What Noisy Cats Are We

If you know me, then it is no secret that I have been obsessed with finding a good pizza recipe for a long time now.  Looking at the sidebar of this blog, you can see my Delicious bookmarks, with many involving the dish.  I’m going to spend some more time documenting my experiments here.

When I was a kid in high school, my first ‘real’ job was at La Paloma Restaurant, in Alden, NY.  The owners, Mr. DiChristina and his wife and their son Frank made some of the great American Italian pizza/sub shop food as well as other dishes for their sit down restaurant.  I started out as a dish washer, but did other jobs as well as time went on (but remaining a dish washer until I left the job when I went to college).  Honestly, I cannot recall a better job or one that I enjoyed as much.  Maybe it’s nastalgia for youth, and maybe it was the lack of major decision making, but that place gave me a taste of the restaurant business that has never left me.  Furthermore, it made me fall in love with their pizza.

While working on my own recipe recently, I have been obsessed with oven temperature.  True Neopolitan pizza is cooked at 700-800 degrees Farenheit and a home oven simply cannot achieve that mark.  I honestly don’t remember what the oven at La Palmoa was set at – it was just  a gas oven and their pizza was a much fluffier type than Neopolitan.

My goal last night was to work on the crust in my existing oven with no modifications.  I got some store bought dough just to make it simple (plus, it was an impulsive decision and I did not have any other dough available at home).  I remembered that at La Palmoa, pizzas were prepared on a pizza pan, and put into the oven that way.  Then, after a few minutes, the pizzas were removed from the pan while in-oven and moved directly on to the oven surface.  (At least, I think that was what they did – this was ~15 years ago!).  I tried something like that last night and got some great results.  Crispy bottom and crust, yet still moist (but cooked) inside.  The stuff I made last night was wicked thin, but I’ll try some thicker pizzas soon once I have better dough.  Here’s a quick synopsis of what I did:

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Sat. night’s pizza testing:

- oven to 450

- trader joe’s dough stretched out of the bag – half a bag

- takes up 3/4 cookie sheet

- my sauce, bagged mozarella, 4 chz mexican, pepperoni, green pepp, onion

- 6-7 min in middle of oven on pan

- remove from pan with peel

- ~5min directly on rack

- remove from oven with peel, set on cooling rack for 2min, remove from cooling rack, slice, serve

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I made a second, cheese topping only pizza for Gwen as well and she really enjoyed the crispiness of the crust that was achieved by removing the pan mid-bake.  Normally, I use a pizza stone (for a different kind of pizza), but wanted to try this idea last night.  I’m very pleased with the results.