We were very inspired by Heston Blumenthal's pizza and following his recipe we really liked some of the techniques and tips. In particular, we were dazzled by the sauce and found the dough handling techniques, especially when shaping your pizza, extremely useful. We integrated some of these techniques into our own pizza with nice results.
Our basic dough recipe sat in the fridge for three days and had two risings. We used Blumenthal's technique of adding something sweet (we want to try maple syrup) to our water and then mixed it with our flour only. After letting our dough rest for an hour we added the instant yeast and salt. We used Blumenthal's sauce, buffalo mozzarella, prosciutto, basil, arugula and parmesan.
This weekend we made Heston Blumenthal's pizza and the results were excellent.
This pizza is a real winner but is very time consuming with a lot of prep work.
You make a pre-ferment for you dough the day before. You mix flour, honey (one of our substitutions) and water and let it rest for an hour before adding the dry instant yeast and salt. The pre-ferment gets added to your fresh dough the next day after sitting in your fridge. Any time you make pizza dough it will taste better if it has sat in your refrigerator for a day or two.
Pre-fermented dough
The sauce is a real winner, we will use this again, and gets made in two parts. The first part uses seasoned (salt, pepper, sugar fresh herbs) oven dried tomatoes. The second is a salty and tangy tomato sauce, almost a paste) that is partially made in the pressure cooker. The two flavor combinations and consistency of the sauce make for great flavor and crust that is not soggy. We kept the olive oil that we covered our tomatoes with the day before because it was infused with flavor.
Oven dried tomatoes
Tomato sauce: stems are put in after to enhance flavor
The finished pizza is very tasty because of the sauce and the dough is really puffy and fluffy.
This blog has looked at a lot of bacon cheeseburgers so when we heard that Delissio was making a bacon cheeseburger pizza we thought that it was only fitting to review this product in celebration of Super Bowl weekend.
Construction:
The word product is exactly what this is, true it is food that can be consumed, but judging from the taste the edible part was really an afterthought. Think about it, the Delissio pizza has its own catch phrase, “it’s not delivery, it’s Delissio.” As the ads often emphasize, Delissio does something amazing because it is a rising crust pizza. If you think about it dough that rises is not exactly a novelty when making bread. Remember making volcanos at home with baking soda and vinegar? The Delissio pizza uses a similar process, as revealed in the ingredient list, with the use of sodium bicarbonate. When heated this substance creates carbon dioxide, the same as yeast, and causes dough to rise. I am not sure but judging with how I felt magic this process seems to continue as the Delissio crust sits in your stomach. Remember the volcano?
When you look at the ads for the Delissio bacon cheeseburger pizza you notice that it uses targeted marketing, because men love these two items.
The Delissio websitewelcomes you with more focused marketing and “a meal your family will love you for.” Even more demographics are covered as we also find “Girls night in. Crispy flatbread pizza. Worthy of your best girls.” The artwork is carefully chosen to look like Sex in the City complete with mirror disco ball crowning the “i” in “girls.” When you click on the picture of the two kitchen divas you are taken to the Girls Night In Facebook page where over 10,000 people sign their seal of approval by “liking this.” In-terms of the other ingredients used in the Dellissio formula we will get into it with the tasting.
The Verdict:
When finished the pizza looks like something that you might get from Dominos. The sauce tastes like ketchup and the overwhelming flavor is the famous rising crust that is very puffy, salty and extremely dry. The bottom part of the crust seems crumbly almost like a graham cracker crust or even tea biscuits. The more we eat and review mass produced food the more we realize that the product overwhelms the actual flavors. In this case the whole bacon cheeseburger thing is lost. Yes, your mind sees pizza because it is round, with something that resembles tomato sauce and cheese. Do you think bacon or cheeseburger? No, this is just an illusion and these elements are only part of the marketing. There is bacon, I even tasted a piece in one bite but one bite only. The hamburger meat consists of tiny meatballs that offer more illusion of food and only offer a rubbery texture.
Recommendation:
Melt cheese on some nice bread in your toaster oven. Be daring, after melting the cheese add chopped or sliced tomato. Top with some prosciutto and finish the whole thing off with arugula . It might not be delivery but drop down on your knees and thank the stars that it is not Delissio. The makers of Delissio have taken two food items and put them together for the sake of marketing. We thought it was funny that when looking at the Delissio ads on YouTube we were then directed to Epic Meal Time that is yet another example of combining ingredients just for the sake of grabbing people’s attention. Judging by the results it seems to be working.
We decided to make this pie because we tried a Puck Pizza at The MGM Grand Casino in Las Vegas. To be honest we were expecting hype and no substance from a Wolfgang Puck signature restaurant but we really surprised at how good the pizza was. In fact, it was one of the best pizzas we ever tasted. Our homemade Puck pizza was also really good, a great combination of ingredients and flavors so try this recipe. Next time we wlll cut our toppings a little thicker.
Puck at home
Following Puck’s recipe we a learned a new trick so we decided to share with you some of our pizza making tips.
Our favorite cookbook is Gennaro Contaldo’s, Passione. We follow his recipe for pizza dough but skimp on the flower and add some semolina to the dry mixture instead. We sometimes add some butter to the dry mixture, cubes that we work into the flour, a bit like making pastry dough. Use rapid rise yeast, it saves time and does not seem to make a difference with-regards to the flavor. We also add a bit of brown sugar to our dry mixt because it makes the yeast happy. We have also read that if you let your dough sit in your refrigerator for 24 hours the results and flavor will be better and we have found this to be true.
Secrets to making a crisp pizza crust are with your sauce and the use of a pizza stone. We drain the liquid from our can of tomatoes. Squash the tomatoes with your hands in a colander, to get rid of all the liquid and use the solid tomatoes on your pizza. The liquid can be used for another dish and makes a great braising liquid. If you use too much liquid your crust will be soggy, you need to use something thick. The Wolfgang Puck Pizza does not use a sauce but thin slices from plum tomatoes. This technique worked really well and we will use it again.
When choosing your can of tomatoes check the sodium content. You would not believe how much salt are in some cans of tomatoes.
The second tip to crispy crust is to use a pizza stone in your oven. You can usually find pizza stones in kitchen liquidation stores and sale racks, I guess people do not make that much pizza at home or have not discovered how well they work. You preheat the stone in your oven and when we first started using a stone we realized there was a problem. How do you get the pizza onto the stone? Think about it, a floppy piece of dough covered in toppings. How do you lift this onto your stone? I did see one of our Italian friends, who was making pizza for the first time, flip her pizzas like a Frisbee onto a piece of marble into her oven. She was using leftover marble tiles from her kitchen floor and technique must have been genetic and we have come up with a less dangerous solution. Make your pizza on parchment paper. Use enough paper so you can lift your pizza, a bit like a hammock. on the sides. You can then just place the paper and pizza on your stone. If you have one of those metal pizza pans (see photo below) you can put the paper and pizza in that to carry your pizza to the oven. You can use the parchment paper to slide your pizza off the metal pan and onto your stone. The parchment paper also makes a great way to slide your pizza off of the pizza stone when it has finished cooking.
Homemade masterpiece: Pizza with pork belly, prosciutto and arugula.
This pizza was inspired by one of the pies from Geppetto Pizza in Montreal.
Send us or post pictures of of your favorite pizzas whether homemade or from a restaurant and be sure to include some of your pizza cooking tips.
