Pizza with cured ham and arugula

This weekend, I made our favorite piizza with cured ham and arugula, so I thought I share some photos here. This time I used a leftover dough from couple weeks ago. I will do another post with the steps to make the dough.

Pizza with cured ham and arugula

For the dough recipe, I used Pizza Neo-Neapolitan recipe from Peter Reinhart's American Pie book. This is a well known recipe which you can search on Internet. I made some minor adjustment for the toppings so it works better in the home oven.

Now, for topping:

- Fresh Mozzarella (drain the juice and pat dry)
- Cured ham, i.e. Prosciutto
- Arugula
- Marinara sauce (reduced)

Some trick for using fresh Mozzarella - it's very wet. Normally I will just use the dry/shred Mozzarella that comes in a bag found in grocery stores. If you just cut the fresh Mozzarella and put on your pizza, believe me it will come out very soggy because the temperature in home oven is not enough to evaporate all those moisture fast enough. In summary, I feel anything wet is the enemy of good pizza baked in home oven.

If you use store bought Marinara, reduce it about 30-40% until you get consistency of a thick sauce.

So, what I did was I just cut the Mozzarella into pieces, and put it on a plate over my oven while I preheat the oven at 550F. The residual heat from the oven will bring out all the juices. Now, you can pat it dry before you top it on your pizza.

Stretch the dough and then to top your pizza, start with the driest ingredients - cheese in this case, then meats, and then the wettest ingredients, marinara sauce. Why? because you want the bottom of the dough to be crispy, and having the dry ingredients as a base of your topping will act as barrier to give the dough time to crisp up before the sauce touches it. If you are like me who doesn't like a soggy pizza, this method will work well.

Many recipes tell you to start with the sauce first. Although it may work, and that's also how many pizzerias do it, remember your home oven can only go 550F vs 800F or more at pizzeria, so some adjustment is necessary because the moisture will not evaporate as fast in your home oven. This minor change will give you a very crispy pizza vs soggy one - your choice.

This time I only have cured beef so I used this instead of Prosciutto

Mozzarella

I baked my pizza between two baking stone but I think it does not make much different really if you use one stone. Just put the stone close to the lowest rack and give it enough time to heat up (I pre-heat mine about 1 hour). The pizza should be ready in 6-7 minutes. About a minute before the pizza is done, take it out and top with arugula, and then put the pizza back in the oven and bake for a minute or until fully cook. The arugula will wilt a little bit.

Drizzle Olive Oil

I baked my pizza between two stones, although I found one stone at the bottom works just fine

Second attempt - Tartine Country Bread

This will be a short post as I just want to update what happenned after my partially successful first attempt to bake Tartine Country Bread

Lesson learned from last time - I think the dough was too overproof and I did not dust enough flour in the proofing basket, so the dough stuck when I flipped it to take it out for baking and I couldn't score the dough as the dough almost couldn't hold its shape.

I also found some great YouTube videos. I couldn't really tell from the book how to properly shape the boule and these videos are great. It gave me much more confident and the dough came out nicely this time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45z18TtFijU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5t-1sJwzFs

I planned to bake on Saturday, so I took out my starter (which is the leftover leavaining from last bake) from the fridge and fed it on Thursday morning, the left at room temperature. By Friday morning it became lively and doubled in size, so I fed it again to get it ready to prepare the leavain that night.

For mixing the dough and bulk rise, I followed the same steps as before, except this time I used Kitchen Aid to do initial mixing. Then hand knead after the first rest. Here're the photos of the dough after the first shaping.

First shaping after bulk rise

Then this time I put "a lot" of flour in the proofing basket. Below is the dough after 3 hours of rise of the basket.

Ready for

And this is the final product. This is where I found another issue with this book. Each loaf takes about 40-50 minutes to bake, and the recipe makes two loafs. So, let's say you can get the first loaf proofed just right, the second loaf could be a little overproof. In my case, I had no problem scoring the first loaf but second loaf didn't hold itself as well. I did the classic square scoring. The dough had pretty good oven spring, almost doubled in size. I think next time I will retard the second dough a little bit and see if that will help.

I should mention this time I used a lame bought from Sur La Table, which costs $5, instead of razor blade. I found that with the handle, it is safer as at least I didn't have to put my hand anywhere close to the cast iron skillet.

Another option is to line up parchment paper on a pizza peel, then flip your dough onto the pizza peel, do your scoring, and then slide the dough (with parchment paper) onto the cast iron skillet. I tried that on one of the loafs and there was no change in quality actually.

I think both loafs came out great - better than first time for sure. I still feel this can be improved even more, so hopefully will try that again after we run out of bread. This time I am able to do this along with working in the yards so I didn't feel like I used up the whole day just to make bread.

The next day, as usual, we had panini using the loaf I just made. Smeared the outside with butter, added cured ham, salami, pesto, fontina cheese, and spinach, and baked in panini grill at "high" for about 6-7 minutes.