There's lots that I don't know about baking. Why you do things a certain way; why recipes are written in a certain order.
I remember being surprised when my wife told me, years ago, that the ingredients for a recipe were written in the order that you use them; while it made sense, it also contradicted my feeling that ingredients ought to be in alphabetical order. Why alphabetical? No special reason, other than a desire for orderliness and structure. I tend to rewrite recipes for the same reason. It mildly irritates me when a recipe has three steps, but each of the steps is a major category with about seven actions. I rewrite those into individual lines. And if I see something like 'put the dough into the preheated oven', I stick a note up top to say 'Heat the oven'. Not preheat. Thank you, George Carlin.
Still, there are things that I don't get, and I'd like to understand. For example, the first ingredient of this recipe:
Peter Reinhart's Napoletana Pizza Dough Recipe
4 1/2 cups (20.25 ounces) unbleached high-gluten, bread, or all-purpose flour, chilled
1 3/4 (.44 ounce) teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon (.11 ounce) instant yeast
1/4 cup (2 ounces) olive oil (optional)
1 3/4 cups (14 ounces) water, ice cold (40°F)
Semolina flour or cornmeal for dusting
Why is either dough okay? If you need high-gluten for structure, then why is all-purpose, which is lower in gluten, okay, too? Is it 'this one is okay but that one is preferred?' Is there actually a 'high-gluten all-purpose'? I wouldn't think so -- then it's not all-purpose, right? And why chilled? This is just flour. Does the chilling do something to the structure of the flour? Or is it a cute way of trying to do something to the moisture level of the flour? And if so, why? I mean, you don't want soggy flour, but other than that, what's the point? After all, I'm going to be adding water - cold water - to it later. So what's up with that?
My flour -- all purpose -- is in the refrigerator now. Chillin'.
2 comments:
Sounds like an experiment about to take place.....
Pizza dough needs to become suddenly stiff when you go to stretch it...so you have to do unto it what you are not supposed to do with most bread...punch the glute out of it. Stretch and warp and finagle it. Slap it against the table, treat it like the flat bread that it is. (My boss at the pizzaria used to trash talk at it before he spun it in the air.) I dunno man...its an art, what can I say!
I agree that you want to weaken the gluten. I really like the Reinhart recipe that I'm using; it softens right up -- in fact, the likelihood is that I'll stretch it TOO much. Made a focaccia yesterday where the damn thing wouldn't even fit on the peel!
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