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.