza dough lasts about a month or two in the freezer without suffering. It does not mean I throw it out if it goes longer but it is not as good.

I started using cake flour to try to simulate oo flour which is low gluten and fine. I haven't checked the protein content of oo compared to cake otherwise I would put that in here. oo used to be hard to find and very expensive. Now it is easy but still a little more expensive and my family prefers cake flour so I continue with that.

I weigh out the dough into 6 oz. balls and wrap them in plastic wrap. Those go into a zipper bag and either go into the fridge or the freezer. Today all will go into the fridge after I break them down. Each 6 oz. makes a 12 inch or so pizza which is as big as I can make with my pizza stones.

I will take pictures tonight if I'm not too self-conscious but two of the people I am making pizza for are very talented professional photographers so I am not sure I want to whip out my phone and snap away.

[Mike Nolan]

I always thought '00' flour referred to the degree to which it is ground, 00 being a fine grind (which cake flour is, too.) The protein content is going to depend on what kind of wheat it's made from.

Most European flours are lower in protein content than North American 'all purpose' flours, even after you take into account the differences in how the protein content is measured by European standards and American standards.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 10 months ago by Mike Nolan.

[aaronatthedoublef]

Reading online you're right - 00 refers to the milling not the protein. The places I've seen that sell it always sold a lower gluten flour like KAF. I'll check on the flour at Whole Foods and Walmart.

[Mike Nolan]

The nutrition labels in the USA don't give you a lot to go on, because they usually consider a 'serving' of flour to be somewhere around 30 grams and they report protein content in gram intervals, so you basically will see 3 or 4 grams of protein per serving.

4 grams of protein per 30 gram serving really means somewhere between 3.50 grams and 4.49 grams, which means somewhere between 11.6666% protein and 14.96%, which is a pretty wide range.

So you can sort of tell whether a flour is a fairly low protein flour (below 11.66%) or not, but that's about it.

I've been reading nutrition labels a lot more lately, because of my low-sodium diet, but I still think they are less helpful than they could be. (And I hold out zero hope that they'll ever be meaningfully improved.)

Another annoying aspect of the labels is what they consider a serving. I bought a candy bar once that contained 2.5 servings. Yeah, right.

[aaronatthedoublef]

Thanks Mike. I guess I've never understood the correlation between nutritional content protein and gluten-protein.

For example, I just looked at KAF bread, all purpose, cake, and self-rising flour. Each have 1/4 cup as a serving size and bread, AP, and cake all have 4 g of protein per serving despite their different gluten content. Self-rising is 2 gm per serving.

[Italiancook]

I don't know whether this will work, but I made the dough for KAF Thin Crust Pizza this morning. I put half the dough in the freezer and half in the fridge. I'm making the pizza for lunch. I knew the pizza wouldn't be made unless I did the dough early. The recipe is doesn't call for a rise unless you want a thicker crust, which I don't. So I'm hoping the dough in the fridge won't rise in the next 4 hours. Unsure what to do if it does. I guess punch it down.

KAF's recipe says to use tomato sauce and parmesan only. I don't like parm on pizza, so I'm going to use mozzarella and hope the weight of it will work with a thin crust pizza.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 9 months ago by Italiancook.

[Mike Nolan]

I like parm, but not as the only cheese on a pizza, it needs the mootz. Romano cheese is good on pizza, too, as it browns well and adds some pungency. One of the local pizzerias does a really good pizza with mootz and cream cheese, we usually have them add tomatoes and artichoke hearts.

BTW, did you know that Pizza Hut, Domino's, Little Caesars and Papa John's all get cheese from the same supplier? Leprino Foods in Denver, home of possibly the world's most secretive billionaire, James Leprino. Forbes ran an article on him recently: Forbes Article, but even Forbes couldn't get a recent picture of him.

[Italiancook]

Have any of you ever calculated to materials cost of a homemade pizza vs. a delivered pizza? As I was portioning out 2 lbs. of mozzarella this morning, I wondered if it's cheaper to make a pizza or, if it's cheaper to buy one delivered. I think making pizza is labor-intensive, but that may be because I'm climbing up the learning curve. So I'm not curious about materials plus labor, just the ingredients that go into the crust and on the pizza.

I think most food is less expensive to make at home as compared to restaurants, but I'm unsure about pizza.

[Author]

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