Is anyone else into wood fired pizza? I built an oven in my back yard last year and love it. The only catch is finding the perfect dough recipe. The pizza cooks in about 4 min. So the dough cannot be your normal type. I have tried several recipes, and some are good. But not great. Thin crust is the best. If you try to use thick it is burned on the bottom and raw in the middle. If you need to know more about wood fired pizza check out woodbrick oven. I bought the mold from them and the have the plans online free.
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wood fired pizza pros
- Thread starter mike45
- Start date
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ccomstock001
Sharpshooter
What is wrong with using a normal pizza dough recipe? I haven't used a wood fired oven but I am a bread baker and I don't see why it would matter.
CountryBoy19
Grandmaster
I don't currently have a wood-fired oven, but it's my dream to do it someday. My only holdback right now is that I don't plan to be in this house for that long so I don't want to build a permanent oven... That being said, what we call "pizza" here in the states is NOT the pizza that Italians eat, and is not the pizza that is generally cooked in wood-fired ovens... That is Neopolitan style pizza (very thin crust, very light on the toppings).
If you're like me and you want a wood-fired oven but it isn't practical, you can get condition near a wood-fired oven in your regular oven at home. Wood fired ovens run hot, 700-900 degrees F generally and you need a way to recreate the floor of the oven, or rather, the "heat storage" of the floor. You want something that will store up heat and then quickly send it into the crust when you slide the pizza in (but not too quickly).
To get the oven up to temperature takes a little bit of "tinkerer" attitude. Generally what people do is "hot-wire" or "bypass" (depends how your oven is designed) the door-lock for the self cleaning cycle and then cook pizza on self-clean, which gets the temps up where they need to be for neopolitan style pizza.
So now we just have to solve the "floor" problem. Sure, you can buy a pizza stone, but the problem with a stone is generally they are small in size; try sliding a pizza off a pizza peel onto a hot stone and not have an edge flop off. You don't get multiple chances, the first failure makes a MESS in the oven and those toppings start to burn in the bottom of the oven, making an even bigger mess (and the smoke tends to be a bit off-putting while your "2nd try" is cooking). So buy a bigger stone, or buy a big piece of stone-like material; that is also not so easy, or rather, not so cheap. A large stone-like piece that is meant to go in the oven can cost $100-200 and there is still the risk of breaking it if you mistreat it etc. My solution is a big ol' slab of hot-roll steel sheet. It's 22" wide, 17.5" deep (depth of my oven), and 1/2" thick. It cost me ~$50 plus a little time. I had to strip the mill-scale off of it and then "season" it like cast-iron to prevent rust. After that it works excellent. I found that if I preheat it in the oven at the full cook temp it's too hot and will burn the crust (because steel transfers heat faster than stone). I preheat the steel at 400 degrees then cook my pizzas on broil (to get the extremely high top heat).
As for crust, I still haven't found a crust that I think is perfect. I've tried several from pizzamaking.com and other places. Right now I'm on a crust recipe that I found linked on another forum for authentic NY style pizza crust. I like it but the last time I made it, even after a 3-day slow ferment in the fridge I had a hard time stretching the pies out to the right size.
That brings me to slow-fermenting, if you aren't doing it you should be. Nearly ALL pizza places do a slow ferment, even papa johns, pizza-hut and the likes. Their dough is made in a factory setting then delivered to the restaurant where it sits anywhere from 2-5 days in the walk-in before being used. What does a slow-ferment get you? #1 you use less yeast and let them do their thing (multiply); this slow multiplication and growth produce a more flavorful crust. Rather than just tasting a floury crust you actually taste the wonderful yumminess that yeast produce (all the good things that we like about yeast-breads). #2 When you knead the dough to develop the gluten you "wind up" the springs of the gluten strands in a way. This makes it quite difficult to stretch the pie out. Letting the dough slow-rise in the fridge permits these gluten strands to 'relax', or "unwind". The gluten itself doesn't break down, it just relaxes a bit. You'll notice that your dough goes into the fridge in a nice, round ball, but when it comes out it has relaxed down to a flattened shape more like a disc or UFO type shape.
Sauce: quit buying sauce, quit buying tomatoes from a grocery store to make sauce. You're doing it wrong (IMHO). You will NEVER make a good sauce with store-bought tomatoes, nor will you ever find a good sauce pre-made in a store. Either grow your own tomatoes or buy real, ripe, fresh tomatoes from a road-side stand or farmers market. There are NO words that can describe the difference in flavor, "potency", and aroma that comes from home-grown tomatoes. I have a friend that is willing to pay anything (possibly his first-born son) for my pizza sauce; I've tried telling him how it's done and he just wants to buy it from me, he isn't interested in growing/making his own. His loss...
Cheese: fresh mozz only. The pre-shredded stuff has anti-stick additives in it to prevent the cheese from clumping in the bag. Those additives can also keep it from melting together on a pizza. Yes, you can use shredded mozz from a bag, and your pizza will be ok, but for the purist it just won't work. Plus, it's actually cheaper to use fresh mozz balls. Local grocery price for a 8 oz bag of shredded mozz is $1.99 on sale, and IIRC, 16 oz shredded mozz is ~$5 (they don't normally put the large bags on sale). Even if you go to Sam's club and buy the 5 lb bag it's still ~$4/lb. Aldi's price for 16 oz balled, fresh mozz is $3.79 (I think...normally my wife picks them up)
Toppings: for any authentic Neopolitan style pizza you want to go light on the toppings. You can do your own research on toppings if you want authentic Neopolitan pizza. I like a more NY style cross with California style. What is California style you say? Well, it's similar to a NY style but it has more toppings and it has more unique toppings. A traditional NY pizzeria has about 5-6 pizzas on the menu with 2-3 meat selections and 3-5 veggies selections and only 1 sauce to choose from. The pizza will come out lightly topped. California pizza is heavily topped and a California style pizza joint will generally have 4-8 meat selections, 8-20 veggie selections, 2-10 sauces, and you can quite literally build anything you want. A lot of the "specialty" pizzas we see at local & chains places in IN are California style. Hawaiian pizza (ham, bacon, pineapple) despite it's name, would be considered a Californian style pizza. Supreme (loaded with all the goodies) would also be a Californian style. I like a "quazi" Californian style pizza; I like to choose whatever toppings I want (BBQ chicken, chicken-bacon-ranch, Pork lovers, & Pizza-hut style taco pizza are the 4 common pizzas we make). Pre-cook ALL your meats, chop them to small size. Pepperoni, skip Hormel, it's crap. I use the full-stick Bridgeford brand. My local Jay C (Kroger chain) and Walmart both carry it. At Walmart it will be located with the beef-jerky and other snack items. I've found that even though the Bridgeford is a bit more greasy it has a LOT more flavor than Hormel and other packaged, pre-sliced pepperoni's. Bacon is Wright-brand or homemade (depends if I have homemade bacon in the freezer still).
I think that's about all I have to say... without going too much more long-winded.
If you're like me and you want a wood-fired oven but it isn't practical, you can get condition near a wood-fired oven in your regular oven at home. Wood fired ovens run hot, 700-900 degrees F generally and you need a way to recreate the floor of the oven, or rather, the "heat storage" of the floor. You want something that will store up heat and then quickly send it into the crust when you slide the pizza in (but not too quickly).
To get the oven up to temperature takes a little bit of "tinkerer" attitude. Generally what people do is "hot-wire" or "bypass" (depends how your oven is designed) the door-lock for the self cleaning cycle and then cook pizza on self-clean, which gets the temps up where they need to be for neopolitan style pizza.
So now we just have to solve the "floor" problem. Sure, you can buy a pizza stone, but the problem with a stone is generally they are small in size; try sliding a pizza off a pizza peel onto a hot stone and not have an edge flop off. You don't get multiple chances, the first failure makes a MESS in the oven and those toppings start to burn in the bottom of the oven, making an even bigger mess (and the smoke tends to be a bit off-putting while your "2nd try" is cooking). So buy a bigger stone, or buy a big piece of stone-like material; that is also not so easy, or rather, not so cheap. A large stone-like piece that is meant to go in the oven can cost $100-200 and there is still the risk of breaking it if you mistreat it etc. My solution is a big ol' slab of hot-roll steel sheet. It's 22" wide, 17.5" deep (depth of my oven), and 1/2" thick. It cost me ~$50 plus a little time. I had to strip the mill-scale off of it and then "season" it like cast-iron to prevent rust. After that it works excellent. I found that if I preheat it in the oven at the full cook temp it's too hot and will burn the crust (because steel transfers heat faster than stone). I preheat the steel at 400 degrees then cook my pizzas on broil (to get the extremely high top heat).
As for crust, I still haven't found a crust that I think is perfect. I've tried several from pizzamaking.com and other places. Right now I'm on a crust recipe that I found linked on another forum for authentic NY style pizza crust. I like it but the last time I made it, even after a 3-day slow ferment in the fridge I had a hard time stretching the pies out to the right size.
That brings me to slow-fermenting, if you aren't doing it you should be. Nearly ALL pizza places do a slow ferment, even papa johns, pizza-hut and the likes. Their dough is made in a factory setting then delivered to the restaurant where it sits anywhere from 2-5 days in the walk-in before being used. What does a slow-ferment get you? #1 you use less yeast and let them do their thing (multiply); this slow multiplication and growth produce a more flavorful crust. Rather than just tasting a floury crust you actually taste the wonderful yumminess that yeast produce (all the good things that we like about yeast-breads). #2 When you knead the dough to develop the gluten you "wind up" the springs of the gluten strands in a way. This makes it quite difficult to stretch the pie out. Letting the dough slow-rise in the fridge permits these gluten strands to 'relax', or "unwind". The gluten itself doesn't break down, it just relaxes a bit. You'll notice that your dough goes into the fridge in a nice, round ball, but when it comes out it has relaxed down to a flattened shape more like a disc or UFO type shape.
Sauce: quit buying sauce, quit buying tomatoes from a grocery store to make sauce. You're doing it wrong (IMHO). You will NEVER make a good sauce with store-bought tomatoes, nor will you ever find a good sauce pre-made in a store. Either grow your own tomatoes or buy real, ripe, fresh tomatoes from a road-side stand or farmers market. There are NO words that can describe the difference in flavor, "potency", and aroma that comes from home-grown tomatoes. I have a friend that is willing to pay anything (possibly his first-born son) for my pizza sauce; I've tried telling him how it's done and he just wants to buy it from me, he isn't interested in growing/making his own. His loss...
Cheese: fresh mozz only. The pre-shredded stuff has anti-stick additives in it to prevent the cheese from clumping in the bag. Those additives can also keep it from melting together on a pizza. Yes, you can use shredded mozz from a bag, and your pizza will be ok, but for the purist it just won't work. Plus, it's actually cheaper to use fresh mozz balls. Local grocery price for a 8 oz bag of shredded mozz is $1.99 on sale, and IIRC, 16 oz shredded mozz is ~$5 (they don't normally put the large bags on sale). Even if you go to Sam's club and buy the 5 lb bag it's still ~$4/lb. Aldi's price for 16 oz balled, fresh mozz is $3.79 (I think...normally my wife picks them up)
Toppings: for any authentic Neopolitan style pizza you want to go light on the toppings. You can do your own research on toppings if you want authentic Neopolitan pizza. I like a more NY style cross with California style. What is California style you say? Well, it's similar to a NY style but it has more toppings and it has more unique toppings. A traditional NY pizzeria has about 5-6 pizzas on the menu with 2-3 meat selections and 3-5 veggies selections and only 1 sauce to choose from. The pizza will come out lightly topped. California pizza is heavily topped and a California style pizza joint will generally have 4-8 meat selections, 8-20 veggie selections, 2-10 sauces, and you can quite literally build anything you want. A lot of the "specialty" pizzas we see at local & chains places in IN are California style. Hawaiian pizza (ham, bacon, pineapple) despite it's name, would be considered a Californian style pizza. Supreme (loaded with all the goodies) would also be a Californian style. I like a "quazi" Californian style pizza; I like to choose whatever toppings I want (BBQ chicken, chicken-bacon-ranch, Pork lovers, & Pizza-hut style taco pizza are the 4 common pizzas we make). Pre-cook ALL your meats, chop them to small size. Pepperoni, skip Hormel, it's crap. I use the full-stick Bridgeford brand. My local Jay C (Kroger chain) and Walmart both carry it. At Walmart it will be located with the beef-jerky and other snack items. I've found that even though the Bridgeford is a bit more greasy it has a LOT more flavor than Hormel and other packaged, pre-sliced pepperoni's. Bacon is Wright-brand or homemade (depends if I have homemade bacon in the freezer still).
I think that's about all I have to say... without going too much more long-winded.
Its just like Countryboy19 Said. If you want the real taste and feel, the regular dough wont cut it. It gets bubbles in it and then starts to burn. Dont get me wrong. We have made some really good Pies. Some times when I am in a hurry Ill use un-cooked Flour tortillas. They cook real thin crust pies. We tried the 000 flour or something like that. It worked OK. Bread flour is OK, but not when you want a thin crust. By the way thick crust in a wood fired oven is almost never cooked well. The outside crust is burned and the middle is almost bread-like.
I cook pizza in my BGE on occasion and use the pre-made crust dough you can buy at Trader Joe's. It's cheap, tasty and works well on the pizza stone at 700*. It's sticky as molasses though and difficult to get onto the stone from whatever you use to construct the pie.
ccomstock001
Sharpshooter
00 flour is what is traditionally used for pizza dough although bread flour can work. I would suggest buying fleischmann's pizza dough yeast it has a dough relaxing agent to keep the dough from snapping back and should help keep the dough thin. I would also recommend reading Peter Reinhart's American Pie: MY search for the perfect pizza. He Talks about many different styles of pizza and includes dough recipes for each style.
CountryBoy19
Grandmaster
For a purist like me Fleishcmann's pizza dough yeast is a no-go. It's targeted towards people that don't want to wait the time it takes to make good pizza dough. Just look at the ingredients list: it's loaded full of enzymes/additives/etc to make it possible for you to make pizza dough with no advance notice. But you don't get all that wonderful yeasty flavor that builds up over a few days.
Pizza dough yeast has:
Sorbitan monostearate: An emulsifier agent that helps the flour absorb water more quickly (a proper resting and slow rising negates the need for this)
l-cysteine: an amino acid extracted from hair/feathers, it breaks down the gluten strands, taking the place of a slow rise.
ascorbic acid: Vitamin C, it's commonly used as a dough enhancing agent but at the very tiny amount found in the yeast it's more than likely just a preservative for the other ingredients. I use ascorbic acid as a dough enhancer but I use it at higher concentrations (1-2 vitamin C tabs in a batch of dough).
I'm not saying the pizza yeast is necessarily bad, but why use something that has additives to make up for the shortcomings of rushing through the process when it just takes a little fore-thought and planning to do it right in the first place? I know that if I want to make pizza this Saturday I'm going to make my dough tonight...
Another comment that some purists will likely frown upon: I like to make my dough in large batches. I make a few pizzas for dinner and then par-bake the rest of the crusts and freeze them in large 2-gallon ziplock bags. I then make individual baggies of pre-cooked meat toppings that will make 2-3 pizzas and freeze them. Any time I want a delicious home-made pizza but didn't have the fore-thought to plan ahead, I go to the freezer, pull out a crust or 2, set my oven for 425, top the pizza, and put it in for ~10 minutes on a pizza-screen (hot and fast on the baking steel doesn't work well with a par-baked crust) and voila, home-made pizza in 20 minutes. Just last night I made a pork-lovers pizza with a frozen crust I made a couple weeks ago.
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