On Chapel Hill Chapter 3

When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie thats amore.

Let’s talk pizza.  Specifically, home made pizza.  We have enjoyed our Friday night pizza ritual for years and love tweaking and experimenting with the ingredients, cooking methods and the crust.  Our Pizza Friday began after reading how to make pizza crust in a New York Times food section article a couple decades ago.  Flour, water, olive oil, salt and yeast sure can do some magical things when worked properly. They can also lead to some culinary disasters when not treated with the utmost respect.  We have made hundreds of pizzas since then, some good, some great and some not so hot.  But what is always consistent is the joy we have in the process and gratification of creating something special.  

This year we added a twist.  As our sourdough skills improved we decided to give sourdough pizza crust a shot.  We used the basic Sourdough Pizza Crust recipe from King Arthur Baking website www.kingarthurbaking.com and began our quest to produce a sourdough version of our weekly pizza crust.  Thus far, we are feeling pretty good about the results.  Mixing up a cup of starter, half cup water that Nana brings from Staten Island, a teaspoon of salt, half a teaspoon of instant yeast and two and half cups flour yields a mighty fine dough.  We also began to add a bit of olive oil, chopped rosemary and oregano.  We mix it up around noon, let it rise a few hours before splitting into a couple balls of dough and letting those sit again just to really get a brew on.  By the time we roll ‘em out, fix ‘em up and slide ‘em on the stone in the grill they have matured into a wonderfully flavorful vector for tomato, mozzarella and whatever else moves us.  

A few tricks we think we have learned are; 1) we prefer tomato paste as a sauce for these as its easy, tastes great and has low moisture content to keep our crusts a perfect texture 2). We love fresh mozzarella - just tear pieces off and place them somewhat liberally around the pie, but no too much as again, we like to keep the moisture level low.  3). Add toppings if desired but again, be wary of the moisture content.  Waterlogged pizza is not good pizza.  Other than that, have no fear!  Get in and experiment and worse comes to worse…..call the local Pizza shop for a delivery.