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What's your ideal pizza?
I'm sitting here eating a pan crust pizza with pepperoni, sausage, mozzarella+romano cheese, and easy mushroom and basil. I feel that this is an ideal pizza with it's mixture of crunch, spices, and sweetness. The leftovers are perfect for reheating in a skillet the next day. The crust has softened but is soaked with enough grease that the skillet makes the crust have an almost puff pastry style crunch/crumble. This is probably my ideal pizza.
I've recently fallen in love with cooking pizza in a barbecue, and went pretty far down the rabbit hole trying to perfect the technique. The person I'm living with has a Big Green Egg smoker, which, with enough charcoal can hit 1000 degrees F, allowing for some amazing pies. You can make a decent pizza in a home oven, but nothing like what can be accomplished when you can get above 600F.
The best "recipe" I've found is more like a long rambling story of one man's search for perfection, interspersed with charts and spreadsheets. That is Jeff Varsanos' pizza recipe. Another good "recipe" I've found is the Bon Appétit "Making Perfect" series on youtube. This shows them trying all the variables and might be better for visual learners. It's four hours long though.
The recipe I settled on is more or less:
Dough
Throw this all into a stand mixer, add the water slowly, gauging how much to use by the appearance of the dough as it mixes. Depending on how packed it is you might not use the full two cups. I really should weigh it, but I prefer to wing it. Allow to knead for maybe 7 minutes, until the dough no longer sticks to the sides of the mixer and springs back when you poke it. Cover the mixing bowl with a damp towel, and allow to rise 20 minutes. Turn out the dough, give it a bit more kneading to knock out some of the gas, cut into quarters and place into oiled tupperware containers. Stick them in the fridge and allow to proof for 3-5 days. The slow rise will allow more complex flavours to form in the dough. Makes four pizzas roughly 12" in diameter.
Sauce
The sauce can be tailored to however you like. There's a lot of variations. I typically add 1/2tsp of onion powder, 1/2tsp of red chili flakes, and an anchovy. Don't fret about the anchovy if you're not a fan of fishy flavors. You honestly can't tell it's there. Don't cook your sauce, just blend lightly to break up the tomatoes. If you want a sweeter, more cooked flavour, add a bit of tomato paste. For the tomatoes I've tried a half dozen brands of imported Italian tomatoes and I'm really happy with Nina brand, but honestly any can of peeled roma tomatoes will do. If you're using cheap ones though, you'll probably want to throw out the liquid from the can, as it'll make the sauce watery and tinny. You can also cut the tomatoes open and discard the seeds if it's too watery or bitter, but with good quality tomatoes that's less of a concern.
Toppings
This part is totally up to you. I'm a fan of hot salami and roasted red peppers, topped near the end with fresh basil chiffonade, grated parmigiano reggiano, and a drizzle of olive oil. With a pizza this good, less is often more. Don't smother the thing in a half inch of cheese and cover it with ten kinds of meats. Try and stick to a max of 3 or so toppings.
Prep and cooking
Get a pizza stone and heat it in a barbecue as hot as you can get it. You may need to run it for a half hour or more to get it up to temperature. I've found 750-800 degrees fahrenhiet for maybe 90 seconds is ideal. Get yourself a pizza peel - one of those flat paddle things. I've found aluminum ones are a hundred times easier to use than the wooden ones. I've also found that prepping the pizza on the peel has a tendency for the pie to stick to the peel, even if you use cornmeal to try and prevent that. What works for me is to lightly flour the peel, tapping off excess, prep the pizza on a flat counter, and slide the peel under. Try and do this all in one fell swoop, don't wiggle it around too much. Likewise try and slide it off the peel in one quick motion, or you'll end up with toppings falling into your bbq, or the pizza coming halfway off, forcing an impromptu calzone.
Final thoughts
This has been one of the most satisfying skills I've learned. The results are astounding. It's become very difficult to order pizza anywhere now, since I've been spoiled by knowing what pizza can be. Amazing pizza at home is totally doable, surprisingly cheap and quick to make. Even if you're using expensive ingredients like proscuitto and mozza di bufala, it's difficult to make a pizza cost more than $5 in ingredients. The most expensive part is usually the charcoal. The actual cooking process is incredibly fast, like less than two minutes, so if you can prepare the next one in that amount of time you can set up an assembly line and feed an entire party of people.
My family and I cook our homemade pizzas in the BBQ too, and I wholeheartedly recommend it. We don't run it quite as hot as you do (only 550-600) and we keep in in there a bit longer as a result (3-5min), but we also use a pizza stone so the bottom still gets nice leoparding despite the lower heat.
p.s. Favorite pizza toppings for me are: roasted red peppers, marinated artichoke hearts, Kalamata olives, red onions, and hot soppressata. I also drizzle some olive oil on it at the end, and sometimes add some fresh basil (or arugula) too.
This entire comment chain is making my mouth water. Kalamata olives, olive oil, fresh basil, and roasted red peppers - yum.
This comment chain makes me sad for the cheap triangle pizza my school is serving for lunch tomorrow.
did you take any photos of your work?
Over the last years I've scaled back on fancy pizzas to preferring just Margheritas. So thin crust, with tasty sauce and topped with mozarella and basil.
Correct answer. Loading up on toppings is a way of masking inferior cheese, sauce, and bread. If you've got the fundamentals right you don't need all the rest of that stuff.
Of course, if people are ordering Papa Johns or something then you gotta make do. In those cases it's mushrooms, onions, and green peppers.
This seems very close-minded and short-sighted. You're welcome to your opinion, but dictating what's right or wrong, and especially reinforcing the idea that they're right and others are wrong, is ignorant at best and damaging at worst.
I believe that your intent isn't to strike down against others, but intent doesn't negate the effect.
Nope. The OP is right. The rest of you are bad and you should feel bad. Don't @ me
Well then you put it that way.
(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
That is kind of an exaggeration. It is entirely possible for a pizza to have loads of topping, and also great cheese, great sauce and great bread.
What you describe may be very frequent, but cannot possibly describe all kinds of pizza.
True, but more toppings masks the flavor of the cheese, which results in a worse pizza usually.
Yup. If I'm trying out a new pizza place, I'll always get a margherita the first time. Best way to see what they're all about is with the simplest meal.
Beg to differ, in one particular respect. If fresh basil isn't seasonal and/or local to where you're getting pizza, don't bother with the Margherita. It really needs that intense vegetal, grassy, anise aroma and flavor to make it perfect.
TBH I didn't realize there were places in the developed world where you couldn't get decent, fresh basil. It grows well under hydroponic conditions so you can have it basically anywhere.
Although I did get a pizza once where, instead of a basil leaf, they just put a single leaf of spinach on there and I was like "WTF is this!?"
I'm in a relatively rural small northern city that doesn't get regular delivery of fresh produce during winter; when fresh basil arrives, it's aged, expensive, and gone quickly. There're squeeze tubes of prepared chopped herbs, but nothing that matches genuine fresh flavor.
In the interest of eating locally and seasonally for carbon/energy conservation and health, I'm embarking on weirdnesses like sweet potato-crust pizza.
You can grow basil in a mason jar on your windowsill though! I would think any "serious" pizza place would either keep an herb garden or have a source of hydroponically grown basil nearby.
Windowsill plants and herb gardens don't work well in a place that's sub-freezing and lacks adequate sunshine five or six months of the year. There are a couple of high-end restaurants in town that feature fresh basil as an ingredient year-round, but even when I've had their pizzas, the basil isn't just-picked fresh.
I should have space for my own garden/greenhouse in a couple of months, and you can bet that basil will be one of the first plants under cultivation.
wut.
As in, it's an incorporated city with a population >20,000, but the nearest population of the same or greater size is >200 km away in any direction. There are a few tiny villages and towns in the surrounding counties, but really not much besides forest, farm, and water in between.
I'm a sucker for a kebab with aioli pizza! It's a staple of Swedish-Middle-Eastern-Greek-Italian fusion style pie.
That sounds a lot like Donair Pizza here in Canada.
Here we have a bastardization of döner kebab called donairs. It's like a meatloaf grilled on a rotisserie spit, sliced thin, served wrapped in a pita with a sweet garlic sauce that's not unlike an aioli. They're very popular on the East coast.
We make that into a pizza with a sweet garlic sauce, tomatoes, and red onions. Very tasty.
Thin crust, slightly charred.Basic sauce from fresh tomatoes. Spinach, kalamata olive, thinly sliced porcini mushrooms, and a strong gorgonzola.
The best pizza I ever ate was kind of an abomination. It was called "chicken bolognese" and it's topping was, like one could expect, made of chicken, mozzarella, tomato sauce and ground beef.
I ate lots of expensive pizza, but nothing beats that cheap slice from Belo Horizonte, Brazil.[1]
And it wasn't even a cantina or anything, just a chain restaurant. Can't remember the name, they don't have restaurants in my region.
[1] We have good pizza. Other than us, the only country with more people of Italian descent is Italy.
My favourite pizza is spaghetti Bolognese pizza. It even has the spaghetti on it.
Sounds stupid but it’s overloaded food in the best possible way. A similar food is the “roll-in-a-roll” that they sold at my school. Sausage Roll inside a hotdog roll topped with cheese and tomato sauce. Delicious, and a really bad amount of calories.
As far as easily available goes it'll be: thin crust, pineapple, mushrooms, and pepperoni
Specialty pizzas run the gamut from the many places I've had them.
Probably a Florentine pizza, with a reasonably thick and spongy crust, the egg in hard-boiled slices, and baked in a stone oven. I once had such a pizza in an Italian restaurant in Malaysia of all places, and it had a singular dough that I've never seen recreated anywhere else. It was sort of chewy, I think, and irresistible. Was the dough underdone, maybe?
Honestly the type of pizza doesn't matter so much as the quality and freshness of the ingredients.
One of the best pizzas I have ever tasted was a pastrami pizza, which by all means should have been an abomination. But good quality pastrami and cheese made it a wonderful experience (to eat once).
Ideal pizza (build your own)
Close second:
Tuna and purple onion on a thin crust
Everyday/value/nostalgia:
Costco combo (from the food court, not buy and bake)
I seriously thought about putting this in the OP as an honorable mention. I frequented the costco food court for lunch every now and then at an old job. That pizza is such a good value.
lots of mushroom + onion
Best pizza I've ever had in my life was a plain Margherita from Firehouse in Portland, OR a few years ago. Based on the restaurant's mythology, they pretty much followed the same path to greatness that @pseudolobster described. The crust was airy, chewy, properly browned and exactly charred enough to give it character.
But on a regular basis, fennel sausage, mushrooms, and black olives, with extra sauce. Also, bacon or prosciutto, Gorgonzola, and Granny Smith apples or figs.
Can anyone explain "Detroit" pizza to me? It's like I didn't even grow up there or anything. I had plenty of Sicilian-style (DeLuca's), and have eaten at most of the iconic Detroit-area pizzerias (Loui's in Hazel Park was my local for years). The now-popular deep-dish greased crust pizza format is like eating a bowling ball.
Same thing that happened with a lot of things in Detroit, we got jealous of Chicago and wanted to do it ourselves.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit-style_pizza
As for why it's liked? Little Caesars made it a thing I guess, and some people like bread.
Maybe if the crust had the complex, rich flavor of the poolish fermentations, but it's really tasteless. Having more of it, with a grease-fried edge, doesn't improve matters. Chicago-style is so thick with toppings it's actually an open-face pie.
What's now being sold as "Detroit-style" reminds me of the frozen French-bread pizzas from Stauffer's, and that means grad-school levels of sadness.
There's still some dispute between me and the spouse about whether Sicilian round (not as thick-crusted as the rectangular sfincioni that evolved into Detroit-style) or New York-style thin crust is the One True Pizza; we usually compromise on flatbreads.
That happens when anything gets popular, but it might have something to do with Detroit Pizza having an origin in bring baked in industrial pans, and the improvised nature being boiled down to efficient thick crusted pizza.
Maybe it's the rose-tinted memories of youth, but the rectangular deep-dish crust from DeLuca's or Loui's actually tasted like olive oil and good bread. I've had artisan focaccia that reminded me of that flavor. Not sure it couldn't be done on an industrial scale, but Little Caesar's doesn't seem like a likely source.
I quite enjoy a lot of pizzas but my favourite is a ham and pineapple, but this also depends on the sauce. I thoroughly dislike tangy pizza sauces, but with a ham and pineapple, if the sauce is too sweet, then it can ruin the taste too. The sweetness, in my opinion, should come from the pineapple.
I personally find margheritas to be a bit bland, but as I was never really much of a cheese person growing up, it comes with the territory. I only ever liked cheese on pizza, lasagna, and spaghetti, with the first two being mozzarella and the latter being parmesan. Any lasagnas I have with too much ricotta or cottage cheese is ruined for me, but again, I dislike most cheeses. I've gotten better as an adult and enjoy cheese a little more, but not by a lot.
I have 2 that I like a lot:
Banana pepper, roasted red peppers, black olives, spinach with a bit of grated parm sprinkled on top.
No sauce, pizza cheese, pineapple, brown sugar and bacon.
Have you tried mushroom ketchup as an anchovy replacement? It obviously won't have the same texture and will lack the fishiness, but salt level and umami-wise it should be a decent enough match IMO.
Just wondering if maybe you've tried dulse? I find dulse has a very ocean-y flavour, plus it's incredibly salty, so it might be worth a shot if you can find it somewhere near you. I live near the ocean, but I've heard it's becoming more popular as a health food thing in other places.
I would rehydrate it and go from there. It won't be as oily as anchovy, but now I've actually made myself curious as to whether it's possible to pack dulse in oil...
NY style, green peppers and ham. Nice, simple, easy, yet rewarding. The combination of flavors is almost sushi-like in its complexity. I specifically favor pizzerias that have sweet sauces, for the same reason: flavor combinations. Mental health issues make a lot of textures difficult for me, but flavors I can and do play with a lot.
I think my favourite is a New-York style slice, big and slightly floppy. A nice sauce that isn't overly spicy or bold, just solid tomato flavour, slightly sweet, and not a lot of it (when I order delivery, I usually get half sauce). Just cheese + herbs on top.
Before I became a vegetarian, my favourite was probably the classic Canadian pizza - pepperoni, bacon, mushroom. I still love mushrooms on pizza, but I find without the extra fat and salt from the meat they kind of fall flat so I'd rather just get a plain cheese one or a margherita.
The site design sucks, but this archive of recipes is pretty great -- http://doughgenerator.allsimbaseball9.com/index.php
The wiki over at /r/pizza is also pretty good for all levels.
For me, my favorite type of slice is technically considered 'California style.' Thin crust, a wide array of toppings, but not an overwhelming amount. The focus is always on the crust. I couldn't care less about cheese on most pizzas, but if it is going to be there, I only want a little. :)
Tonight I went to a decent slice shop near me and had a white pie with potato and thyme, a slice of hawaiian, and a slice of spicy beef -- which looks completely disgusting but is pretty good.
If I'm at an AVPN place, I really like a marinara with anchovies.
I'm not going to go into large detail, but my ideal pizza is the deep dish personal pan pizza from my local pizzeria Jendy's, subtitled the home of the deep dish in Madison, Indiana. I'd say it's from 4 to 6 inches in diameter, maybe 2 or 3 inches tall, it has a thick crust with a crispy brown end, I usually get double pepperoni. The toppings are always under the the centimeter thick cheese layer, and it is very saucy. What completes the pizza experience is their somewhat salty breadsticks dipped in hot (in temperature and spice) nacho cheese. If you have enough crust left over you can dip it into the cheese for a spicy savory heaven.