10 tips to make the perfect pizza

6 de July de 2018

Who said pizza is not healthy food? Enjoy a classic of Italian cuisine with these recommendations from our chef Carlos Caballero.

Make your own dough. It’s much easier than you think.

1. Making homemade dough

The first and most basic tip of all is to lose your fear and start making pizza dough at home. It is very simple and once you make it two or three times you will realize that it can be done almost without staining. Each master has his own recipe, I will give you the one I like the most:

Ingredients for the dough:
-0,5 l. of water
-800 gr. of flour for bread. White but not too refined.
-22 gr. of salt
-5 gr. of brewer’s yeast.
Ingredients for baking:
– 50 gr. of 12 months old Grana Padano cream cheese.
-30 gr. of smoked scamorza (a semi-hard cheese typical of Italian cuisine made with cow’s milk. It is a cheese very similar to mozzarella).
-24 months Grana Padano grated on the edges for gratin.
Preparation:
Pour the water into a bowl and mix it little by little with the flour and salt. Then add the brewer’s yeast and continue kneading for 20 minutes, making sure that the dough is not too compact. Once ready, let it rest for 4 hours covered with a cloth. After this time, cut the dough into round portions of between 100 and 200 grams each, according to the taste of the diner, and let it rest for another 2 hours. Bake the disk of dough with a base of 12 months Grana Padano cream and scamorza. Halfway through baking, spread the Grana Padano au gratin on the edges.
After cooking:
-30 gr. pasteurized egg yolks
-30 gr. 24-month Grana Padano chips
-60 gr. crispy smoked bacon
-Pepper powder.
-Lime skin.
Once cooked, pour the yolks over the pizza and add the bacon, lime peel and pepper powder.

2. Set the oven to maximum temperature

One of the main keys to the success of a good pizza is the oven in which it is made. In the wood-fired ovens of restaurants, temperatures of 400-500ºC can be reached. In our case, we are not lucky enough to have a professional pizza oven, so we are going to have to make do with our kitchen oven. In principle, the two ovens most commonly found in homes are electric and convection ovens.

The cooking times of the pizza will be different in each case:
1. Convection: In this case we will put the oven at almost the maximum 240-250ºC with the fan function on putting the pizza in the central tray. At this temperature we will have the pizza ready in 4-5 minutes.
2. Electric: these ovens transfer the temperature to the pizza worse and therefore we have to have the pizza between 10-12 minutes in the oven. A trick is to start by putting the pizza on the lower tray of the oven so that the lower resistance makes the dough crisp and then raise it the last two minutes to the upper tray to get the pizza to brown evenly.

3. Use a stone for the oven

This is optional but the truth is that a good stone will cost you between 25-35€ and if you like cooking and it is one of these things that if you take care of it, it will last forever. The good thing about the baking stone is that when you put the dough in it, it loses the moisture much faster so you can get the dough much crispier.

4. Pre-bake the dough

This is a trick that will come in handy for those who do not have an oven stone. It consists of putting the dough already extended but without any ingredient 1-2 minutes in the oven, just enough to lose a little elasticity and ready. In this way we also get to remove moisture from the dough and thus we get more crispy.

5. Use homemade tomato

This may seem silly, but it is not. Pizzas with a natural tomato base are quite noticeable. In general, we will always look for the tomato sauce to be as dense as possible, and therefore, have less water content, and in this way we do not moisten the dough too much and we get that crunchy touch that we like so much.

Prepare your own natural tomato sauce.

6. Fresh mozzarella or real cheeses

Cheese is an ingredient that cannot be missing in your pizza.

For my pizza I usually use Grana Padano or scamorza but we can use any cheese we have at home to put on the pizzas, whether it is cured sheep’s cheese, goat’s cheese, etc. …. When I use fresh mozzarella, it is usually the one that comes in individual plastic bags with a little water. Now, when you use this fresh mozzarella, I recommend that you squeeze it with both hands with a kitchen towel so that it loses the maximum humidity and does not spoil the pizza.

7. Prepare some ingredients in the frying pan beforehand.

Another trick I usually do is to put some of the ingredients of the pizzas in the pan beforehand. For example, if I am going to put onion or bell pepper, first I poach them over low heat in a pan with a little oil and then I put them on the pizza. This way we avoid burnt or toasted ingredients. I also use this trick in pizzas with eggplant, artichoke, mushrooms, chili peppers, etc.

8. Do not use too many ingredients

Another basic thing is to be very clear about what you want to make the pizzas with. A pizza has to have a base that can be tomato, one or two ingredients, and then a topping such as a pesto or an olive paste, etc. If you put too many ingredients on the pizza, you will end up with a pizza that tastes like nothing and you will not be able to differentiate the flavors.

9. Add the fresh ingredients at the end

Another one of my tricks is to put some raw ingredients once you take the pizza out of the oven. For example, this works very well if you use cecina or bresaola, anchovies, foie, etc. This way what you get is that the ingredient is not toasted in the oven and the pizza has much more flavor.

10. A little Parmesan or other cheese for garnish.

Finally, I usually grate a little grana padano on the edges of the dough before baking. I use an ordinary potato peeler, to get the cheese to stay in flakes. The truth is that it gives it a very good flavor.