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[personal profile] jducoeur
It's the little milestones in life that sometimes produce the greatest satisfaction...

So [livejournal.com profile] msmemory and I decided yesterday that we wanted Thai Shrimp Pizza for dinner. However, upon shopping we discovered that Bread & Circus doesn't carry Boboli premade crusts, presumably because they aren't Organic. (Which always sounds like they must be made of silicon, or something like that. But I digress.) So I decided to take my life in my hands and try making a real pizza with a real crust, albeit using the cheat of store-bought pizza dough instead of homemade.

The long and the short of it is that we survived the experience, and demonstrated that a more-or-less homemade crust is vastly superior to the prebaked thing. However, a few lessons learned:

  • Our house lacks a decently warm spot to raise dough in. (I eventually gave up and sat it in front of the exhaust vent of a low oven.)

  • If you try to spin the dough and don't know what you're doing, the center can get very thin. Didn't actually break, but I think that 90% of the mass of the crust was in the edges.

  • Make sure, before you start the project, you have a clean, movable thingy large enough to build the pizza on, and which you can slide it off of onto the pizza stone. (By lucky chance, we have one cookie sheet that's big enough.) Now I want a pizza peel, not that I have anywhere to put one...

  • Put more cornmeal than that onto the sheet, to make sure the pizza can come off again. No, more than that. Okay, now add a little more. ([livejournal.com profile] msmemory was subjected to me swearing a blue streak while trying to get the damned thing off the cookie sheet onto the stone.)


The various hassles aside, I can honestly say that the resultant pizza was Competant -- better than Domino's, although not as good as Bertucci's. With more practice, I might actually be able to get one that's actually round, as opposed to a Mutant Oblong With Huge Puffy Crusts. And since the brand-spanking-new Cuisinart (after sixteen years of abuse, we finally managed to kill the old one's engine) makes a huge deal about being good at pizza dough, I might even try it from scratch next time. Which I don't expect to make the slightest difference in the end product, but will make the Foodie in me feel terribly virtuous...

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