We have a student staying with us at the moment and we try and do pizza with them using the wood-fired oven.
I have also been making sure that my sourdough starter works in preparation for trying out the levain (sourdough) recipes in the book later.
So this is a quite simple recipe as there were only three of us going to be to pieces I did 50% of the volume. It sticks to his premise of just using flour, water, salt and yeast, quite often people add olive oil. Again, there is very little kneading or folding of the dough, because of the autolysing and long rise time due to very small amounts of yeast.
We started the recipe off just before his 9 o’clock lesson, and then Sue taught him for just over an hour, so the flour had a long time to autolyse. However, this had no negative impact on the final dough that I could tell. After he finished that exercise we mixed the yeast and salt into the dough and we had quite a stringy mess after all the chopping and pulling so I was a bit concerned, it wouldn’t go back into a nice ball. So we finished our lesson and then at the end we came back and folded it and it was looking much better.
We then left it for most of the day and at about 5 pm we made it into five doughballs ready for the pizza oven. We put it in floured container in the fridge and then we got the fire going.
My pizza oven has been recently repaired after the chimney fell off in the winter. I repaired it yesterday and I was hoping it would work well.
So I am pleased to say that the fire burned pretty well, not too much smoke and after two hours the oven was at 400 degrees so ready for cooking pizzas, here you can see the result.
One thing for next time is that because people like having lots of toppings, sometimes the dough doesn’t get cooked all the way through even though the top and bottom of the pizza is well cooked.
So, I think in future, maybe if the pizza dough can be made much thinner that would be good, but this is quite a challenge. And secondly, if I just cook the top of the pizza a little bit before put in then dress it with the toppings, that might also be good.
