Curtis Ide - Passionate About Pizza: Making Great Homemade Pizza

I dedicate this book to my wife and my mother. These two women have been central to my life, my health, and the way I see the world.

Copyright 2003, 2008, 2009 by Curtis Evan Ide, all rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part, in any form.

Photographs Copyright 2008 by Curtis Evan Ide and Charles Henry (Nick) Ide, all rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part, in any form.

ISBN 978-0-615-25860-7

I dedicate this book to my wife and my mother. These two women have been central to my life, my health, and the way I see the world.

Copyright 2003, 2008, 2009 by Curtis Evan Ide, all rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part, in any form.

Photographs Copyright 2008 by Curtis Evan Ide and Charles Henry (Nick) Ide, all rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part, in any form.

ISBN 978-0-615-25860-7

Table of Contents

You are about to make pizza. This section is intended to quickly get you started and bring some early success. If you are making your first pizza, you can expect to be a little uncomfortable with the process. You may be working with yeast for the first time. It may be some time since you worked with (or played with) dough, if ever. If you have read through the rest of the book you might even be thinking "Oh my, this is more complicated than I thought!". Do not be deterred! We can get through our first few pizzas together then you will be on your way to making great homemade pizza.

Pizzerias use the same ingredients, preparation, and baking time for every pizza they make to ensure that all pizzas come out alike. This system brings consistency, uniformity, and repeatability. A very good system will help make very good pizza.

A system is more than just a recipe; it is a complete plan for how to make a pizza from scratch. The Passionate About Pizza System introduced later in the book will help you make each pizza better than your last. You will be able to create a mouth-watering taste sensation with every pizza you make. The full Passionate About Pizza System is fully explained later but you will be introduced to some of the concepts in this quick start guide. Eventually, you will create your own system for making pizza the way you want it. For now, let's get started and we will come back to this topic later.

Put your passion into your pizza! The fact that you are reading this book means that you are willing to put effort into making a pizza rather than ordering one from a pizzeria or buying a frozen one from the grocery store. Go one-step further and put your passion into your pizza! Your pizza and all the things you do to turn it from raw ingredients into a finished pie are an expression of you. Your friends, your family, and you yourself will be able to tell when you make food with passion, so express yourself with gusto!

Why should you want to use a system? Is the system going to constrain you? Can't you just wing it when making pizza? These are good questions and you need to be comfortable with the answers. What I call the Passionate About Pizza System is really just the habits that I now have for making pizza. In addition, it helps make you aware of what you are doing (or need to be doing) when making pizza so that you can change some part of your actions or habits when you need to in order to make better pizza. As you become more comfortable making pizza and develop your own habits you will be developing your own system.

So just how long is this pizza going to take you to make? The entire process should take you two to three (2-3) hours. The dough should take you about fifteen to twenty minutes to mix and knead. The dough will rise for about sixty minutes. Basic pizza sauce should come together in less than five minutes and cooks for about thirty so it can be finished entirely during the time the dough is rising. Toppings can be prepared while the sauce is cooking and the dough is rising. Shaping the dough and assembling the pizza will take five to twenty minutes, depending on the complexity of the pizza. The pizza will bake for fifteen to forty minutes depending on the style. The key is to do it all in the right order!

With a little advance planning, you can turn time into your friend as you make a pizza. The individual steps involved in pizza making as described in this quick start guide and in the book are laid out in the order that makes it easiest to create a pizza from start to finish.

I suggest that you use the ones that you have or the ones that you can easily obtain. It does not even have to be a pan specifically designed to make pizza. My pizza pans are just basic pans purchased from various kitchen stores or received as gifts. I followed the instructions to season them with oil and they have worked wonderfully.

A peel is a wide, flat wooden board with a long handle. Professional bakers use a peel to slide pizzas, breads, etc. directly onto the floor of a commercial oven. Professional peels are available in a variety of paddle sizes, paddle materials (most are wood, but some have metal paddles), and handle lengths. You can generally find a home-sized peel that has an approximately 14" square paddle with a six inch handle; these work very well.

It helps if your peel is exactly the same size as your pizza stone. This way, when you are shaping and assembling your pizza, you will be able to easily create the largest pizza your stone can handle. If your peel is larger than your stone, consider marking your peel to show the size of your stone so you can accomplish the same thing. If your peel is smaller than your stone, you will just be limited by the size of your peel, not your stone.

You can use almost any cheese on your pizza, so go ahead and express your freedom of choice. I do, however, want to point out one thing. I have found that if you purchase cheese that has been shredded or grated before you buy it, it has less moisture in it. This fact can be used to your advantage. When baking a pizza with a lot of moisture in it (such as one with diced, fresh tomatoes), use pre-shredded cheese. When making a pizza with little moisture, you may want to grate the cheese yourself.

You might think that flour is just flour; however, not all flours are created equal. You can use almost any type of flour to make a pizza, but the type of flour you use does make a difference. Different flours have different amounts of gluten ; this is the protein in wheat that helps hold in the bubbles of gas produced by the yeast. These different flours will behave differently; you can see and feel the difference in the dough as it is mixed and kneaded.

You may have seen flours labeled All Purpose, Unbleached, All Purpose Unbleached, Cake Flour, Pastry Flour, Bread Flour, High Gluten Flour, etc. Each of these flours is formulated to have a different amount of gluten in the flour. Almost all of the recipes in this book call for All Purpose Unbleached Flour. It is definitely the kind of flour you should use for your first few pizzas. This type of flour can be used with success in almost all types of baking, so it is widely available. You generally have a few brands to pick from in your local supermarket. Pick your favorite brand All Purpose flour and let's get started.