...And they're like, its better than yours. Damn right it's better than yours. I can teach you, but I have to charge!
Is there a better way to celebrate weekend than to spend time with your loved ones and eat (tons of) gorgeous food? We love to eat good food and enjoy making it and trying out new recipes. It almost feels like our life circles around food -when we aren't making food or eating we are already planning our next meal. My better half is also a professional chef, so for her this literally is the case.
Weekends and day offs are a perfect time to make something from the scratch. We can plan our days and have the time needed for preparing basically what ever we choose. We don't like to leave things halfway, so it's very satisfying to have enough hours for mise en place and preparing everything ourselves. Today we decided to have a Pizza Saturday and share you our perfect recipe. Okay I admit, we are still working on developing the perfect pizza recipe, but even this one is great.
The secret lies in the dough
Or better said, the secret is to raise the dough for a looong time; over night at least, but why not raise it for 48 hours like a proper Pizza Napoletana, if you have got time. You'll get better result if you put it in the fridge. The other secret is to use "00 flours instead of regular wheat or durum flours. It's highly refined powder like flour, which is milled to standard "00" (doppio zero).
No that you know the basics, here are the proportions for a dough from which you can make 2-4 pizzas, depending on how thin you want them to be:
2 dl (about 0,85 cups) water, about 37°C warm/ body temperature
10 g yeast
2 tsp salt
pinch of sugar
5 dl (about 2,10 cups) "00 flour
At first soak the yeast to the water, add the sugar and salt and after that add flours gradually while mixing. Knead well for a while (15-20 minutes) until it's a firm ball with slightly sticky, soft and elastic touch. After this, raise the dough in a bowl covered by a cloth for several hours. As I said, the longer the better.
Our favorite fillings are:
créme fraishe
mozzarella
tuna
capers
onion
lemon peel (and some juice before serving)
fresh basil leaves
Today we tried a modified version of our favorite, with portobello mushrooms, leak, marinated red onion and Kalamata olives. SO GOOD!
The best pizzas have only 2-5 fillings in my opinion. If you use too many ingredients it might get too wet and the crust won't bake well. Use only good quality ingredients and if you want to add lots of different flavors, use only small amount per one filling. In this case it's quality over quantity!
Our speciality tomato sauce is also quite good, so here's the recipe for that:
1 onion
1 small can of Mutti Doppio tomato pure (70 g)
1 can of Mutti crushed tomatoes
a big bundle of fresh oregano, basil & thyme
2 tbsp balsamic vinegar
some salt, sugar & black pepper (taste when it's good)
1 clove of garlic
Start by sweating the chopped onion and garlic in oil. After that add tomato pure and then balsamic vinegar before adding rest of the ingredients. Cook in a mild temperature as long as needed. Again, the longer the better. Finally puree it so that the consistence is silky.
