Pizza - Mario Batali Style - Part 1 - We Make Dough

Pizza used to be a real treat when I was a kid - my mom and dad divorced when I was pretty young so I was raised by a single mother and pizza just wasn't in the budget all that often. When we got pizza, we got pizza from Pizza Hut. Or Pizza Inn. One of the big chains (does Pizza Inn even exist anymore??). As a kid I thought it was wonderful.

Now that I'm all grown I've realized how truly crummy it is. I mean, they bring hot (mostly) food right to your door which is great, but instead of viewing pizza as a real treat like I did when I was a kid I now view it as something I order because I'm hungry but just don't feel like cooking.

I want to get back to the "pizza is like Christmas" kind of feeling and since I got Mario Batali's "Molto Gusto" cookbook for actual Christmas why not try to take it up a notch?

So, the first thing is the dough. He calls for 00 flour which my grocery store naturally doesn't sell. I've substituted all purpose flour instead - hey, we gotta do what we gotta do.

The dough turned out to be extremely wet. He mentions in his book that his dough is wetter then most bread doughs and he is not kidding. I'm a baker - we have homemade bread on a regular basis at this house - this dough is WAY wetter than a typical dough. I couldn't stop myself from throwing in a few sprinkles of flour while the stand mixer was kneading it because it was so wet.

There is totally a dirty joke in there somewhere.

Mario gives the directions for dividing and partially cooking the dough and I've discovered that I suck at making round pizzas. I did have to refrigerate mine for easier handling and there is no thicker portion around the outside edge because I used a rolling pin rather than hand stretching and when I tried to scrunch the dough to make an edge it wanted to tear. I'm of German descent - not Italian, so cut me some slack. Anyway, it's not like the fillings are piled so high they threaten to slide off the edges so it should be okay. I hope.

So here is what my par-baked pizza crusts look like after cooking:



They're like oversized tortillas but fatter. This is worrysome and I've searched the internet but am not finding scads of pictures of a finished Mario Batili pizza made by the home cook.

I've chosen to make the mushroom pizza, pepperoni pizza and balsamic onion pizza so we'll see how that goes in the next post. Oh, and by the way, I am not buying his signature gridde to make these pizzas. I cooked these using a T-Fall cheapo and they browned just fine.

Still reminding me of tortillas, though...