I know it is lame to stop posting like I did and I’m sorry about that. Things have been somewhat hectic for me. The good news is that we are still baking a lot of pizza so let’s see if we can get some posts going here…

I may go back and write about some of the pies that I made in past months, but for tonight I thought I would just post this lovely photo of the Chicago style pie that we enjoyed. The recipe has not changed much, but this time I doubled the recipe. When I did that, I doubled the yeast amount as well. I think that was a bad idea as the dough really seemed to rise more than normal overnight.

The other thing I tried was to press the dough into the pan a bit more to make the crust thin. I tried for about 1/4 inch throughout. I pressed it in and trimmed the edge that hung over the pan sides. I topped her with sliced mozz, sliced provy, pepperoni, Neapolitan sauce and mushrooms on my side. The pizza baked for about 22 minutes at 450 degrees. This photo was taken just before cutting it. Yum.

I got to unwrap a new Kitchen Aid 600 series professional mixer for Christmas this week! The mixer has a spiral dough hook designed for large batches of dough. It’s supposed to be able to handle 14 cups of flour, which by my rough calcualtions, would be about 8 full-size pizzas! I’ve already used it to make a double batch of Bill’s Traditional dough and you can bet I’ll be putting this baby to the test in the months to come. Thanks Mom and Dad!

Hmm, I wonder how long it would take to bake 8 pizzas in my oven…

 

  

©2004 pizzamaniac.com

 

 

  

©2004 pizzamaniac.com

 

It was a good day for another tray pizza experiment. Today I wanted to see how it would effect the flavor and texture to allow the pizza to rise in the tray for an hour rather than just 30 or 40 minutes as I had done in other trials. My hope was that more voids would form and that the crust would get taller and lighter.

After mixing, rising once and then spreading it into the tray, I sprayed the top of it with olive oil to ensure that it wouldn’t dry out. Then I placed the whole tray in the oven at about 100 degrees for one hour. The dough rose, but I shouldn’t say there was a noticeable difference from other times. After topping and baking the pizza, there seemed to be even less of a difference. I suppose if I am going to get more lift out of this dough I will have to modify the ingredients. Sounds like a project for another pizza day.

We’ll keep this recipe in the experimental list for now.

 

  

©2004 pizzamaniac.com

  

©2004 pizzamaniac.com

 

I had some friends over for pizza tonight and decided that it had been a while since we’d done the ol’ buffalo chicken pizza. After stretching a ball of Bill’s Traditional dough, I broke out the Texas Pete’s hot sauce and grilled some chicken so we could toss one. I was out of red onions, so I substituted bits of cooked bacon, naturally.

The flavor of the bacon went very well with the buffalo chicken. Everyone enjoyed the flavor and said it had just the right amount of kick. I’d forgotten how much I like this recipe. I’ll have to make more of these bison cockerel, er, buffalo chicken pies.

Here are the pics …

View the Buffalo Chicken Pizza Recipe …

With a batch of Bill’s Traditional on hand, I decided to make a pizza that I’d seen recently in a local pizza shop. The pizza base was ranch dressing and it was topped with tomatoes, bacon, chicken, mozzarella, and a ranch dressing drizzle. I used a small ball of 24 hour dough to test this recipe. I also used some very fancy ranch dressing (Marie’s parmesian ranch) that seemed to be oil based, rather than whatever it is that ranch dressing is normally made from. The result was what looked like a bacon ranch chicken pizza, but tasted like a greasy mess. I’ll have to start all over on this one and use another brand of ranch dressing next time. Yikes.

Good thing I also made a pepperoni pie for the kids – no one went hungry.

 

  

©2004 pizzamaniac.com

  

©2004 pizzamaniac.com