Flat is beautiful!

We've been experimenting with making our own pizza lately, based on this episode of Alton Brown's "Good eats." It was on a while ago and I've been fantasizing about it ever since.

This is a two part video, here's part two

As so many others who've tried this have discovered, the mechanics of making a pizza from scratch are not that much of a challenge. The difficult part is in making soft, flaky crust, something that still eludes me with attempt #2.

There are only a handful of ingredients in pizza dough, a bit of olive oil, sugar, bread flour, yeast, salt and water. The yeast is typically the same kind of flora that gives us beer, Saccharomyces cerevisiae (sounds a lot like "cerveza," the Spanish word for beer, no?). The dutch used to make enough beer and yeast to be a major exporter of both. Anyway bakers used to get yeast from beer makers. Modern yeast is a bit more of an industrial process, but beer makers can still sell their yeast to bread makers.

Anyway the deal with dough is that, as Alton points out, for the right consistency you need a bubble-gum effect to happen with the wheat gluten (a complex carbohydrate) and the yeast, which outgases co2 as it chows down on the sugars and stuff in the flour. This is actually kind of tough to figure out, and there are some basic calculations bakers do to figure out the right amounts and timing for everything.

Fleischmann's is the modern brand of yeast you find in the supermarket, and recently they came out with a "pizza" yeast. We found that since it has "no rise time" it come out fairly dense, but we may not be preparing or cooking it correctly. We're going to give it time to rise a bit in our fridge, which alton says is the best way to let pizza dough rise to give it lots of tiny bubbles.

Here's a gratuitous action shot of Karl chowing down on some of our homemade pizza crust:

Not pictured, Charlie chasing close behind in case of dropped food items.