Eat Fresh Live Well

Normally I make the dough but some friends have been telling me about this awesome garlic and herb pizza dough at Trader Joe's. So I thought I would take them up on it and post about it to share the success.

Baking Stone vs Baking Steel

The new baking steel I got has far surpassed my expectations from every baking stone I have used. I believe that the banking steel is so much better because of the ability to retain the heat from a home oven. When you go to a professional wood fired pizzeria you would see that they run the wood-fired dome oven between 600 & 800 degrees. This is much hotter than the temperature of our home oven of 450-500 degrees. When your home oven is cold and you put the baking steel or baking stone in the oven the temperature will take additional time to reach optimum temperature. When your oven reaches temp keep waiting for the stone or steel to reach temp.

Example: the oven could have reached a temp of 500 while the stone/steel is only 300 resulting in a far less than awesome outcome.

If you do not have a baking stone or steel then you can use a cookie sheet and not have to worried about transferring the dough loaded with toppings. The downside of using something like a cookie sheet is you will not get the nice chewy crisp crust. The added head from the steel will also provide a much better oven spring.

Pizza Peel vs Parchment Paper

I have found that for a novice pizza maker that you can have more success with the ease of use of parchment paper making the transfer onto the oven much simpler. I have had the dough stick to the pizza peel and then reall mess-up the toppings.

Making extra for leftovers

When I do find the time to make some pizzas it is nice to make extra because is makes good lunches for the next two to three days. I would not store it much longer that that.

Fun Fact

Over 5 billion pizzas are sold worldwide each year. Eat up, thats a boat load of pizza!!!!