Pizza dough notes from my Italian cook neighbor

Okay, I related last week how lucky I am to have a fabulous Italian cook who lives next door, and who happens to blog about her recipes here

Well, I tried her pizza dough recipe with poor results, so bad that my 15 year old didn't even like it, and we all know 15 year old's will eat any pizza. So, I mentioned to her that I'd failed miserably, and she offered to let me sit in on her weekly dough making event today. So, I went, learned a few things, and thought I should share!

Her recipe talks about adding the water (warm, not hot) yeast (she uses Instant/Bread yeast) and olive oil initially, then the flour (unbleached non-bread flour) and the salt after about 2/3 of the flour goes in. BTW - the Kitchen Aid mixer was between 2 and 3 (setting) the whole time. One interesting thing is that she recommends not making the dough to a measured recipe (mainly the flour) other than a 1/3C of water per person, then add flour until the dough is 'right'. Well, that was my problem I see now, knowing when 'right' is. I imagine it's like Carwash Mike's ribs, you do it enough, you'll know. Anyway, I took a picture of the dough shortly before it was 'right':



Notice how the dough at the bottom of the hook is still 'connected' to the bottom of the bowl? This is when she cautioned you have to progress carefully and add the smallest amounts of flour until it releases from the bowl and forms a tacky ball. At this point we started adding probably 1/2 - 1 tsp of flour at a time, giving up to a minute or more to fully incorporate the flour (*important*). It was weird, it would grab the flour up, look drier initially, then a minute later it would look wet again as the flour was pulled into the dough.

Anyway, we went like this, adding a little bit at a time, until it just got to the point of forming a stretched out 'ball' and detaching from the bottom of the bowl fully after the flour was incorporated, but the thing I noticed most was that when you had it 'right', the dough was tacky, but not sticky. It was kind of like handling an industrial strength 'Post-It' note (if that makes any sense). I also noticed that it left the merest amounts of dough on my hands:



Anyway, I followed the recipe from there (interesting to note that the amount of yeast she recommends using is more a function of how soon you need the dough than anything else), let it rise in an oiled bowl on the counter-top for 2 hrs, punched down and divided (1/3 in my case) and formed balls that I left to rise another hour.

Here's the blasphemous part. My son was hungry, and I didn't have time to fire up the Egg, so I set the oven to 550 degree's and cooked it inside (the snowstorm going on here in Michigan may have had something else to do with it). The boy knows what side his bread is buttered on though. he said it was great (woo hoo, a compliment from a teenager!), but that he thought it would have been even better on the Egg ( He makes me so proud).

Here is the result. The best home made pizza I've ever pulled off in the past. Next time I'll leave it on for 30-45 more seconds and crisp the crust up just a touch more.