Secret Technique🔗

Having been making on average two pizzas every week for over three years, I'm fairly confident with our workflow, from dough making to pizza rolling. I wouldn't claim our implementation anywhere close to experts. Especially given that many real pizza gurus out there dedicate their entire career and life to this craft (check out Netflix Chef's Table: Pizza for state of the art in the game). The good news is you don't have to be an expert to make good pizza that you'd very much enjoy. With a couple of tips and tricks, pizza making is no longer a high skill cap thing but a casual relaxing experience.

So, our contribution to the community is not to push the frontier of the best pizza with all the fancy ingredients, equipment and years of practice etc. Rather, we'd like to share with you how to make very respectable pizza in a normal home kitchen setup with relative ease. So you get to enjoy Pizza Friday for movie night or board game night or just weekly routine like us. The best part is you get to create your own flavor that can be wildly imaginative or uniquely you or just kitchen sink. The point is with the right technique as toolkit and good dough base as canvas, you are now a painter. You can paint anything you like instead of just receiving whatever is painted. To me, it's the most fun to try out new ideas on pizza canvas. OK, enough for motivation.

Today's main topic is a simple but extremely useful trick that brings so much convenience yet hasn't been mentioned anywhere. I know, it's a lot of suspension. Believe me, it's a good one.

Let me quickly get to the point. Assuming you have pizza steel or aluminum set up and cold fermented dough balls ready to do (both can be a topic of their own, leave in the comment if you'd like to learn more and I will prepare posts for them), now it's the time to roll them out and bake some pizza. Here is what every tutorial or youtube video teaches you to do. Dust your bench and pizza peel with LOTS of regular and/or semolina flour. Stretch the dough to desirable size. Load onto pizza peel. Now get into hyper paranoia and OCD mode of shimmering peel every now and then to prevent sticking. As we all know, if it sticks when loading into the oven. It's a disaster and a HUGE mess. Ughhh... Whoever has the experience, pretty much everyone who gets into pizza making does at some point, would frown even at the hypothetical scenario. So, what happens after rolling out dough? It's a speedrun of deploying sauce and toppings as fast as you can, to prevent sticking. Then take a deep breath, use core strength to steady pizza peel in a slightly downwards angle and have absolute focus to generate just enough momentum for the pizza to slide onto the plate in the oven. When it's done, use a metal turner to shovel underneath pizza in a swift motion and bring it out. Does all that sound intense and sweaty to you? It surely does to me. But none of this is necessary if you simply

Use a parchment paper

I don't know why nowhere has mentioned this simple solution. It solves all the problems described above. By loading stretched dough onto a parchment paper, there is zero chance of sticking and thereby no challenging maneuvers whatsoever. Now take your time to make dough perfectly round, ladle sauce evenly, arrange toppings in a pretty pattern, while having conversation with your family and friends. Now you can enjoy the process because it's no longer a race with dough sticking. What's more, unloading couldn't be easier. Just pull on the extra tab of parchment paper and slide it onto the peel. No additional turner required. Everything has almost zero skill cap. Even if you are a first timer, it won't be off by too far. And after a couple of tries, you'd be doing it as muscle memory.

Then you (when I say you, it's actually A) might say people must have chosen to do it without parchment paper for a reason. For example, it reduces heat transfer from plate to pizza so that the crust is less impressive. In the name of science, we did the following experiment for this week's pizza. Divide the dough into two equal pieces and shape them both to equal size smaller pizzas, one on parchment paper and one directly on pizza peel. No doubt flour everywhere, quite messy and hectic. Well, for science. Luckily, due to the smaller size, the one directly shaped on the peel was loaded with no problem, other than excess flour getting burned on the plate needs cleaning afterwards. Both are baked for 4min15sec, give or take. Here are the side-by-side comparisons.

Without paper	With Paper

As you can see, if anything, the one with parchment paper has better crust browning and better oven rise. As for the taste, the two are identical. Even the better browning might be the extra couple of seconds in the oven. If that's the case, it further supports my claim that parchment paper is a good idea that it has all the convenience in making without any drawback on performance.

Hopefully I've convinced you to try out this simple trick. It looks rookie but it really works. Not only works, works great. Please leave in the comment if you'd like to see a live demo. It's probably more instructive to put all my words above into a youtube video.

That's it for the technical discussion. As for the creativity part of this week's pizza, it's spoilered in the headline "Got any grape?". Maybe I will use it as the name. It's sausage and pepper with red sauce, which is a classic Italian dish itself, just now on pizza. The novelty is the seasonal sweet grapes. Half them and use as topping. The grapes after baking burst sweet juice blending with red sauce, creating savory and sweet irresistible combo. Just like the pineapple on Hawaiian pizza.

Formula🔗

Sauce🔗

• classic red

Topping🔗

• sausage, cooked and sliced
• red pepper
• grape, halfed

Finish🔗

• parm

Evaluation🔗

Given that Hawaiian is high up there on our all time favorite ranking and this one is pretty much inspired by that, you can imagine how highly reviewed this is from both me and A. We always say that using cured meat like salami, ham, sausage or sardine is almost cheating as they are so flavor packed themselves that basically carry the whole team. But with some sweetness, it's even better! It might be atrocity to some pizza purists. "Wat, pineapple on pizza? Waaat, grape???" Well, it's really good.

Demo🔗

More on techniques. I invented the cardboard trick to help loading pizza bigger than peel. Comment below if you'd like to know more.

Recently, we started a 10-based grading system for everything we make. This one gets 8.5 from both of us.

To finish off, here's one for the pun. Got any more grapes? (look closer)