Suffice to say, sourdough makes a mighty fine pizza dough. Made pizzas last night with a homemade sauce (tomatoes, roasted garlic, and tons of fresh herbs from the garden), baby portabella mushrooms, pepperoni, thinly sliced sausage and topped with a mix of cheeses.
Sadly, no pictures of said masterpiece.
We’ve got our technique just about perfect for making crispy pizzas at home, and it starts with firing up the grill and finishing in the oven. The grill lets you get a nice high direct heat that you can’t get in in your home oven, and lets you toast and “pre-bake” the crust. What also helps is when I bought my grill, I splurged for a few accessories and one was something I’d never seen before… a perforated pizza pan with a long, insulated handle.
Start your oven pre-heating at 425 – 450 degrees, and your grill pre-heating on high. Spritz the pan lightly with cooking spray, spread and shape your dough on a flat surface (not too thick, not too thin) and brush one side lightly with olive oil. Flip it over onto the pan and lightly brush the other side with oil. Once your grill is pre-heated and rocket hot, place the dough and pan on it and immediately lower the heat to medium/low — you need that initial burst of heat to “set” the bottom of the crust and start the browning so that the dough doesn’t sag through the perforations in the pan. Keep an eye on the crust by flipping up an edge every so often and check for browning — the crust will start to rise and firm up, and that’s a sign that the crust is starting cooking through — and once the crust is firm enough, rotate it around a bit to ensure even heat distribution. Once the bottom is evenly and lightly browned, flip it over (I use a combo of a broad flat spatula and tongs) and toast the other side lightly as well. If you’re doing multiple crusts, re-heat your grill to high between each one.
Once the crust is done, transfer it off the pan and onto a large plate, tray, pan or peel and build your pizza to your tastes, leaving about ½” – 1″ of unsullied crust around the edge. Don’t overdo the sauce or the crust will get soggy again during cooking. Try not to build a mountain of toppings, a few even layers of thinly sliced items is plenty. Don’t go overboard with the cheese… ok, you can go a little overboard with the cheese.
Once your pizza is built, slide it off the plate/tray/pan/peel and directly onto your oven rack.
Yes, directly on the rack… don’t argue with me, just do it.
If you toasted the crust well enough on the grill, there should be sufficient structural integrity to keep the crust firm and prevent drooping. Putting the crust directly on the rack rather than on a pan will let the indirect heat from the oven travel directly into the pizza and finish making the crust crispy, rather than insulating it from that heat with the pan — which, yes, does eventually get quite hot but that takes time to get so… and metal pans have poor heat storage, so that even if you pre-heat the pan, it’ll lose all that heat the instant you put the cool pizza on it.
Optimally, if you have a pizza stone, you have the best of all worlds. You pre-heat the stone with the oven, it stores a lot of heat and transfers it into the pizza when you place it on the stone in the oven. In the absence of a stone, put the pizza directly on the oven rack. Trust me on this.
Your three goals here are to 1) heat all the ingredients through, 2) melt the cheese and brown it a bit and 3) make the crust nice and crisp. If you have too much stuff piled up, you lose all claim to balancing those and will either burn your crust to a cinder and/or render the cheese on top inedible long before the ingredients heat up. Show some restraint wouldja? This is all done by keeping an eye on things, but aim for about 10 minutes as a general guideline.
Take your pizza out of the oven, and show about 2 minutes of restraint. Let it cool for those 120 seconds before cutting, and you will be rewarded with slices of pizza that don’t miraculously heal themselves back together with molten cheese. Again, trust me on this.
Eat.
You know, I have absolutely no idea how this went from a “neener, neener… I had yummy homemade pizza last night” post to a “how-to”. *shrugs* I went from no posts in a month or so, to “please, for the love of Jeebus, shut the hell up!”
I do tend to ramble.