So only a limited use of a cookbook over the weekend. I decided to make pizza yesterday partly to use up some things we had in the refrigerator but also because I was in the mood generally. Pizza’s a leftover that everybody in the house will eat, so I usually make a couple of pizzas of different kinds.
The cookbook was just for the dough. I’ve used a couple of pizza dough recipes but I’ve settled on the one-day dough in Ken Forkish’s Flour Water Salt Yeast. Forkish’s book is the one that guided me to baking bread during the pandemic as well as pizza dough. I’ve kind of fallen out of the habit because I neglected my starter and it died (that makes me feel like a kid with a hamster that I didn’t feed…) but that was after a fair number of loaves between April 2020 and early 2022. I think the thing that really led me to fall away was just the feeling that I needed to bake bread so regularly (if I was going to feed the starter) and a bit of frustration over the close attention it took every single time I made it. If I got careless or worked in a rush, I ended up with a bad loaf. If I focused and followed the recipe exactly, it was as good as any artisan bread you might ask for. Plus Forkish is so big on mixing with your hands, which I agree gives good results but at least for me, always means a half-day of picking little dried bits of dough out of the hair on the back of my fingers. Painfully. I think if I were going to live the life of a Forkish-guided baker indefinitely, I’d take to shaving my fingers.
Anyway, the yeast-based one day pizza dough is easier and for whatever reason a bit easier to correct if the dough is slightly off on the first mixing. (Forkish has a book on pizza exclusively but I don’t really feel the need to get it.)
So I took stock of what I had and what I needed and resolved to make one red sauce pizza with some salami and Jimmy Nardello peppers, one white sauce pizza with mushrooms, leeks and smoked turkey, and one tomatillo salsa pizza with some seared tuna steak and red onions on it. Mozzarella on the first, gruyere on the second, monterery jack on the third.
(As a side note, while I don’t often mention specific products, I really like the salsas that La Fundidora makes. I have that sinking feeling that they’re a small producer funded by a big company but for now at least they make good stuff.)
Anyway, a good outcome, and hence we are stocked up for a day or two of pizza leftovers.
Though not for the first time, I did think that I need another pizza brick: making a pizza in a cast-iron pan just never quite works right.