I finally purchased a kitchen scale so I can pretend I really know what I'm doing when making dough. And maybe by taking exact measurements I can reliably reproduce pizzas I've made. Science!
Here's last night's ingredients:
- 100g water (about 1/2 cup)
- 1/4 tsp yeast
- 5g table sugar (1 tsp)
- 166g King Arthur Organic High Gluten flour (about 1 1/4 cups)
- Pepperoni, jalapeño, pineapple, moz. Known locally as "The Falcon" because Zeeks used to have this as a signature pizza. Its been a favorite of mine for years though and I think Shakespeare's Pizza has the best version of this.
So after dumping everything together in the mixer, walking away for a couple of minutes and coming back, I noticed right away that I didn't have enough water in there. Typically I use a ratio of 1/2 cup of water to 1 1/4 cup of dough, but I think the flour might have been a bit packed in my measuring cup so I ended up with more than I realized. It's easy enough to add water to the dough if you have a mixer, it just adds another couple of minutes of preparation to the process. I didn't feel like doing that so I took out the dough, hand folded it a couple of times, and put it down to raise.
![Fresh made dough, ready to rise](https://maybepizza.com/images/2012/04/2012.04.11-dougha.jpg)
This dough wasn't nearly as soft as most I make (again, because I used less water than usual) and it was super elastic. I think the combo of the high gluten dough + less water is the culprit here.
![The dough after 2 hours](https://maybepizza.com/images/2012/04/2012.04.11-doughb.jpg)
And now I'm wondering after a 2 hour raise (on the heat mat), why exactly hasn't it doubled? Is the gluten keeping it from pushing out?
![On the peel and ready to top](https://maybepizza.com/images/2012/04/2012.04.11-peela.jpg)
So here is something unexpected and awesome about this pie: it was super easy to handle. Trying to spread it out on the mat was no good- it wasn't soft enough. But if I held it over my knuckles and shaped it (fast forward to 1:30 in this video), then I got what you see in the above pic. I'm pretty sure if I wanted to toss it a bit it would have held its shape, but I'm not that brave.
![Toppings applied and ready for the oven](https://maybepizza.com/images/2012/04/2012.04.11-peelb.jpg)
![All done!](https://maybepizza.com/images/2012/04/2012.04.11-outa.jpg)
Baked for exactly 2 minutes 40 seconds. The stone was ~750°.
![Nice char on the bottom, burry pic](https://maybepizza.com/images/2012/04/2012.04.11-outb.jpg)
![Thin in the middle, slightly puffy on edge](https://maybepizza.com/images/2012/04/2012.04.11-outc.jpg)
At some point I'm going to have to try and make a 00 dough and another high gluten dough at the same time, and see how they both turn out.