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Eater has a longer article on how sourdough, and bread in general, is back in fashion and the changes being inflicted on the millenias-old staple by tech bros.
“I spent a lot of time — I don’t want to say ‘debugging,’ because that sounds really technical — but just working on recipes and trying to teach myself and there really weren’t a lot of materials out there at the time to do that,” he told me by phone this spring. “With bread baking, you kind of follow an algorithm to produce a result and that result isn’t always what you think it’s going to be, so you kind of have to step back and debug and diagnose the steps along the way. How did I go wrong here? That’s because technically the temperature might not be right or the dough strength might not be right. That iterative procedure and working through those algorithms kind of appeals to engineer. There’s the precision part of it, but also, when it comes down to it, technical people like to work with their hands. You want to construct something and I think bread is a good way to do that.”
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 21 2018, @01:40AM (3 children)
Two cups of warm water. Yeast. Sugar. Wait for fermentation. Add flour until dough stops accepting flour. Place dough ball in oiled bowl, rotate to oil all sides, then cover. Place in a warm place until it rises.
(One cup of flour makes about enough dough for about one pizza. I've tried to estimate EXACTLY how much water to add, but it's impossible. You cannot predict the humidity in your flour. And so I encourage you to go by the TEXTURE, and skip all the metrics. That's what I mean when I suggest that you can learn a lot about making bread, by making pizza dough.)
Oil a pan, roll or stretch the dough, flat, across the pan. Fold the edges to keep liquids inboard. Oil the upper surface (to avoid soggy dough).
Baking pizza requires a hot oven! At least 450 degrees, Fahrenheit. Your pizza will bake in less than 15 minutes. Once the dough is ready, it's time to turn on the oven, it takes a while to get that hot. NO, you don't need a pizza stone. If you care, you can fake it with a few bricks.
Now you can get creative! We like to make GREEN pizza, using pesto and a handful of pine nuts.
Or you can make a RED pizza. This year I made pizza sauce from tomatoes harvested from two bushes I grew in large pots on my balcony - when all was said and done I had four quarts of tomato sauce. Pick, rinse, slice, add to pot on lowest heat, cover with Italian spices, slowly cook for eight hours. Refrigerate or bottle for future use. Tomatoes are fairly acidic but you can improve shelf life by adding a little vinegar before sealing.
Don't even get me started on exotic recipes. Goat cheese? Pineapple? The sky is the limit.
Bread is interesting but it's just a platform. Take the next step.
I am a UNIX systems administrator, have been for over 30 years, and everything I learned about bread and pizzas came off the shelves of used book stores and libraries, for free.
~childo
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 21 2018, @02:35AM (2 children)
Pizza dough is very easy to make. The problem I usually have with it is the rolling/stretching. It always wants to pull back; I have trouble stretching it and having it stay stretched.
(Score: 3, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday November 21 2018, @02:52AM
Let it rest. The gluten will "relax" over time. If your pizza dough is particularly elastic, begin by stretching to a small disk until it starts to really spring back. Then wait a few minutes. Then stretch some more. You may need to do this in several phases if you have very elastic dough.
Alternatively, make a dough recipe that isn't quite so elastic. Wetter doughs that are allowed to ferment for a long time are often easier to stretch.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 21 2018, @05:55AM
Stretch it out a bit, then tap it all over with your fingers like you're playing chords on a piano. Stretch it out some more and repeat until pan sized.