Today is Pizza Day. There are food holidays pretty much every day, but this is certainly one I can celebrate. I like pizza. I even like making my own. Although lately my efforts have started to make me question this.
I have been trying to go for a thinner crust. But it’s a tough one to figure out. You look online and they start getting into hydration. The ratio of flour to water. There’s even a formula for hydration of dough. No one told me there would be math.
Instead, I have been just looking for recipes that will tell me what to do. There has to be an easier way to make a thin, crispy pizza crust then spending an hour with a calculator and a pencil, or filling a blackboard with an equation that would likely stump Albert Einstein.
As near as I can figure, a little extra water will make for a crispier crust and if you want a thin crust, roll out out so you can almost read through it.
I have a pretty decent dough recipe, which actually is for pizza caccia nanza, a type of Italian flatbread. Although if you spread it by hand, it does tend to get pretty think. Since I tend to favour the toppings over the crust, I like a thinner crust. The problem seems to be the thinner you make the crust, the fewer toppings you can pile on top. There is a balance between toppings and crust.
This is probably a physics thing, which would, again, mean more math to work out the perfect crust to topping ratio. But I don’t really want to do math. I want to eat pizza. So my preferred method is experimentation.
But a lot of it seems to come down to how thin you spread the crust in the first place. If you roll it out really thin, you should get a thinner crust. Or you could go with higher sides and a much thicker crust and make a Chicago style deep dish pizza. That allows for a lot more toppings, so there is an advantage. But the thicker crust means you’re filling up on bread.
Although I will say, in spite of my attempts to get the crust thinner, I have yet to reach the point of collapse with my toppings.
And when it comes to toppings, I tend to be pretty open minded. I’ve even tried anchovies a time or two. Although they don’t seem to be something you can find very often around here. I can even tolerate pineapple. If I have to. And my wife likes tomatoes, which I think are redundant. There are tomatoes in the sauce, so adding tomatoes is like double tomatoes.
Still, I’ve never met a pizza I didn’t like. So my experiments will continue. Without the math.
