This month, Rosa of Rosa’s Yummy Yums chose Peter Reinhart’s pizza recipe from his fabulous book, The Bread Baker’s Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread, as our challenge, and all I can say is, Rosa, thank you from the bottom of my heart. First, a savory recipe, involving no butter, buttercream, whipped cream, or chocolate. Second, I now have a new favorite pizza recipe that I’ll be using a lot.
We could use any topping that we wanted, but we were required to use the dough recipe, and we had to toss the dough. I don’t know about all you other Daring Bakers out there, but my dough was so soft that the simple act of picking it up just to get ready to toss it stretched it so thin that I had to set it back down immediately. If you look closely at the picture on the left, the stuff in the middle that looks like a blob of cheese is actually the white cutting board – when I took the pizza of the parchment, it was so thin that it ripped. The recipe called for portioning the dough out into six pieces, and next time I’m going to split it into four and see if the dough is sturdier. After that first pizza, I didn’t attempt any more tossing, and had much better luck.
My toppings were simple: for Master Chow, I had tomato sauce, mozzarella, tomatoes, parmigiano reggiano, kalamata olives, and salami. For my pizza, I just eliminated the salami. The crust was fantastic- not so crisp that it was brittle, but enough to stand up to the toppings. The edge of the crust was wonderful (my favorite part), too.
Check out Rosa’s blog for the recipe, and the Daring Bakers blogroll to see how everyone else did! Thanks again, Rosa, for a fantastic choice.
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15 users responded in this post
One of mine did that. I think it was the first one I tossed. Too thin I guess. I will be practicing with the toss thing!
Nice job on the pizza–it looks delicious! I had trouble with my first batch being too thin, too. When I made the dough again, I added a bit of whole wheat flour and cut back on the oil, and that seemed to help. I agree–I think I’ve got a new favorite dough!
Mine ripped too, but I enjoyed the flavor. Your pizza looks delicious!
Your topping photo is a knock-out!
I used AP flour and no oil. Thought it was wonderful: thin, chewy but crisp and great taste. Now I must try it with bread flour and the oil.
No tossing necessary here, because the dough was so soft, just a bit stretching was right. It’s all about the flour.
Your pizzas look very appetizing!
Ulrike from Küchenlatein
That is one tasty looking pizza!
One of mine ripped too, the rest were stretched enough just from picking them up.
It was a very soft, pillowy dough.
Your pizzas look great! Hole or no hole.
Mine stretched itself too – definitely very soft. Nice toppings, and the end result looks delicious.
my dough was too sticky to toss as well. YOur pizza looks great!
Aww, that is too bad your pizza tore, it looks delicious!
Even though it ripped, it still looks delicious! Great job!
I thought it was cheese, too. It happens all the time to me, too. Once an area is gets stretched too thinly, it’s hard to patch it up.
Still looks delicious to me, though.
By my third pizza, I knew I didn’t have to toss it as much; the first ripped slightly, the second folded in on itself. I’m guess just stretching it gently first with only one toss would probably work. I love kalamata olives on my pizzas, too. Yours look delicious.
My dough was the same – there was no way I would have been able to toss it! It looks wonderful!
Your pizza looks great. I’m sorry about the hole. I made a pizza once that stuck to the counter & to get it onto the pan to bake, I ended up having to fold it all up & make it a calzone. It still tasted great, just looked awful.