5 C AP flour

1TB sugar

2 tsp salt

1 tsp yeast

2 TB olive oil

1 3/4 to 2 c water

Made dough the day before. It rose in the refrigerator overnight. Deflated and tried to shape dough, without time to let dough warm to room temperature. Is that the reason why the dough was almost impossible to stretch out without it fighting back? Also, it was darn sticky. Thoughts? I do a fair amount of breadbaking, but am just starting out with pizzas as I just finished my backyard earth oven. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Greg 

After a lot of experimenting, I finally found a way to make some really good thin crust / Neopolitan style crust.  This crust is crispy on the outside and still has a moist crumb.  I have a gas oven and set it to 'broil' and put one baking stone on the bottom rack, and another on the rack above it and baked the pizza in between (placed on the bottom stone).  For the first time ever it rose perfectly and cooked wonderfully.  A quick pic here and I'll post the whole process once I do it again and get a better set of pics.  A little more details and some more pics are located on my short blog entry at http://www.feedmittens.com/fmblog/2009/09/02/pizza-crust-success/.

So the quesion is: how do I do this better?  Firebricks on either side?  Put the bottom stone on the deck of the oven?

Hi,

I've lurked for a while and I'm finally posting

I have pizza dough rising right now. I wanted to put green pepper, onion, and fresh mushrooms on top. Do you saute your toppings before putting it on the pizza? My main concern was the mushrooms.

Thanks!

To begin with, let me say that I'm relatively new at baking.   I worked in commercial food venues for a long time, then left that for a string of factory jobs.  These days, I am self-employed and work out of my home.  (www.sandraydesigns.com) I do high-end embroidery and graphic design for many clients, but food has always been my first hobby.  

And now, open the curtain upon the wonderful world of baking! 

When I started researching baking, it was with the simple motive that my family could barely afford bread at the local supermarket.  I needed to find ways to not just make ends meet, but bend them like pretzels and make them taste good too.   So, I've kind of gone back to my foodservice roots, making the simple, wholesome fare that... errr, generations of college students relied on... like deep fried everything, gourmet burgers, and delicious pizza.

You need certain tools to create the right taste, whether it is an outdoor grill, good cooking oil, or hmm, a peel, a baking "stone", and some specialty cutlery. 

Let's just say I'm oppurtunistic when it comes to finding the right tools.  If it can be cannabalized for my latest obsession, I'll strip it down and use it in a heartbeat.  My wife just rolls her eyes and sighs when I get into something, but she also knows the end result will be good.

Heres a picture of my peel, made from an aluminum cookie sheet and a 2" dowel piece.  On it is another dowel piece, that I use for a roller, and my nifty little mezzaluna-onna-stick that I made from an alaskan snow knife ("Ulu") and another 1/2" dowel.  I put a 15" ruler next to it for scale.

And here is the finished product, with crust showing...

Recipe to follow, in the next post.

I hope I am putting this in the right place.  Anyways, we do farmer's markets around our area and for the past few weeks one of the ladies have been bringing a loaf of bread she calls the Pizza Loaf.  It is a regular bread that looks like it has pizza sauce, cheese and pepperoni in it.  It is not a quick bread either, but instead a yeast bread.  I was wondering if anyone here has ever made such a thing.  She doesn't care to share her recipe, but I think my family would really enjoy it.  She is always out of it before I have a chance to go shopping.  If no one has made it, any idea on how to reproduce such a thing.  Thanks so much in advance.

Blessings,
Lydia

I am having trouble with consistancey of my doughs, especially pizza dough.  I stopped using bread flour because my dough was getting too tough to stretch and was very resilient.  I have been using the same recipe for 5 years, and the past two i have had to change the recipe twice.  I went from all bread flour to all ap flour, way too wet.  then i went to 50/50 ap/tipo('OO'), and increased the oil to soften the dough a bit.  This recipe came out great, then the other day I had to add an additional 2.5# of flour, mind you the base recipe calls for 7#.  I cannot figure out what is going wrong.  Any help is appreciated.

Having battered myself attempting to conquer (well...make peace with?) baguettes - hampered by still developing scoring techniques and an old gas oven that simply won't retain steam - this morning I decided to treat myself to something less daunting.  I've been looking at some of the flatbread recipes in Hamelman's Bread, and his fougasse recipe caught my interest.  It's simple and has a pleasing scoring pattern (no gringes, thank you very much).

The bake turned out nicely, I think, and the reaction of my pub companions with whom I shared the loaf was positive.  It yielded a nice crust, and a chewy crumb infused with flavor from the olives and the olive oil.  This is a wonderful snack-type bread that will disappear quickly, as it should.  With its large area of crust, including that around the decorative slits, it's not meant to store but bake and eat soon as it's cooled sufficiently.

I diverted from his recipe just a tad - instead of a small pinch of yeast in the pâte fermentée, I substituted 15% of my 60% hydrated sourdough starter.  The only noticeable difference was a slight hint of sourness to the pâte fermentée the next morning which I enjoyed.

The one challenge was moving the fougasse to my parchment covered peel.  Once you score the risen dough (I used a pizza cutter which worked well), the cuts tend to spring open immediately.  This is nice.  However, attempting to lift the fougasse onto the peel was a nightmare, as the cuts made it impossible to lift the dough without it stretching in every direction.  At first I looked at what appeared to be a hopeless mass, but with some patient rearranging I was able to reconstitute its shape.  In the future, I will probably do the final shaping and slashing with the dough on the peel to avoid potential disaster and aggravation.

Otherwise, it's remarkably simple and the the finished product elicits a very high "oooohhhh" factor when shown off.

Larry

I followed The Bread Baker's Apprentice's instructions almost to a T and it came out really well.  Just wanted to post a couple quick pics and look for suggestions for improvement.  Oh yeah, and I did not use parchment paper or a slipat or anything.  Was this a bad thing?  I think the bottom came out great.  I baked it at 450 for 12 minutes, then let it cool for 20mins before cutting into it.

On top was rosemary, oregeno, kosher salt, fresh ground pepper, and some garlic powder.  Next time I'll use real garlic, and I'll wait to put the toppings on until the bread is half baked.

Hello,

   Is there an error in the Hamelman recipe on page 105 of BREAD: A BAKERS BOOK OF TECHNIQUES AND RECIPES?  I am just making sure I did the right thing as I am still a novice to using the recipes in these advanced bread books.

   I was making the focaccia recipe on page 280, which uses the ciabatta dough from page 105. 

    The Biga called for 3.8 oz of water for 6.4 oz of flour.  It seemed to come out correctly as a stiff biga.  When I moved into the final dough, the recipe calls for 3.5 oz of water to over 25 oz of flour.  It looked incredibly odd but I followed the instructions since this is the first time I made this recipe.  But I know ciabatta is supposed to be a relatively high hydration dough, so looking at the recipe's Overall formula, I noticed I should have a total of 23ish oz of water in the entire recipe.  So I added water to make up for the water that appears to be missing from the section on Final dough.

Is that correct? I haven't made the focaccia yet so I am not sure how it is going to turn out. I was just wondering if I am missing something that is right in front of me. I didn't find a lot about an error in the book when I searched for information, and some bakers on the book review for amazon said there was absolutely no error and that the reviewer who claimed there was an error was inexperienced with reading the recipes.

   I am just checking my understanding of the recipe.

I have had great success with Hamelman's sourdough breads so I think I have used the recipes correctly, but I am double checking to hear from experienced bakers. 

Thank you for your help!

After many tries for the right recipe, I just found this recipe on TFL search and baked it this morning-- it is the best ciabatta recipe I could hope for!  The directions were clear and the result was completely as advertised...Thanks, you made my day!