Pizza

I made some absolutely banger pizza this morning, and felt like writing a blog post about it. Kind of feel like those full time food vlogger people that post tiktoks of themselves making some overcomplicated coffee as the "start of their day" when we know that took like 3 hours to make and film and the rest of their day is editing that video.

A friend gifted us a sourdough starter recently, so that prompted my pizza frenzy. One of the byproducts of feeding is discard, basically the extra starter you "throw away" when you feed it. Every week I end up with a little tub of this stuff and pizza dough is a perfect use. I toss it in the stand mixer with some flour, water, salt, and yeast and let it rip.

At this point I've got the shaping technique down. Honestly the biggest factor is just getting the dough right. If the dough is mucked up you'll struggle. The dough in the one above was way too wet. It was like handling a slimy baby.

The latest breakthrough was cooking these puppies on a pizza steel. It's essentially a giant hunk of carbon (?) steel that you heat up and cook the pizza on. The instructions say to preheat it for FOURTY FIVE minutes on MAXIMUM BROIL, if that gives you an idea of how hot it gets. So far I prefer it a lot more to the pizza stone I had before. Those have to be babied way too much for my taste, you don't really want to get them wet or they can crack, they stain in a weird way, and they just don't get that hot.

The resulting pizza is probably as close as I can get to an actual wood fired brick oven without getting an ooni or an actual wood fired brick oven.