Yogadad World

This is the best pizza I've ever made. It's not your standard tomato sauce, cheese, and two, three, or four toppings, but boy, was it tasty. I used no sauce or cheese, just mushrooms, potatoes, onions and a few spices. Good stuff.

For years, I've fooled around with pizza dough, trying recipe after recipe. But I could never get close to the same texture as pizzeria pizza dough. I even asked my daughter's boyfriend, who makes pizzas at Pizza Hut for the secret. Turns out the dough is delivered to them frozen, and they thaw and bake. It's not mixed on site. No help there. So I looked at book after book & website after website.

Last week, I was rewarded. I got My Bread: The Revolutionary No-Work, No-Knead Method by Jim Lahey from the library. His no-knead bread recipe has been copied and adapted many times, including by Mark Bittman of the New York Times and the folks at Cooks Illustrated. Turns out he also likes pizza. His recipe is simple, elegant, and delicious. It's the closest I've ever come to pizzeria style dough. Two days after checking it out of the library, Shannon ran out and bought a copy. And tonight I put it to work.

I think there are a couple of differences between his recipe and the others I've tried. First, he says to shape the dough into a rectangular pan and place that in the oven on top of a pizza stone. Previously, I've baked the pizza directly on the stone, not in a pan. Second, the pan has been liberally coated with olive oil before stretching the dough out in it. The oil makes the dough a little slippery but made a big difference in the cooking. Last, he calls for more yeast than I normally use to make my pizza dough. That made the crust very light.

This recipe makes enough for two thin crust pizzas, and the crust is very thin. If you don't want to make two pizzas at once, you can cut the recipe in half quite easily or do what I did and freeze half.

You will notice that the dough ingredients are given in weight as well as volume measurements. I recently bought a good kitchen scale and was pleased with how easy it was to put everything together using the scale, rather than the usual assortment of measuring cups and spoons. I suspect that the scale played a role in tonight's supper success.

Lastly a word about the toppings. I used mushrooms and potatoes. The recipe called for cremini mushrooms but the market was out so I used white button mushrooms. For the potatoes, it was Michigan-grown Yukon gold. The key to a well-done, tasty pizza was having the veggies sliced quite thinly. If you are very highly skilled you might be able to do that with a good chef's knife. I'm not in that league. So I used a mandoline. I'm sold on the gadget. I got uniform slices, quickly. There are many mandolines on the market, covering nearly every pricepoint so you should be able to find one that suits you and your budget.

We paired the pizza with one of our favorite Chiantis, Da Vinci Chianti. It's a pretty good, inexpensive Chianti. I often find it on sale for around $10.00 a bottle.

If you're not a fan of thin-crust pizza or think you aren't, you owe it to yourself to try this out.

Ingredients
Pizza dough
3 3/4 c (300 grams) Bread or all-purpose flour
2 1/4 tsp (10 grams) Instant or active dry yeast
3/4 tsp (5 grams) table salt
3/4 tsp plus a pinch (3 grams) sugar
1 1/2 c (300 grams) room temp water (about 72 degrees)
extra virgin olive oil for pan

Toppings
3/4 lb mushrooms
3-4 Yukon gold potatoes, peeled
2 small yellow onions, diced
1/3 c extra virgin olive oil
fresh thyme
fresh rosemary
fresh ground black pepper
oregano
Red pepper flakes

In a medium bowl, stir together flour, yeast, salt, and sugar. Add the water and use a wooden spoon (or your hands) to mix until blended, at least 30 seconds. Cover the bowl and let sit at room temperature, until the dough has doubled in size, about 2 hours.

Oil two 13-by-18 inch baking sheets. Scrape half the dough onto each sheet. Gently pull and stretch the dough across the surface of the pan and use your hands to press it evenly to the edges. Make sure the pans are adequately oiled and press gently yet firmly. Pinch any holes together. The dough on each pan will be quite thin.

Preheat the oven to 500 degrees with the rack in the center.

Use a mandoline to cut the mushrooms and potatoes. The mushrooms should be about 1/8 inch thick and the potatoes 1/16 inch thick.

In a medium bowl combine a quart of water and 4 tsp of table salt. Stir to dissolve the salt. Place the potatoes in the brine for about 90 minutes, until the slices are wilted and no longer crisp.

Drain the potatoes in a colander and use your hands to press out excess water. Pat dry.

In a medium bowl, combine mushrooms, potatoes, onions, and olive oil.

Spread potato and mushroom mixture on pizza dough, with a bit more of the mixture near the edges. Sprinkle with rosemary, thyme, and oregano.

Bake 20 - 25 minutes on a pizza stone. Remove from oven when the topping starts to turn golden brown and the edges begin to pull away from the sides of the pan. Serve hot. Put jar of red pepper flakes on table for guests to add.