Pizza Napoletana

I have used the Bread Baker’s Apprentice Pizza Napoletana recipe for a long time now, and I’ve written about it in a previous post.  It’s been my hands-down favorite, and I first found it on Heidi’s blog, when I lived in Austin.  Curious to see how all my bread baking/learning affected the way I made this dough, I was happy to find out that now I am able to stretch the dough even thinner.  It’s probably because the gluten development is better, since I’ve learned from all the doughs I’ve worked with over the past many months of the Bread Baker’s Apprentice Challenge.  I’ve learned how to feel when the dough needs more flour or more water, and when the kneading has done its job.  Since we like our crust thin in this household (well, most of the time, anyway!), that gluten development thing is pretty darned important.

As you can see, that’s some very thin crust.  I baked these pizzas on the grill, which gave them a wonderfully smoky taste.  Peter Reinhart’s recipe breaks all the rules of bread-making, using ice water, chilled flour, and at least an overnight in the fridge (for the dough, not the bread-maker) to slow down the fermentation process.  This results in a crisp-chewy crust with a ton of sweetly complex flavor.  The dough can also be frozen, which is something I often do, so that a pizza is never too many steps away.

It’s possible this was the best pizza I’ve ever made with this recipe.  Oddly enough, however, I now have an urge to use that blankety-blank Pain à l’Ancienne dough (that gave me such trouble) for our next pizza night.  Leaving well-enough alone has clearly never been my motto!

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Tagged as: BBAC, delayed fermentation, pizza dough