Pizza dough: olive oil or not?

Most recipes for pizza dough include olive oil (or some other oil) and sugar. And many recipes for bread also include oil and sugar, usually unnecessarily, leading many people to think they are some kind of magical ingredients without which the bread will not rise / be edible / too few holes / too many holes, etc!

The first thing that strikes a novice on a good bread course is the ingredient list…

• Flour
• Water
• Yeast
• Salt

The instructor will usually show the students the ingredients list from a packet of commercial white bread, the four main ingredients being supplemented by a host of others designed to allow the Chorleywood process to do its funky thing. After a day of bread making you soon find out that the four main ingredients will do almost anything you want. Sugar can help develop the crust a little, as can steam in the oven. Oil can help control texture by shortening the gluten strands, and can make the bread easier to cut for those with weak arms (!). But it can also contribute to the flavour and keeping time, so it shouldn’t be ruled out without some research, experimentation and consideration.

However, pizza dough isn’t being used to make conventional bread, so maybe the same rules don’t apply? I asked a friend who works in northern Italy if she knew what the Italians did. She spoke to the local Piazzaiolo, and sent this reply to me:

They ALWAYS use olive oil in the pastry, but here “North” it depends on the taste, it’s not a main ingredient however, (but in the South it is), and he still puts in a very small quantity. He tells me that important thing is  you should make sure the yeast is fresh and melt it down “just before” you add it to the pastry and not earlier, it should rise inside the flour.

A quick sampling of internet recipes suggests most people use oil and sugar. The first Google result for ‘pizza dough’ is from Jamie Oliver’s site and includes oil and sugar, plus luke-warm water. This will make fantastic pizzas quite quickly. But a search on the Forno Bravo site reveals almost identical steps but without oil or sugar.

Last week we made pizzas without oil or sugar – excellent results.

Yesterday we made the dough with 60% water and 5% olive oil (baker’s percentages) plus a little brown sugar. Also excellent results.

My feeling at the moment is that because most people making pizza dough think oil and sugar is necessary then most newcomers pick this up and propagate the myth. That isn’t to say that you shouldn’t add oil and/or sugar. But there’s nothing compelling I can find to suggest any particular advantages. Especially since I drizzle oil on the topping before it goes into the oven, plus a tablespoon of sugar. (Kidding about the sugar!)

It would be cool to make two batches of dough next time we fire up the oven and see if we can do a blind or double blind test to see if anyone can spot anything between them. Regardless of the results we still get to make and eat more pizza, so the test is really coincidental!

Poolish, sloppy dough and bread rolls

On Saturday I made some fantastic bread rolls. Since I prefer the characteristics of bread made from wet (72% hydration) dough I use some of the techniques I learnt at one of Richard Bertinet’s bread courses. Next time I’m going to put a video on, but for now here’s what I did:

First I made a poolish – the French term for a pre-ferment or sponge.

• 500g Shipton Mill white flour (the flour from these guys is awesome)
• 720g cold water
• 10g fresh yeast

The water was cold to help retard the fermentation a little, and I used half the amount of yeast I’d normally use for a 1kg flour batch because the long fermentation and pre-ferment just don’t need tat amount of yeast.

This was all mixed for a minute and left to rest for 5-6 hours after which is was a beautiful bubbly mass of elastic goo – longer would have been even better!

Then I added the other bits:

• 500g white flour
• 20g salt

So the final mix in baker’s percentage terms is:

• Flour 100%
• Water 72%
• Salt 2%
• Yeast 1%

This was mixed and then ‘kneaded’. You can’t really knead a 72% hydration dough in the conventional way – i.e. rolling it around on a surface. The minimum you need is to stretch the dough and encourage a bit of gluten formation and structure, but the Bertinet style also tries to mimic the action used in some French dough mixers that lift the dough as well as mixing it. This involves lifting the dough and throwing it, then folding it over on itself a little. The stretching comes from the repeated lifting and throwing – when throwing only part of the dough is thrown while the other part remains in your hands. The folding may help get a little air trapped in the dough and make even more spongy!

After 5 minutes of kneading it was then left in a not-to-warm place for 2-3 hours. Then the bread rolls were formed, some dunked in mixed seeds, and these were left for another hour or so. Finally they were all cooked for around 12 minutes on a pizza stone.

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Pizza, sourdough bread and soup

Yesterday was another great success for the oven. Great weather, excellent friends (who’ve made their own cob oven), pizza for lunch, then sourdough bread and soup for tea, all cooked outside – I could get used to this!

Last Tuesday I mixed up a new rye starter (25g rye, 50g water), and then on each successive day I added the same again. The bowl was covered but left hanging around in the kitchen. On Saturday I added 100g rye and 200g water to bulk it up a bit, and then on Sunday morning mixed up my bread:

300g Rye starter, containing 100g rye and 200g water
200g Wholemeal
700g White
520g Water
20g Salt

This gave me 1kg of flour and 72% hydration – nice and sloppy and good for a slow ferment. It probably had around 6 hours before it was shaped, and was then left to rise for a couple more hours in a proving basket. It was cooked in a pre-heated cloche – we have La Cloche from here – for about 40 minutes, then had another 10-15 minutes with the lid off. The temperature started around 250 and was just below 200 by the time we’d finished. It had that fantastic sourdough taste to it, which just served to remind me how dull ordinary bread is without butter and other toppings.

Later on Toni mixed up a quick Minestrone soup and cooked it in the oven – soup in a pizza oven! – and we ended the day watching episode of Ashes to Ashes with what may have been the best sourdough bread and Minestrone soup ever made in a pizza oven in Droitwich on a Sunday evening 🙂

(For the pizza dough we just used ’00’ flour with 65% water, 2% salt and 1% yeast instead of the normal 2%, and didn’t use any oil. Need to do more research and testing to figure out what’s best for thin crust wood-fired pizzas, but yesterday’s were’t at all bad!)

Buon appetito!

Italian hot pot and Focaccia

Yesterday we decided to try the wood-fired oven for baking rather than pizza making. My personal goal is to master it for baking bread, but I think I have some insulation issues to address first. So we decided to make an Italian-inspired beef stew, originally inspired by the Italian (maybe) man from Papson’s Deli in Worcester. When I told him about my oven he started reminiscing and telling me about his childhood, telling me about a beef stew dish his mother used to make that was finished by adding pasta rice (also known as Orzo), something I’d never seen or heard of. So a couple of days ago I had a look at a neat blog post on an Italian beef stew (Stracotto di Manzo in Italian) and decided on making something similar. I also decided to try baking some more bread in the oven for a bit of practise, Focaccia being the obvious choice.

Our timings for the day were:

• 12:00 (mid day) start up the fire.
• 15:00 no more logs.
• 15:45 door shut, not many glowing embers so not much smoke.
• 16:30 focaccia in (oven around 250)
• 16:45 focaccia out (oven around 210)
• 16:45 beef stew in
• 20:00 orzo added to beef stew, focaccia back in to warm up (mistake!)
• 20:20 stew out (oven around 100)

The focaccia was ok but not great, for two reasons. First I should have used olive oil in the dough and didn’t since I never add any fat to any of the breads I make; but I should have done for this one! And secondly we dried it out a little when we warmed it up – it should have been cooked to serve fresh. (Possibly a third reason is we didn’t try to steam the oven which I always do with the house electric oven). But it wasn’t bad and went down a treat with the stew (and also the risotto that Toni made for all the veggies!). My score, 5 out of 10.

The stew was awesome! 8 out of 10! It was roughly as follows:

• 1.5kg stewing steak, seasoned and browned in olive oil, all placed in metal baking tray.
• 4 onions, sliced.
• 3/4 Claret (we forgot to buy Italian – sorry!)
• Big handfuls of freshly picked and chopped oregano, rosemary and thyme.
• Ground black pepper
• 0.5L beef stock
• Two tins of chopped tomatoes.
• Cover with foil, sit for a while.

If we’d added the whole bottle of wine, and used Italian instead of French, tweaked the seasoning slightly, and possibly a small amount of celery and/or other veg, this could have got 9/10! But for our first stew in the outdoor oven, and given it was made up by a vegetarian (!), it was awesome.

So we have a way to go before the oven will be able to cook bread in the morning after cooking pizza the night before. I think we need to get a load of insulation on the underneath of the base and also thicken up the door. Certainly the outside of the dome never gets very hot meaning the insulation is working a treat even when the inside is 400C or more.

The focaccia before going in:

 

The cooked focaccia:

 

The stew, after it had served up about 8 portions!

 

Until next time, chow!