Bread Book Pizza with Durum Scald
When my wife and I went to Italy earlier this year, we had a pizza in Bergamo that became my wife's favorite combination of toppings: red onion and bacon. I was itching to make some pizza, and my wife said I could make it any time as long as it had onion and bacon.
Typically for sourdough pizza, I make a basic dough with white flour at 70% hydration. This time I decided to try a variation based on Robertson's recipe in Bread Book. The only changes I made were reducing the leaven (from 20% to 5%, for an overnight room temp bulk ferment), replacing the spelt with whole wheat flour (because I thought I had spelt but didn't), and doubling the durum scald (because his method made far more than required and it seemed a shame to waste half of it).
The dough was wonderful to work with, and the pizza tasted great. I'm looking forward to more pizza for dinner for the next two days.
Comments
I’ve never seen a durum scold used in pizza dough. Did you just add hot water or did you cook the flour?
The durum (which I milled a little coarse and used whole without any sifting) was cooked like a tangzhong/porridge with 2x its weight in water. I also just realized that my formula above had the amount in the original recipe, but I actually put all 74 grams in.
This book, which I think is Chad Robertson's latest, focuses a lot on Tartine's transition to high-extraction heritage wheat flours in the place of white flour, but several of the recipes also include scalded whole-grain flour. This pizza is the first recipe I've tried (if you don't count the Country Bread, which is virtually unchanged except for the switch to high-extraction flour), but I'm interested to try out the "Slab Bread" (looks like it's essentially a ciabatta) recipe, which has a durum scald at 60%. That baker's percent is somewhat inflated by the 50% poolish and 25% levain that aren't included in the 100% flour total, but it's still significant.
I mill and sift my grains to high extraction so I have to give the scald a try. I’ve made a ton of porridge and Tangzhong breads so this will be similar I would think. I’ll have to check out his new book as well.
best,
Ian
Very interesting to see the tangzhong in a pizza. I’ve seen it once in a YouTube video and I keep forgetting to try using one when I make pizza. Your pizza looks delicious.
Benny