My A-pushing friend says that’s totally me with pizza.
I disagree. I think if I were that dog, I would have eaten the pizza already and not just be holding a slice in my mouth. Also, I hope Sid gets to eat all the food he has to hold in his mouth after the photo/video has been taken.
So, I went and made more pizza recently. It’s a big surprise, I know. It was mostly because I’m still trying out crust recipes. This time, I did a no-knead whole wheat dough. I came across this recipe from Handle the Heat and decided to give it a try because I have a lot of whole wheat flour.
I used normal whole wheat flour, not white as they did, and I let the dough rise for about 24 hours at room temp before dividing it and storing in the fridge for about another day. From said pizza dough, I made one transfer pizza, as in one you have to transfer with a peel but isn’t really quite in any style (e.g. NY) that you could define it as such, and one pan pizza.
Working with the whole wheat dough is easier than the white flour dough. It’s still pretty wet and sticky but not like the white flour dough. All the bran in the dough make it easier to handle I guess. It felt a little bit like play doh, actually.
Jarred pizza sauce, 6 cheese blend, green bell, onion, mushrooms, hot Italian sausage
The normal pizza was pretty good. There’s a nice char at the edges, the crust is light and fluffy as yeast risen crusts are, but it is lacking the chew and the crispness of a more refined flour. The bran might have made the dough easier to handle, but it also gets in the way of gluten formation. So just like whole wheat breads are softer and don’t crisp in the toaster as much as a white bread does, the same goes with whole wheat pizza crust. It tasted pretty good though.
Pizza was baked using the preheat stone (550degF), turn on broiler method. Pizza was in the oven for about 12min. I used parchment again for easy transfer.
The second pizza was more of an experiment on pizza techniques and not dough. I really like Neapolitan style pizza, thin crust pizzas, NY style pizzas (ok, basically all pizzas) but sometimes I want a giant, fatty slice of pizza with lots of toppings. You can’t really do that with thin crust pizza and it’s hard to do that with any kind of pizza you have to transfer because of the potential for a bunch of your toppings to go flying during transfer. And then immediately char and smoke. And then causing you to frantically turn on all the fans and blow smoke away from your smoke detector. Unless you enjoy the ear piercing shriek the smoke detector gives off. I don’t particularly.
Anyway, I was looking at my cast iron skillet one time and decided that I could probably make a pan pizza in it. A quick search let me to the Serious Eats post about pan pizzas in cast iron skillets. Sold. The author was an editor for Cook’s Illustrated magazine, which is published by America’s Test Kitchen, which tests recipes to death. He does a whole bunch of tests so I don’t have to. Yay!
If you’re going to go with a whole wheat crust, I definitely recommend pan pizzas over a transfer pizza of any style. The lightly fried crust helps give a whole wheat crust some crispness that is otherwise hard to develop. Texture wasn’t bad. Again, it’s softer and lacks the same amount of chew because of the bran in the flour. I think it was better than the transfer pizza because of the light frying though.
The pan pizza was baked at 550degF in my cast iron skillet for about 15min. Same toppings as the first pizza.
I’ll be trying all of this again with a white flour next time. I think I’ll also try varying ratios of white:whole wheat flour. But I think I might always make one transfer and one pan pizza from now on, as I always make two pizzas at a time. Otherwise I don’t think it was worth turning on the oven. But anyway, the one pan, one transfer saves time. I can let the pan pizza bake while waiting for the stone to preheat and then slide the transfer pizza in after taking the pan pizza out.
Random moosages as I see fit. 