Hi all, please let me know of good and healthy recipes for pizza, thanks

I was making dough earlier today and ran short on flour - (I was using all purpose)

So I substituted 1/3 of the flour with course semolina flour. I'll know tomorrow if this was a good move.....wondering if anyone else has done this?.....what do I expect. I would think it would just be a bit more rustic?

thoughts?

thanks
Andy

Sometime ago I took a cooking course in Gargano and Chef Marco gave me a delicious family recipe that I is perfect for a luncheon with friends. 

http://turosdolci.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/a-recipe-from-gargano-calzone-con-cipolla/

Here is a short Pizza Baker video titled "Naturally Risen".  I received it from Pizzatherapy.com.  Enjoy!

http://pizzatherapy.com/naturallyrisen.htm

This past week I ordered some flour from one of our members (Stan) and am so happy with the service and the product he provided me. I ordered some of his Caputo 00 Pizza Flour to try in my little high heat pizza oven. I made a few pizzas today and I have to say this flour is amazing, the crust is crispy on the bottom and soft, tender inside and at the rim. It was one of the most supple doughs I have ever worked with, I was able to stretch it thin enough to read thru and it never tore........amazing! If you are one who loves pizza I would heartily rec you get some of this flour and give it a try, it is made for high heat and I would imagine it would be great to use in a wood burning oven. I am going to try to attach some pics.  Mattie

http://i139.photobucket.com/albums/q314/mattie405/PizzawithTipo00Flour001.jpg

http://i139.photobucket.com/albums/q314/mattie405/PizzawithTipo00Flour008.jpg

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?

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 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.

Hi everyone, 

    I'm fairly new at this, and don't have many recipes to share as yet.  I'm still working through the basics- I'm one of those ppl who like to master the foundations before getting fancy.

So currently I'm working on mastering pizza crust... like this guy :Jeff Varasano's NY Pizza Recipe  .  Although I'm not brave enough to cut the safety interlock off my oven's cleaning cycle lol. 

    I rather think I'm going to go with the dual baking stone concept to make a mini intense convection oven inside my conventional electric oven.  Looking on craigslist, I was able to spot some Pampered C's baking stones for sale cheap... though I have not gotten them yet. And I need a pizza peel... ah, the challenge of low-to-no budget baking...

    One thing I found very interesting is Mr. Varasano's description of what he terms "poolish"... he reccomends starting with a commercial (mail-order) sourdough Italian culture.  Has anyone here had experience in this area?  Has anyone in my area come up with a sourdough culture they would share a cup of?  I'm not sure of what would germinate in my kitchen, but pretty sure it woud be something odd.  I'm in Baltimore, MD btw.

thanks in advance!

Yesterday I tried the ciabatta pizza that trailrunner posted about a week ago. I was very impressed with the results.

The pizza formula has a lot of yeast in it and went through bulk fermentation like a rocket (I had to put it in the fridge to slow it down.) When it had tripled (after about 3 hours in fridge--probably faster but I just let it sit there until I was ready), I heavily floured my counter, literally poured the glutenous dough onto the flour, and then sprinkled more flour on the top. I patted the blob into a circle about 1/2 an inch thick. Then the trick was how to get the blob onto the pan-sprayed parchment. I did the best I could but had to reshape it a bit after it landed. Didn't seem to hurt it any. I topped it with tomatoes and basil (topping basil was an obvious mistake at this point because it dried out in the oven--next time I'll put it on as a garnish; sometimes in the heat of the moment I do stupid things).

I baked it on a preheated stone on the bottom rack for 8 minutes. (Trailrunner had warned me that I needed to bake the moisture out of the tomatoes and that was good advice.) After taking it out of the oven with my peel, I removed the parchment paper, topped it with some of TJ's marinated rope-type mozzarella, and slid it back in the oven for another 8 minutes. It rose up real nice in the oven and produced a delicate, soft, thickish pizza crust. The pizza as a whole didn't have as much flavor as I was hoping for but my tomatoes weren't home grown (I used an heirloom supermarket variety), so I'm not surprised as the topping was so plain. Next time I think I'll reduce the yeast to 3 g (I used 7 g by mistake) so it will take longer to go through bulk fermentation and perhaps develop a little more flavor. But all and all I was pretty happy with the results. Thanks trailrunner for posting this great pizza!

Topped with tomatoes and ready to go into the oven.

After 8 minutes

After 15 minutes (TJ's cheese had some oil in it so that's why it browned; regular mozzarella probably wouldn't brown.)

Crumb (or is it slice?)

250 g AP flour

227 g water (I might reduce to 210 g next time)

3 g yeast (I misread the recipe and used 7 g by accident)

7 g salt

tomatoes, thinly sliced or halved cherries, or a combination of both

mozzarella cheese, grated or thinly sliced

fresh basil leaves, for garnish

olive oil

kosher salt

Put the flour, water, salt, and yeast in mixer bowl and mix with paddle to incorporate. Let dough rest for 5 minutes to hydrate. Knead with dough hook on speed 2 for 10 minutes. (My dough never formed a ball like trailrunner's so next time I'm going to use a little less water).

Put dough into a container and let triple.

Place dough onto a heavily floured countertop, sprinkle top of dough with flour, and pat into a round about 1/2 inch thick. Transfer dough to pan-sprayed parchment paper, top with thinly sliced tomatoes, and bake on a stone in a preheated 500º oven for 8 minutes to drive off the moisture from the tomatoes and set the dough. Remove pizza and parchment from oven, discard parchment and top with mozzarella cheese. Return pizza to oven and bake until done, about another 7 to 8 minutes.

Garnish with fresh basil leaves, and a light sprinkling of kosher salt and olive oil.

Makes one pizza (serves two people).

The original post is from LilDice.

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/3621/quick-rustic-ciabatta-pizza-recipe-full-howto-pics

http://hollosyt.googlepages.com/quickrusticciabattapizza

I also found another link to this pizza with pictures and discussion. NB: the reduced amount of IDY.

http://www.prurgent.com/2009-04-15/pressrelease36039.htm

--Pamela