Oven up and running again

Saturday night I made 100 ounces of dough for pizza with these proportions:

pounds	ounces
1	0.0	levain
3	1.3	Flour
2	2.7	Water
0	1.0	Salt

Which was almost the same as the focaccia dough (75% Hydration) I described in the earlier post.  Because of time constraints I had to make the dough the night before, fold, divide, and shape it, and put in the fridge overnight.  The dough was in the fridge from 12-midnight until about 2:30, when I pulled it out and started the oven fire.

I wasn't too happy with the results.  It was just too wet to easily work with -- especially for kids and neophytes.  The extensibility was fine, but  something was amiss.

Also, the oven took FOREVER to heat up!  It wasn't ready for the first flatbread until almost 5:30 -- it took nearly 2 1/2 hours to reach full temperature, and then I had trouble keeping it hot.  This is only the second weekend since the holidays that we used the oven, so it's probably drawn a lot of moisture into the insulation.  Last year it took three, successive firings to get the oven to behave.

Luckily, the pizzas tasted great and we had cake friends and wine, so who's complaining!

Focaccia al Silverton

Thursday was my daughter's Jr. High School graduation.  A party was held at one of the graduates homes to celebrate.  Originally the plan was to make pizza in their wood-fired oven, but under the influence of Nancy Silverton's recently published focaccia recipe, we decided to try that instead.

I did some calculations based on the LA Times article and determined that her hydration was 75% +/- with about 2% olive oil, salt, and about 3% rye flour added.  I swapped whole wheat for rye (as I didn't have any rye in-stock) and using my standard starter (levain), mixed up two batches of dough the night before for a total of 180 ounces of dough.  I let this ferment on the counter for an hour and a half, then did a fold, and put in a dough tub in the fridge overnight for a retarded ferment.


My friend Andrea did something similar, but an 80% hydration and 30% wheat flour.


In the morning I pulled the dough from the counter, let it warm up, and then did another fold. I trucked the dough over to her house about three hours later and divided it and did quick shapes into 18-ounce balls.  


The balls were placed seam-side down into 12" pans that had been filled with about a quarter cup of olive oil.  After resting for about 30-40 minutes we started topping them with onions, peppers, olives, tomato, and herbs.  all in all, we made about 30-40 focaccia, and then cooked them over the next few hours 6 at a time in her oven.


The flavor was great -- but I think next time, we will cut back on the olive oil, significantly. 

photos: K. Labby

Changes

Summer is officially here--but the big news is three 3'x12' planters on the garage roof. I spent the Memorial Day weekend filling them with tons (literally) of dirt and my daughter planted beans, squash, corn, and some greens in two of the beds. The third bed will be planted with vegetable starts from the nursery.


The garage roof is flat, nearly 1000 square feet and gets full southern exposure to the sun year-round. It's also protected by a short bluff from Sant Ana winds, but gets the evening breeze to relieve the afternoon heat. Pretty much perfect!

In a month or so, I hope to be serving a pizza topped with squash blossoms from my own garden, plus easy access to basil and other fresh herbs.

Windy City Pizza....

...with a twist -- the winds are the Santa Ana kind, and the city is LA.  That means the sauce will be on the bottom, too.

Figs are on the menu tonight with onions & Gorgonzola (or goat cheese), and some wild rocket on top.
 
I expect the usual pesto & mozzarella pizzas will make an appearance as well.

Some bread baking is also on the agenda: a ciabatta and two loaves of whole wheat sourdough -- all made with natural levain.

Never Again, Again.

Here is a link to the King Arthur organic high gluten flour mentioned in a comment to my last post -- I had no idea this product even existed until yesterday.  Perhaps I will have an opportunity to do a side-by-side comparison soon like I did with the Caputo Tipo 00 flour -- fun!

In the meantime, I need to get the protein content of my levain back up a few notches.  It looks like it's right around 13% right now, two feedings with 14% should pull it back to 13.75%.  Where would I be without spreadsheets!

Never Again

Last Sunday I fired up the pizza oven for the first time since July.  I've been out of flour for a bit and decided to to try making dough with the King Arthur's bread flour.   The dough itself seemed great, though a little stickier and with more rise than usual; I shaped it and put in the fridge to ferment, but as soon as we started working with it, problems.

First, the gluten strands hadn't really developed as much as I was used to.  The dough was very hard to work and had too much spring-back -- with a 9-oz. ball, I couldn't shape a pizza larger than 8" (usally I get a 10"-12" pizza out of that much dough), and two pizzas tore while shaping.  I had trouble getting the pizzas off the peels due to sticking, and once the pizza's went in the oven, they cooked very strangely -- burning on the outside, but not cooking fully inside.

So I'm going back to the Giusto's Ultimate Performer that I've had such success with in the past -- and to guarantee that I won't run out, I picked up a 50-lb. bag at Surfa's ($68)!  It's going to need to live in my office until I can find a container big enough to store all that flour ( I wonder how many gallons of flour 50 lbs. is?)

Pizza Picture

Second try with the Electrolux resulted in this nice looking and great tasting squash blossom & burrata pie. Scorched it just a wee bit. :)

A New Floor

One mistake I made building my original oven base was placing the slab too low.  It ended up being about 1/4" below the level of my patio slab, and thus a water collector on rainy days.  To make matters worse, weep holes in the block walls ended up letting water into the wood storage area from the surrounding soil.  This is now fixed. 

I placed and additional 3 cubic feet of concrete on top of the existing slab in the storage area.  Th e nw concrete raises the floor about a half inch, and id sloped to drain to the front.

One problem solved (I hope)