Friday, February 15, 2013

Pizza perfection.....


To the average person this might just look like a pizza. Any old pizza. Well, maybe quite a tasty looking pizza but just a pizza none the less. To Neil this is the culmination of years of obsession. Years of scrutinizing, tasting and adjusting. He has been on a quest to produce the perfect pizza for a long time. First it was the flour (it's really gotta be 00), then it was the tomatoes (only san marzano will do), the cheese (buffalo mozzarella is best but fior di latte will be fine) then came a few more details such as the polenta flour sprinkled on the peel to stop the pizza from sticking and to give it just the tiniest touch of fine crumbled texture on the bottom of the crust. Oh yes the crust, it's got to be perfectly puffed with the right crispness to puffiness ratio. The base should be a bit floppy but not too floppy and the edge just ever so slighly air bubbled and charred. The obsession with dough is and I think always will be ongoing. He gets so excited every time he makes a batch and no matter what I'm doing at some point I'm always asked to drop it and "come and touch it"........"Please!" Of course all this has taken him years to fine-tune and perfect and he'll probably be mad that I've just gone and given away so many of his secrets in one fell swoop and he'll probably make me delete this post altogether (except for the photo, I know he'll want you to see that). Anyway, the one thing that has had him puzzled for so long is how to cook the pizzas and get them just "Napoli" right without a proper pizza oven. At one point he even suggested tampering with our new and expensive oven to disable the door lock mechanism and cook pizza's using the self-clean function. What!? err, no. Anyway, sufficed to say he's finally figured it out. Nailed it in fact. Here's how....With your pizza stone on the top shelf of the oven switch it on to grill (or broil if your North American, I can't use the word broil it sounds too weird) at the highest heat. Let the oven and the stone heat up for about 15 minutes, It's got to be stinking hot in there, slide your pizza from your peel onto the stone. Let it cook for just a few minutes, literally just 2 or 3, 4 tops, watching it like a hawk the entire time. Remove from the stone with the peel and voila.

He. Has. Now. Made. The. Perfect. Pizza. (I know because I ate it.)

2 comments:

D.C. Ralstini. said...

Ah, yes NICE! and as an EX Neopolitan I can say, hand on heart, it looks SCRUMPIOUS! It seems that all the RESEARCH and EXPERIMENTATION has PAID off! YUMMY Yummy! I was given as you may know a RUNDOWN from the MASTER of exactly how its done, Belissimo, Maestro, cant wait to SAMPLE ONE? OR?????? Neil of course thinks PIZZAS came via the silk road from Chine BUT not so!!! Pizzas were invented in NAPOLI when under seige and all that they had in the city was FLOUR and TOMATOES, Voila, PIZZAS! In any case Marco Polo on his way back with SAMPLES probably ATE THEM and so some time had to elapse until NAPOLI, haha!!!!! Finished the HOUSE cover yet Sophie, the KNITTED one to keep the heat in?

dalecjr said...

It looks the muts nuts - of course a tasting session will be required to confirm that!

I will try the grill function on our oven - I always wondered how to get it hotter myself.

Nice work dude.

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