I've been learning stuff.

Do you all remember Still Trailing/Trailrunner/c's recent pizza thread?

https://www.gardenweb.com/discussions/6554730/it-s-friday-that-means-pizza#n=10

I asked her for details because it sounded so different from my own kind of pizza recipe, and she was kind enough to provide it. Not that I followed exactly or anything, but I learned a lot from trying it. Of course, I wanted to read the thread again, but couldn't find it. CF is invisible to both the native search engine and even moreso Google, but I copied a long quote from what I had saved, and the Houzz search engine found it (Google did not).

My own pizza recipe is made with real whole wheat and emendations, baked on a clay "pizza stone" (though I usually use a thin pizza pan on the stone for convenience and it comes out almost as well), and has twee toppings like broccolini and red onion with red pepper flakes (my favorite). It's a big bother. Not really worth making one small pizza's worth, but the standard batch of 4 is okay after the first day fermenting in the fridge, perfect on day two, goodish on day three, and kind of sad though not actually bad on day four.

C's is a white pizza made with half bread flour and half semolina and ultra high hydration, with sourdough starter. I'm really bad at ultra high hydration--in breads they most often deflate on me even with gluten enhancements--but pizza is supposed to be flat. :D It's also par-baked and freezable which sounded attractive. And working through it was equally instructive as reading the recipe.

So...No bread plus some time--go for it. I need to feed the starters anyway, so made the 100% hydration starter for the pizza from the freshly fed discard, including the whole wheat, and put it in the fridge overnight, then just weighed out the amount required. I mixed up the dough late on Friday (C says it's good in the fridge for up to 2 days and I came in a bit under that). I should have put it in the mixer, but the instructions just said stir everything together. I used my Danish dough whisk. It worked, but it was a lot to get through. But I didn't use her flour, which can make a much bigger difference than you'd think.

I used whatever semolina was in the flour drawer, and a combination of pizza and bread flour (all high protein) to use up some lingering small amounts (not rancid at all, but perhaps too old). I also added the optional spoonful of ADY, not knowing how my started would do on its own. When I did the stretch and folds, the dough had no gluten development and no stretch, it just broke instread of stretching. Whatever. That's one reason for the longer ferment--gluten will form. Another lesson was toasting diastatic malt to get it non-. I was out of non-diastatic (i.e., regular) malt, because it goes weird pretty fast, so I did the toasting thing. It's still pretty sweet, but seems to have worked.

I was tired and divided the dough into two containers because I didn't have fridge room for any of my dough buckets (but didn't want to wait--though if I'd had a chance to roast the giant beets, etc., I'd have had room). I was too tired, even to weigh the dough, and just kind of eyeballed halves. You can see in the picture that they're not even, but I don't care about exact sizes at this point.

So, today, I started with the smaller part and went astray again. Butter would probably have released better, but I use oil for regular bread and it works fine. For this, I used the newfangled mist spray Avocado oil (good for the high heat. I did finger press the dough as directed, and was impressed with how much it didn't deflate, considering how brittle it had started out. I used a high sided 2/3 sheet pan, not knowing how high it would rise. Not that much, but it filled the corners and levelled out on the surface from rather lunar, inc. craters.

The baking was interesting. I left it in extra until there was just a bit of color. It was very wet, still, and kind of gooky. Cooked! But too wet, and the bottom was all big holes. I left it upside down to dry some.

The second batch was divided into a round on a pizza pan and a rectangle in a quarter sheet pan. Also oiled. I wanted to see what would happen. Neither slid away goopily, like some of those high hydration breads will if you leave them to their own. Both of these rose and spread, but didn't goosh. They weren't quite as wet as the one with the closed sides, but I still put them upside down, holes up, to dry some.

So pizza. There would be dinner! And "bread". I know how to fake a sauce with tomato paste, etc., but thought this was a great opportunity to use a jar of marina from the pantry. Spread thoroughly on the "bottom" bubble side. Amended with dried marjoram, "Italian seasoning", granulated garlic and crushed red pepper flakes, plus a few grinds of black pepper. Topped with rough chopped onion, sliced sandwich provolone, goodly sprinkle of pecorino romano, chorizo flavored pepperoni and a little more Italian herbs for decoration. Broiled.

Really easy to cut (cutting between the pepperoni helped). Very tasty. The crust is a little delicate and would break if a large piece were lifted, but I cut them two into two pepperoni wands, which worked. It was good! No complaints. I did freeze the two small ones, untopped. In the future, I could be more careful about the flour, etc., or adapt the recipe more to fit what I have, but I don't really feel compelled to do iterations. I've learned a lot from the whole process, which was the point, and did better than previously working with such high hydration. So, success! And I have a pizza for the crowds strategy in my pocket!

Thank-you, c!