TrickyDick
New member
Hey folks!
Been hanging out here for about a year or so.
As some might already know, I joined while researching Grill options for a summer kitchen addition I was doing. The addition included a Wood Fired Pizza Oven as well, and initially was slated for a propane grill. I discovered there were built-in grill style Pellet smokers and opted for the newly released MAK version instead of a propane grill. I am so glad that I did!
During the same time frame, I was also learning from scratch, how to make pizza. WOW, what a lot there is to know! I thought I had a pretty good handle on things, but turns out I was wrong. Had some initial success, with some minor stumbling blocks, then realized that my results were very inconsistent. Frustrated but not discouraged, I turned to the internet. What I found was a wonderful resource for all things pizza!
As it turns out, I was going about things wrong in several small, and few large areas.
I ended up doing a trial cook tonight with what I had learned in the last month, and cooked on a round pizza stone on the MAK.
As an experiment, I cooked up one pizza late tonight (Takes 24 hours + 3-4 hours before dough is ready). I mixed up the dough last night, and tried to shortcut this time frame, but physics would not bend to my will. I was aiming for a single 16" pie. The dough I thought I would just throw away but wanted to see if the recipe and instructions I had learned would be successful and panned to just try to shape the pie, not believing that it would turn out, based upon past failures. Well... as it turns out, the dough behaved GREAT! so I decided to cook it! Unfortunately, I had to wait for the grill to go from 0 to 550 degrees! During this time, the dough had slackened, and when formed for final pie was way too large. Not to mention, I think my pizza stone is on the small side of 14" and the size I was shooting for was 16". However, I wanted to try a 16" pizza "skin" to see how the dough handled - plus I'm not really great at making the pizzas yet.
So.. what did I learn? Well for one thing, pizza dough requires a very accurate digital scale and way to measure ingredients in a baker's % format in order to get consistent results for the average guy like me. Previous attempts were inaccurately measured and that likely is why they were inconsistent. Fortunately these scales are pretty cheap nowadays, though I needed two to achieve the results ( one has a limit of 1000 grams and precise to the 0.1gram measurement which is good for things like salt, yeast, sugar, and other smaller percentage items. A larger scale to handle the water and yeast in 1 gram precise accuracy is also needed, unless you've got one scale to do it all.) I bought my scales for $20 each roughly.
carrying on with this experiment, the grill was hot, the dough was about 18" when I formed into a circle on the pizza Piel or peel or whatever. I found the cheese a bit old and hard to crumble and scant sauce on hand with minimal pepperoni (thanks to my kids, the pepperoni bandits!). Anyways, I dressed the pizza and when I placed on the stone, most of the toppings slid off or to one side, leaving most of the pie as a very thin thin scanty sauce & cheese topped pie. Some stuff burned or scorched as it overhung the edges of the stone or simply slid off while trying to launch the pizza off the peel.. Anyway, After about 2-3 minutes, I pulled it out and onto a cutting board.
The pizza was VERY thin. Too thin really - but that was because I formed the dough about an hour before the grill was ready, and had to re-stretch after it relaxed for an hour. When I cut into slices, it was incredibly crusty and sliced easily into well formed pieces. The mis-shapen pie was too ugly to photograph! Most all the cheese and pepperoni had slid to one slice (Yep, I ate that one and it was delicious!) The other slices were like plain cheese pizza. My wife and I gobbled up the whole thing at 10 PM because we could NOT STOP EATING IT!
Well, after months of trials and tribulations, I recommend any fellow pellet cookers wanting to make pizza to check out another internet site. There is an easy to follow spreadsheet style recipe editor for making a pizza dough formula, called the pizza dough calculator. You enter parameters like number of dough balls, size of the pizza, thickness of the pizza (in a strange thickness factor), and also some things like % oil or sugar if desired, though optional. As I said, I mixed up enough for one ball of dough and the results were spectacular! I used High Gluten Commercial Dough (All Trumps) but I think King Arthur's Sir Lancelot or even their regular blue bag Bread Flour might provide acceptable results without the hassle of finding the commercial sized bags.
Anyways, I am still learning about this all, but was sooo excited about the results tonight (even though flawed by my technique/laziness) that I just had to share with the rest of ya'll!
Here is a link to the "dough calculator" which I used (TF 0.8, 1% salt, sugar, oil (don't use EVOO, just light OO, 0.5% yeast)
Lehmann Pizza Dough Calculator
There is TONS more information on the forums there. This is for NY style pizza, which for me, is what I think of when I think great pizza.
Hope you all enjoy as much s I did. All that's left are a few tiny scraps of crust that fell off the sides of the pizza stone....
TD
Been hanging out here for about a year or so.
As some might already know, I joined while researching Grill options for a summer kitchen addition I was doing. The addition included a Wood Fired Pizza Oven as well, and initially was slated for a propane grill. I discovered there were built-in grill style Pellet smokers and opted for the newly released MAK version instead of a propane grill. I am so glad that I did!
During the same time frame, I was also learning from scratch, how to make pizza. WOW, what a lot there is to know! I thought I had a pretty good handle on things, but turns out I was wrong. Had some initial success, with some minor stumbling blocks, then realized that my results were very inconsistent. Frustrated but not discouraged, I turned to the internet. What I found was a wonderful resource for all things pizza!
As it turns out, I was going about things wrong in several small, and few large areas.
I ended up doing a trial cook tonight with what I had learned in the last month, and cooked on a round pizza stone on the MAK.
As an experiment, I cooked up one pizza late tonight (Takes 24 hours + 3-4 hours before dough is ready). I mixed up the dough last night, and tried to shortcut this time frame, but physics would not bend to my will. I was aiming for a single 16" pie. The dough I thought I would just throw away but wanted to see if the recipe and instructions I had learned would be successful and panned to just try to shape the pie, not believing that it would turn out, based upon past failures. Well... as it turns out, the dough behaved GREAT! so I decided to cook it! Unfortunately, I had to wait for the grill to go from 0 to 550 degrees! During this time, the dough had slackened, and when formed for final pie was way too large. Not to mention, I think my pizza stone is on the small side of 14" and the size I was shooting for was 16". However, I wanted to try a 16" pizza "skin" to see how the dough handled - plus I'm not really great at making the pizzas yet.
So.. what did I learn? Well for one thing, pizza dough requires a very accurate digital scale and way to measure ingredients in a baker's % format in order to get consistent results for the average guy like me. Previous attempts were inaccurately measured and that likely is why they were inconsistent. Fortunately these scales are pretty cheap nowadays, though I needed two to achieve the results ( one has a limit of 1000 grams and precise to the 0.1gram measurement which is good for things like salt, yeast, sugar, and other smaller percentage items. A larger scale to handle the water and yeast in 1 gram precise accuracy is also needed, unless you've got one scale to do it all.) I bought my scales for $20 each roughly.
carrying on with this experiment, the grill was hot, the dough was about 18" when I formed into a circle on the pizza Piel or peel or whatever. I found the cheese a bit old and hard to crumble and scant sauce on hand with minimal pepperoni (thanks to my kids, the pepperoni bandits!). Anyways, I dressed the pizza and when I placed on the stone, most of the toppings slid off or to one side, leaving most of the pie as a very thin thin scanty sauce & cheese topped pie. Some stuff burned or scorched as it overhung the edges of the stone or simply slid off while trying to launch the pizza off the peel.. Anyway, After about 2-3 minutes, I pulled it out and onto a cutting board.
The pizza was VERY thin. Too thin really - but that was because I formed the dough about an hour before the grill was ready, and had to re-stretch after it relaxed for an hour. When I cut into slices, it was incredibly crusty and sliced easily into well formed pieces. The mis-shapen pie was too ugly to photograph! Most all the cheese and pepperoni had slid to one slice (Yep, I ate that one and it was delicious!) The other slices were like plain cheese pizza. My wife and I gobbled up the whole thing at 10 PM because we could NOT STOP EATING IT!
Well, after months of trials and tribulations, I recommend any fellow pellet cookers wanting to make pizza to check out another internet site. There is an easy to follow spreadsheet style recipe editor for making a pizza dough formula, called the pizza dough calculator. You enter parameters like number of dough balls, size of the pizza, thickness of the pizza (in a strange thickness factor), and also some things like % oil or sugar if desired, though optional. As I said, I mixed up enough for one ball of dough and the results were spectacular! I used High Gluten Commercial Dough (All Trumps) but I think King Arthur's Sir Lancelot or even their regular blue bag Bread Flour might provide acceptable results without the hassle of finding the commercial sized bags.
Anyways, I am still learning about this all, but was sooo excited about the results tonight (even though flawed by my technique/laziness) that I just had to share with the rest of ya'll!
Here is a link to the "dough calculator" which I used (TF 0.8, 1% salt, sugar, oil (don't use EVOO, just light OO, 0.5% yeast)
Lehmann Pizza Dough Calculator
There is TONS more information on the forums there. This is for NY style pizza, which for me, is what I think of when I think great pizza.
Hope you all enjoy as much s I did. All that's left are a few tiny scraps of crust that fell off the sides of the pizza stone....
TD
