Good ingredients = good pizza. Don’t forget the overall price (incl toppings) is going to be around £5 for 3 large / 4 medium pizzas. With the rate food prices are going up that figure might be out of date soon but you get the picture: it’s cheap enough to start with so don’t scrimp!
500g Strong White Bread Flour
For regular supermarket flour I’ve settled on Allinson’s strong white bread flour – the extra strong is also good. What you’re after here is the gluten content being high to give your dough enough stretch to get it into shape.
If you’ve got some friends who want flour or you know you’re going to go through this pretty fast and you live near a Costco then go get the 16kg Manitoba flour that they sell. Don’t buy this and store it for a year, you need to go through it pretty quick (under 6 months at the absolute max, preferably 3-4 months). It’s about £11 a bag (December 2011). Splitting the bag up into multiple airtight containers helps.
Other than this, you could get hold of some proper Tipo 00 flour which is very fine (the 00 is the grade, it’s like powder). Something else I’ve tried is mixing in 100g of semolina (so that’s 400g flour and 100g semolina). I’ve more experimenting to do with this but we’re getting into the finer points now and that’s not where most people reading this will want to be. There are plenty of technical pizza discussions elsewhere – for now then, let’s have 500g of Allinsons strong white bread flour and carry on.
300g water – tepid
Notice I’ve put 300 grams of water here and not a volume. There’s a reason for that – accuracy and the fact that it works for me so I’m not changing it anytime soon! This is why I mentioned the digital scales on the blog’s first page. What I’ve found is a 60/40 ratio of flour to water works for my normal gas oven. I’ve heard of 65/35 and I’ve tried it but you’re going to get quite a sloppy base and unless you have either a pizza oven or some commercial oven (both will reach temperatures much higher than your kitchen oven) then you’ll struggle to get a crispy base. 60/40 all the way.
Room temperature – don’t worry too much but as a general rule of thumb we have about a third of it from a recently boiled kettle and 2 thirds of it out of the tap (or filtered if you have it). This is useful when the bread machine basin is a bit cold – balances it out.
10g salt
Those of you keen on chopping salt out of your diet – alter as you see fit. 10g doesn’t end up with very salty bread, and you can use something like Schwartz ‘Season-All’ (Costco sell it) though I’d suggest 5g of each so as not to over-flavour the mix. Only do this when you’re confident – first timers stick to 10g salt and see how you go – I still do this.
3.5g dried yeast
I say 3.5g here, but you’re just using half of one of those sachets you see in the baking aisle of the supermarket – a bit like the picture here which I took in the baking aisle of a supermarket so you could see what they look like on the shelf(I’m all for accuracy, remember?). I used to try to weigh it but now I just guess. In fact, I’m back to weighing as I recently bought one of the small tins of Allinsons yeast – about half the price of the sachets but you must use within 4 months.
A pinch of sugar
There’s a lovely Italian lady who owns a long-standing deli in the middle of Leeds, she’s probably forgotten more recipes than I know and she was the one who told me to use a bit of semolina in the flour. She also told me to use a pinch of sugar which gets the yeast going. I don’t argue with Italian cooks, especially her. She’s ace.
2 Teaspoons Olive Oil
Optional – might be worth trying without this to start with and then add it on the second batch so you get an idea on how it changes your dough’s consistency and flavour. Don’t use a strong extra virgin oil, just a mild one – I use the Filippo Berio mild.
That’s the ingredients for the dough, you’ll need a good tomato sauce for your pizza.