Nothing like a cheap cell phone camera to make delicious pizza look totally unappetizing! Oh well, too late now…
I make a mean pizza, a claim many have doubted until they tasted it, but would add that good pizza isn’t that hard to make so it’s not like it’s that big a claim to make. As with many things the secret is balancing the ingredients and giving yourself time to do it properly. And there you have it, time, the one thing you usually don’t have enough of. With pizza the most important factor is making a good crust, doesn’t take much: water, flour, olive oil, salt and yeast, plus eventually a small pinch of sugar to help start the yeast. And then the hard part: let it raise an hour or so, punch it down, let it raise again; all in all a three hours is a good reference.
Which is why I was wondering if I could freeze pizza dough, which after search the web a bit seemed possible, at least for some. So Monday I made about a kilo of dough, let it raise about 2 hours, divided into 4 balls, stuck 3 in the freezer made pizza with the fourth… Hence the picture.
Why two hours? Figured that if it didn’t raise after being frozen at least it will have already risen that much. In a couple of weeks I plan to defrost a ball in the fridge overnight and then at room temperature for the afternoon. But that will depend on how frozen it still is in the morning.
If you’ve already done this feel free to leave a message, in any case I’ll update this post to say how it went.
Oh, and if you want to compare pizza recipes how about a comment…
Updated Feb. 24th: This has worked well. I’ve made three batches over the winter and have fine tuned it: Move a ball (or two) of frozen crust from the freezer to the fridge the evening before and let it defrost over night, then it depends on the temperature in your house. Mine is pretty chilly in the winter so a few hours before making the pizza I kneed it quickly and stick it in a bowl covered with a wet cloth into the sightly heated oven to get the yeast active again. Not too hot or you might kill it! Otherwise in the summer I figure it will take a good part of the afternoon to get to room temperature. (…no I don’t live in Florida)