ThermoBlog by Martin Earl
While there is much to commend the classic American pizzeria-style, delivered-in-a box pizza, it will almost always fall short of a Neapolitan-style pizza. When Raffaele Esposito created the Margherita pizza in Naples back in the mid-1800’s and launched the popularity of pizza, he used a woodfired brick oven that had enough heat to lightly char the chewy crusty, giving it a flame-kissed flavor that was as important as any toppings.
But I don’t have a brick pizza oven, and, statistically speaking, neither do you! So, how are you to get a crisp-char crust on your favorite homemade pie? The grill! Opinions vary, but most people will agree that an “authentic†pizza oven must be in the range of 600–900°F (343–482°C), and your house oven just can’t hit that temperature. And anyways, in the summertime, who wants it to!
By grilling your pizza, you can achieve the kind of temperatures you need for maximum flavor development while also sparing your household a roasting. But where to begin? What temperatures do you need to know to become a real pizzaolo? Read on to find out!
Contents:
How to make pizza dough
Critical temps
Grill setup for grilled pizza
Pizza stone grilling method
Grilling pizza on the grate
Topping tips for pizza
Pizza dough recipe, grilled pizza recipe
How to make pizza doughThe best pizza doughs are made with bread flour. Bread flour has a higher protein (gluten) content and can, therefore, create a crust that is chewier and more pliable. Chewy crusty is one of the most sought-after characteristics of a pizza crust, and pliability is necessary if you want to fold a slice in half without it crumbling like a biscuit. Use a good quality bread four for your pizza dough.
Note: Some people will tell you to use only Italian Tipo-00 flour for your pizza. This is good advice, except that it doesn’t necessarily refer to high-protein flour. Tipo-00 refers to the largest granule size of the flour, not its protein content. You can find pastry AP of this fineness, if you look, and they could even be pastry flour. Go ahead and use Tipo-00 if you can find/afford it, but make sure it’s high-protein flour for pizza our pasta.
After flour selection, the rest of the ingredients for pizza dough are simple: water, yeast, a little sugar if you like, salt, and a nice helping of good olive oil. There is no mystery to the ingredients. It’s all in how you put them together.
There are two important factors that will affect the outcome of your dough:
temperature and
kneading.
Critical temperatures for pizza dough, also kneadingThe temperature of the water that you add to the dough is of critical importance to the success of your pizza.
More:
https://blog.thermoworks.com/bread/how-to-grill-pizza-a-thermal-explanation-2/
