Let’s start with pizza! (Hamelman’s pizza)
So, this is my first entry and hopefully I’ll be able to go on describing my work as a home baker. I am from Naples, south Italy, and this means that I love pizza, but I am also quite picky about it. I might be “unpolite” to the rest of the world…but I rarely eat pizza outside Naples (though I had a very good pizza in Minneapolis), which doesn’t mean that anywhere in Naples you can have good pizza, there are places where they sell a really cr… pizza but other places where it is just delicious (I am sure “Michele” is famous abroad). That said, I tried Hamelman’s pizza, and my wife (from Turin) immediately said “no doubt, this is the best pizza you have ever made!”.
Now let’s come to the crust. I used Hamelman’s percentage formula and prepared enough dough to make 5 crusts of about 250 g each.
And this is my result:
 Biga after 12 hours: is it over ripen? |
 Pizza dough after one fold. |
 Panetti |
 Pizza!! |
My comments:
The dough is not technically a neapolitan pizza in which there is no oil, and the procedure is completely different. But Hamelman never claims it to be neapolitan, so this is just a comment. I folded the dough twice, not once as Hamelman suggests, but now I think that one was enough. The dough is very extensible, but I find it a little bit too wet to be easily handled. In the past seven months I used to make pizza dough with at most 60 % water. I cut the dough into pieces of about 250 grams each (“panetti” in Italian) which is the size of a regular pizza in an Italian pizzeria.
Taste: just good, very good, not too crisp.
The dough was very light and soft.
Final result: I’ll try this dough again next Saturday since I overcooked the first two pizzas, and I think that my biga was over-ripen.
Oh, I almost forgot, the topping was of course just tomatoes and mozzarella, and a few basil leaves.
Lello
Update 1 (01/07/2010) : just a short update on the dough. It is a little bit too puffed up. Too many bubble, due to the large amount of yeast. For the next time I am going to try a completely different version based on a poolish. I’ll post about it later.
