Pete's Pizza Secrets

Lately everybody has been marveling at the concept of no-knead bread, and there's a similar idea by the writers of the book Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, but the commonest complaint I've read about both methods is they have no taste. The experimenters at Cook's Illustrated went so far as to adapt the no-knead recipe by putting in vinegar and beer for taste!

My (flat-) bread of choice is pizza. Five years ago or so I started making it from scratch. I was a teacher with a free summer at the time and I was looking for a challenge. I used to knead the dough by hand, using the recipe from the Scicolones's Pizza: Any Way You Slice It!, a great resource for crust and sauce recipes. Then I scored a free brand-new Cuisinart from somebody emptying their storage area and I found a book at the library on how to mix dough in a food processor. Charlie Van Over's humbly-named The Best Bread Ever contains both the best bread recipe and the best pizza dough recipe I've ever found. Since the "kneading" is done by the Cuisinart in under a minute, they're also the easiest recipes I've ever found.

It's the classic four ingredients: flour, salt, yeast and water. They're mixed in the food processor per Charlie's instructions (there are temperatures you have to measure before and after mixing), and the dough is put in a ziploc bag to rise (Why dirty up a perfectly good bowl?). Then it's in the fridge for 1 to 4 days. This is the secret to delicious pizza crust: the dough slowly ferments in the fridge as the yeast break down starches into sugars and develop flavors as only one-celled fungi can.

I flatten the dough, add pasta sauce (homemade or store-bought), Trader Joe's Quattro Formaggio cheese blend, toppings like caramelized onions, peppers, mushrooms, sausage or pepperoni and occasionally some herbs. I slide it on my cheap quarry tiles at the hottest my oven can go for 9 minutes and it's done. People rave about the pizzas, and I'm no chef. Get Charlie's book from the library and do it yourself!