🍕 Pizza Log: Experiment 1 - Baseline the Base

Experiment date: 6th February 2021

Objective: baseline the base

Abstract: An attempt to quantify flour and yeast ratio. The focus on ratio lead to a disastrous failure of quantity management, but an acceptable result in the end.

My pizza technique - of slinging unmeasured flour, yeast and water together in a bowl with the occasional dash of salt and oil - has reached a local maxima. I now realise that baking is not just about flavour combination, but also features some interesting chemistry and biology.

My theory was always that pizza is basically just SWOFTTY:

Salt
Water
Oil
Flour
Time
Temperature
Yeast

Find the right SWOFTTY combination, make the perfect pizza, right?

Aside from recipe websites generally being garbage piles of advertising, I find them mutually contradictory and full of hand-wavey terms that might make total sense to the author, but leave far too much room for interpretation.

I want to take an engineering approach to optimal pizza. I'm going to start with quantified SWOFTTY, then measure and iterate.

My first experiment is just a baseline - to record quantities for my traditional ingredient-slinging recipe, so that I have something to improve upon.

Reagents

5g salt
590ml water
30ml extra virgin olive oil
971g Supermarket own-brand self-raising flour
7g Allison's dried active yeast

Method

I began with good intentions, but made a fatal mistake right at the beginning: the water for yeast activation wasn't warm enough, so I added more. I'm not convinced the yeast ever properly activated, and I had to add more flour to match the increased quantity of water. By the time I had recovered the batter into a dough, I had used nearly a kilo of flour - more than twice as much as usual, and surely throwing the ratios way off. This was a disaster. Still, this journal publishes negative results too.

I kneaded the dough for 10 minutes, transferred it to a clean bowl, covered it with a damp teatowel, and set a timer for an hour and a half.

Aside - how does one properly dampen a teatowel anyway? I ran it under the tap for half a second and squeezeruffled the moisture through.

An hour an a half later, great disappointment set in. Almost no rise. Perhaps the dough realised that it was already an insane size. I gave it a squish down and tried to extract it - still goopy.

At this point I set the oven to 230°C - its maximum setting.

I divided the dough into two halves, then one of the halves into quarters, then placed the shaped charges back under the teatowel for another 30 minutes.

After 30 minutes, my great disappointment turned to mild disappointment - a slight rise!

I stretched the dough balls out over the foiled and oiled baking trays, and pre-baked them for 5 minutes. This is something I started doing to help make sure the dough cooks through regardless of the weight of toppings above.

Toppings on, then 10 minutes in the oven.

Sauce

35ml extra virgin olive oil
2 cloves of garlic, chopped finely
500g supermarket own-brand tomato passata with basil

Heat the oil in a pan, flash the garlic for 30 seconds, add the passata, simmer for 20 minutes to reduce.

Toppings

Mozzarella, smoked mozzarella, and pepperoni.

Result

Astonishingly, the pizzas had risen to an acceptable springiness, despite the mad quantities! They might have been more than an inch thick, but that didn't seem to bother my customers.

~lab6: 7/10 Far too thick, passably tasty dough, great toppings, great sauce.

Mrs ~lab6: 9/10, slightly soggy bottom, but nice.

Little Miss ~lab6: 10/10 Love it

Littler Miss ~lab6: nom

What can I say? Even when pizza is bad, it's good. And this monster is going to be breakfast too.

Limitations

Despite wanting to measure everything, there's a lot I didn't measure:

Water temperature for yeast activation
Quantity of extra flour picked up during kneading
Kneading technique
Oven temperature was set to 230°C, but I have no way of knowing whether it tells the truth
Ambient temperature in the kitchen