Pizzapalooza

We tried pizza in the outdoor bread oven for the first time last night. We started with a quick (8-hour) dough recipe made for a medium-hot oven, around 500-600 degrees, and baked about 10 smallish pizzas for the 8 of us, with a variety of toppings. The crust came out amazingly well: crisp with a well-developed flavor.

Since we had several dough balls left over in the fridge, I tried again using the indoor oven today for lunch and found that worked pretty well, too, even though I can't get my oven much above 500. At that temperature, with refrigerated but not frozen dough, it baked in 8 minutes. Apparently the refrigerated balls of dough will last perfectly well in the fridge for several days, and in the freezer for several weeks. Unrefrigerated, they're good for several hours after they've reached their recommended fermentation stage. Pizza dough, unlike bread dough, has an extremely brief first rise followed by a longer second rise. You can finish the whole process in 6-8 hours if you can keep the dough at 80-90 degrees. If you rush it a bit, it will still taste good, but will be a bit springy when you try to stretch it out into a suitably large round. That doesn't turn out to be much of a problem. None of our crusts were thick enough to fail in crispness, and no one minded the wavy perimeters.

We'll definitely be doing this again. If we were going to shoot for a larger crowd, we'd have to use a wetter recipe calibrated for a much hotter oven, so we could cycle the pies faster. They say a Neapolitan pizza bakes in 90 seconds at 900 degrees. We can definitely get the wood-fired outdoor oven up that high, though I'm not sure how easy it will be to hold it there. We'll have to see how much harder it is to work with a wetter, softer dough.

My favorite turned out to be the extremely simple Margherita: a little fresh tomato sauce, mozzarella, and fresh basil leaves. I was surprised to find that the ordinary all-purpose flour version was a little tastier than the fancy Anson Mills pizza flour. So that's lucky, because the local grocery store stocks a good King Arthur AP flour. It can also usually be counted on to carry some fresh basil out of season. For tomatoes, we used a high-quality canned San Marzano brand that we order online by the case year-round, but the grocery store's hydroponic fresh tomatoes have been quite good in the last few years, too. The tomato industry has figured out how to transport a fresh tomato with flavor. The tomato sauce is really just an instant puree; no need to cook it down unless your tomato source is too watery.

We oversupplied ourselves with a wide variety of other toppings, such as onions, mushrooms, bell peppers, olives, sausage, feta, and Alfredo sauce, but another time I may not bother, considering how tasty the Margherita was. The volume of toppings was vastly more than necesssary, as well, but most of the leftover veg went into some excellent omelettes this morning for us and our two houseguests. (Last night we were joined by four neighbors.)

Here's the indoor slice from today, which had a decent crust, though not as crisp as the outdoor pies from last night: