Eat more pizza

Finding a reliable pizza dough recipe for my woodfire oven has been a fun adventure. I have tried many and though I haven’t run into any disasters, I feel like I haven’t quite locked in my favorite. However, my last couple attempts making dough has been a poolish recipe and it might be my frontrunner. Both times it turned out well though I had to make a couple adjustments.

Pizza dough is similar to any other bread making where a great recipe can only take you so far. At some point, you need to use intuition and make small adjustments because a recipe doesn’t account for every possible variable in your kitchen. Room temperature, humidity, flour dryness, age of ingredients, and so many other things can cause the chemistry in your baking to come out a little different. Expert bakers get a sense for those things and can make those micro adjustments just by their senses. I am certainly not an expert baker, but I feel like the simplicity of the poolish dough process allowed me to understand that my dough was just slightly too wet and I needed to add a little more flour than the recipe called for.

My wife is an excellent baker and she helped coach me in this process. I realize I could enlist her expertise to make dough, but it is a skill I want to continue to practice for myself. My “Neapolitan style” dough cooked great and we had tasty pizzas for ourselves and some family guests. My wife makes an amazing “Sicilian style” sheet tray pizza that is basically focaccia bread with toppings. If we had to open a restaurant tomorrow, that would be the sure bet for a winning recipe. Anytime we are looking for inspiration for the sheet tray / Sicilian / grandma style pizza, we have a go to location. I understand that Detroit pizza is still very popular but that isn’t what we go for. Mario’s in St. Paul is the best in town and we have a great time whenever we go.