Nothing particularly spectacular - woke up in the morning with the urge to make pizza dough. Yes, folks, it is a sleep filled with great anticipation and a wakening at 6.30 in the morning with an unbounded enthusiasm to play with flour, yeast and water. Lemme at it!
Background:
We've been going to themeless potlucks for the past few weeks. This time, all of us decided that we should theme our potlucks, and, as luck would have it, the theme was Italian.
Erring on the side of caution, I told everyone that I would be bringing spagetthi - my mum has this fail-safe recipe which involves a Maggie bolognese sauce premix and canned cream of mushroom soup. It's mum's recipe and everyone knows that mums's recipes are untouchable and sacred, so am sticking to it. BTW, it is also extremely yummy.
So - even if the pizzas didn't turn out, I would have the bolognese to fall back on and no one would know the better. *Rubs hands at own cleverness*
I read Giada de Laurentis's recipe in my second-hand issue of Bon Appetit (it's available online too), plus I read some other recipes, some simpler and some not so simple. (Note: To anyone who is asking, yes, I did put as much effort into my thesis as I did this project)
I am engineer (proudly), so after my extensive (ahem, ahem) research and reading the recipes again and again, I believed I nailed the basic formula.
Equipment and ingredients:
I don't exactly have an oven - just a small toaster oven and a grill pan. I also did some research on how to overcome this (ok, ok, I stumbled on it) - to my dismay, it seems that one needs a really hot oven and even heat distribution (thus the use of a pizza stone) for really great thin-crust pizza. I don't even know what my toaster oven temperature is. This is when my engineer/McGuyver instinct kicks in - I'd grill it perhaps? Makeshift oven with my virgin griddle and a plate?
I had 2 types of flour - atta (whole wheat) flour for making chappatis and Hong Kong flour (bleached flour) for making pau's - neither of which I have started to make, by the way. For the life of me I could not find a bag of flour that said "all-purpose" in Miri, why??
It's alright! We shall soldier on! I settled on a combo of the two - slightly more atta flour (just because I had more of it:) )
Ms. Laurentiis's recipe was easy enough - I made sure I measured the ingredients before hand. I halved everything and made sure everything was on standby and waiting to be added.
It went smoothly enough - the dough acted exactly as the recipe said it would and obeyed me nicely. Now I understand why so many bloggers insist on making their own pizza dough - it's not difficult at all.
Baking the dough was a different story though.
The Yummy Chapati
- erm, at first I tried to grill the dough because I thought that would give the same effect as the hot oven. But I ended up with a really tasty, light chappati - which wasn't bad at all but could never pass off as pizza. Also, I rolled the dough too thin (almost transparent). But it really tasted good - in fact, the reason why I don't have a photo for this is because I ate this 1st mistake.
The Pita Pretender
So I rolled them out thicker (app. 3 mm thick). I also decided to pop them the toaster to bake. This is the result - puffy pita bread lookalikes. Once cooled they were like thin, crisp rocks.
Pita bread?
I was running out of ideas.
It was when I was rolling out my final piece of dough that I recalled an article in a book I had as a child - that pizza is actually bread but with toppings to weigh the dough down. Duh!
Ta-Daa!
Well - I topped the final base with a couple of oyster mushrooms and some cheese after it sat in the toaster oven for a couple of minutes. and then baked it for another few minutes, totally expecting the dough to still puff up and toss my fillings all over the oven - but it didn't. Miracles of miracles - pizza!!
I was so happy I immediately woke AK up, to do a bit of showing off.
My first batch was slightly too thick - so tomorrow, for the potluck, I will be using more HK flour to reduce the heaviness from the atta flour.
Here is AK, rudely awakened by me to have my virgin pizza shoved down his throat
I am posting my improvised recipe, made with the ingredients I had on hand with my measly bunch of equipment. Servings are approximately 5 pizzas that will fit into my little toaster tray (20 cm by 20 cm), made with ingredients easily found in sundry shops across Malaysia, and Miri specifically
Thin Pizza Crust
3/4 cup atta flour (Indian whole wheat flour)
1/4 cup Hong Kong flour (bleached white flour)
1/2 packet instant yeast
Slightly less than 1/2 cup warm water (warm like a bath warm - 1/4 cup boiling water to 1/4 cup tepid)
1 1/2 tablespoons olive oil
1/2 tsp salt
Place yeast in a small bowl. Pour the warm water and let it stand for about 10 minutes.
Ensure that the yeast has bubbled up and expanded - froth will appear and cover the the surface of the liquid
Place the flours, salt and oil in a large bowl.
Add the water - yeast bubble mixture and stir, stir, stir until all have been incorporated and the dough leaves the sides of the bowl. If it doesn't, add 1 tablespoon of flour at a time and continue to stir.
Knead the dough until smooth. I rolled them into 6* doughballs and placed them in my oiled slowcooker pot (slowcooker off) and placed the lid on. For 1st-time yeast proofers like myself, it is pretty amazing how they expand so if they look small at first, don't fret - it will be enough.
Let the dough rise - in our tropical weather, about half an hour to 45 minutes.
Once they have puffed up nicely (they should be crowding each other now), take them out. Punch them down (mine were so small I kinda just used my palm to slap them down) and now you're ready to roll them out - 4 mm thick should do nicely.*
If you own an oven toaster like mine, then prebake for 4-5 minutes until you start to see the dough puff up like a pita being inflated. Once this happens, quickly take it out of the toaster, poke the puff with a fork to deflate and top with fillings of choice. i did this without removing the crust from the baking tray. Then bake until the crust becomes golden and your cheese melts.
*I suppose if you have a real oven you can roll into just 3 balls and save yourself the time prebaking, topping and baking again 6 pizzas one by one
*I rolled them on a clean, dry wooden cutting board which I floured slightly with an old ginger ale bottle I was saving for recycling
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