Rezepte Mein Rezept für. . eine Sterne-Suppe, die schlank macht. Meisterkoch Heinz Wehmann wird zu einer schrägen Wette herausgefordert: Kann er in einer Woche eine kalorienarme Suppe auf Sterne-Niveau erfinden? Heinz Wehmann (57) wuchs in einer Wirtsfamilie in Versmold auf. Nach Lehrjahren im „Hotel Atlantic“ in Hamburg blieb er der Hansestadt treu. Seit 1980 arbeitet er im sternegekrönten „Landhaus Scherrer“. Im NDR-Fernsehen gibt er bei „Mein Nachmittag“ regelmäßigkulinarische Tipps. 2 mittlere Endivien Salz 2 Knoblauchzehen 2 Schalotten 3 EL Butter 800 ml Geflügelfond (oder Rinderfond) Pfeffer (Mühle) 1 Fleischtomate etwas Thymian oder Dill. Für die Einlage: 200 g Büsumer Krabben. 1. Endivien vom Strunk befreien. Blätter in kochendem Salzwasser garen. Herausheben, abkühlen lassen. Endivien ausdrücken und hacken. Knoblauch und Schalotten schälen, fein würfeln. Krabben aus dem Kühlschrank nehmen, damit sie Zimmertemperatur bekommen. abschmecken. Fond zugeben, aufkochen. Alles pürieren. Mit Salz und Pfeffer abschmecken.

Pizza hut rezept

Leckere Rezepte für den perfekten Pizzateig! Kostenlos und nur für kurze Zeit. Download unseres Pizzateig Rezeptes. Unser beliebtes Pizzateig-Rezept direkt zum ausdrucken als PDF Datei. Pizzarezepte, einfach und lecker. Wer auf der Suche nach einem guten Pizzarezept ist, der wird im Internet zahlreiche Varianten dazu finden. Sie unterscheiden sich aber meist alle. Nicht einfach, wenn die perfekte Pizza zubereitet werden soll. Inhaltsverzeichnis. Das richtige Rezept für den Pizzateig. Erst einmal sollte sich jeder Gedanken dazu machen, wie die Pizza bereitet werden soll. Soll ein Rezept mit Hefe genommen werden, oder soll auf die Zugabe der Hefe verzichtet werden? Eine Hefeteigpizza ist aber die klassische Variante dabei. Die Hefe wird gären, sodass der Pizzateig noch größer wird, als vorher. Dadurch wird er luftiger und locker, was für die meisten bei der Pizza sehr wichtig ist. Ein Grund gegen die Hefepizza kann eine Allergie sein, sodass auf die Zugabe verzichtet werden muss. Andere entscheiden sich aber auch der Zeitersparnis gegen eine Hefepizza, da diese nach Rezept noch etwa zwei Stunden ruhen muss. Statt Hefe verwenden andere für die Zubereitung Speisequark . Wieder andere setzen darauf, die Pizza mit Milch und Eiern zuzubereiten. Ist die erste Hürde genommen, dann stehen noch immer viele Pizza Rezepte zur Auswahl. Meist unterscheiden Sie sich nur noch in kleinen Punkten, wie der genauen Grammangabe für das Mehl, ob Trockenhefe verwendet wird, Olivenöl oder Sonnenblumenöl usw. Auch die Menge der Zutaten variiert oft sehr stark. Wird bei manchen Rezepten der Geschmack durch die Zugabe von Gewürzen verstärkt, sind diese in anderen Grundrezepten noch gar nicht zu finden. Ein wichtiges italienisches Gewürz ist Oregano ; deshalb ist es bei vielen Pizzarezepten auch direkt zu finden. Je nach eigenem Geschmack kann das Rezept für die Pizza also erweitert werden. 500 Gramm Mehl, 250 ml Wasser, 10 Gramm Hefe, entspricht einem Paket Trockenhefe, 1 Prise Salz 3 Esslöffel. Pizzasoße – selber machen! Zu dem richtigen Pizza Rezept gehört auch die Zubereitung der Soße. Diese sollte im Idealfall selbst und vor allem frisch gekocht werden. Die Pizza wird dann um einiges besser schmecken. Sicher mag es auch im Supermarkt die eine oder andere Pizzasoße geben. Einfacher ist es garantiert, damit die Pizza zu bestreichen. Aber wird es im Geschmack auch einiges ausmachen – nicht zum Guten! Eine Pizzasoße kann einfach und auch sehr schnell zubereitet werden. Einige wenige Zutaten und ein wenig Zeit ist notwendig, der Pizza den richtigen Pfiff zu geben: 1 Dose geschälte, ganze Tomaten 1-2 frische Tomaten 1 kleine Zwiebel 1 Knoblauchzehe Salz 1 TL Zucker Oregano Basilikum Natives Olivenöl. Das Gemüse putzen und klein schneiden. Das Gemüse alles zusammen anbraten. Den EL Zucker dazugeben, bis es karamellisiert ist. Die Tomaten aus der Dose können nun in den Topf gegeben werden, und alles sollte etwa 15 köcheln. Dabei muss dieses Gemisch immer wieder umgerührt werden. In der Zeit können die Gewürze und die frischen Tomaten klein geschnitten werden, bevor sie dann auch in den Topf gegeben werden. Das Ganze muss noch einmal gut aufkochen. Das Rezept für die Tomatensoße ist ausreichend für ein großes Backblech, mit der die Pizza belegt werden soll. Sollte noch etwas übrig bleiben, kann es im Kühlschrank noch einige Tage aufbewahrt werden . Die Pizza belegen. Abgerundet wird das richtige Pizzarezept mit dem Belag für die Pizza. Hierbei sind alle erdenklichen Speisen möglich. Selbst Pizza mit Spaghetti ist nicht unbekannt. In vielen Pizzerien wird diese Variation angeboten. Am häufigsten wird die Pizza Margherita verkauft. Für zu Hause sind der Fantasie keine Grenzen gesetzt. Es lässt sich vieles miteinander kombinieren, was den Reiz an der Pizza ausmacht. Ein Pizzarezept für den Belag wird es so nicht geben. Der Belag kann aus allem gestaltet werden, was schmeckt. Salami, Schinken, Meeresfrüchte, die verschiedensten Gemüsesorten, Käse, usw. Was die perfekte Pizza sonst noch ausmachen kann. Die Pizza kann nach Geschmack ausgerollt werden. Das Ausrollen des Teiges und der Backvorgang sind ebenso ein wichtiger Bestandteil des Pizzarezepts. Auch hier sind einige Möglichkeiten da, was den Geschmack der Pizza beeinflussen wird. Ein dicker Teig wird selten knusprig werden, wenn die Pizza gebacken ist. Wer einen etwas weicheren Pizzaboden mag, der sollte eines der Pizza Rezepte nehmen, bei dem der Teig dicker bleibt. Durch das dünnere Ausrollen wird der Teig beim Backen knuspriger. Ebenso sind die Zeitangabe für das Backen und auch die Wahl der Temperatur des Backofens sehr wichtig. Wer lange und heiß die Pizza backt, der wird eine knusprige Pizza bekommen. Wer hier wenig experimentiert, der wird schnell merken, wie lange seine Pizza und bei welchen Temperaturen gebacken werden soll. Ein perfektes Pizza Rezept, wird es so nicht geben. Jeder hat einen anderen Geschmack, daher sind es auch so viele Pizzarezepte, die es überall zu finden gibt. Wer das Rezept für die Pizza finden möchte, welches den eigenen Vorstellungen am besten entsprechen kann, der wird oft nicht beim ersten Mal Pizza selber machen, Glück haben. Übung macht den Meister. Oft lässt sich die richtige Portionierung erst nach und nach finden. Ähnliche Rezepte und Beiträge. Kostenlos und nur für kurze Zeit. Download unseres Pizzateig Rezeptes. Unser beliebtes Pizzateig-Rezept direkt zum ausdrucken als PDF Datei.

Pizza hut rezept

Leckere Rezepte für den perfekten Pizzateig! Kostenlos und nur für kurze Zeit. Download unseres Pizzateig Rezeptes. Unser beliebtes Pizzateig-Rezept direkt zum ausdrucken als PDF Datei. Rezept Pizzateig ala Pizza Hut. Pizza Hut ist weitaus mehr, als nur eine gute Pizzeria. Die Pizzen, die hier verkauft werden, sind nicht klassisch italienisch, sondern amerikanisch . Kennzeichnend dafür ist der dickere Pizzateig, der nicht so kross, sondern eher fluffig und weich ist. Sicher möchte so einen Pizzateig jeder auch zu Hause zubereiten. Das Originalrezept würde das Unternehmen sicher nie herausgeben, wir haben jedoch versucht dieses möglichst Detailgetreu nachzubacken: Zubereitung des Pizzateigs ála Pizza Hut. Zutaten für ein Backblech. 4 Tassen Mehl, 1 Tasse warme Milch, 1/4 Tasse warmes Wasser, 3 Esslöffel Olivenöl 1/2 Packung frische Hefe, 1 Tl Salz, 1 El Zucker, 1 Ei. Die warme Milch, das warme Wasser, Hefe, Öl, Salz und Zucker zusammen in eine Schüssel geben. Alles muss gut miteinander vermischt werden. Anschließend den Teig rund 2 Minuten ruhen lassen. In dieser Zeit kann in einer anderen Schüssel das Ei in das Mehl gegeben werden. Auch dieses Gemisch muss gut miteinander verrührt werden. Danach müssen beide Gemische miteinander vermengt werden. Es sollte so lange geknetet werden, bis der Teig nicht mehr am Rand der Schüssel kleben bleibt. Je nach Teigkonsistenz kann etwas Mehl oder Wasser noch dazugegeben werden. Der Teig muss nun erst einmal 5 Minuten gehen, bevor er ausgerollt und auf ein Backblech gegeben werden kann. Der Pizzateig auf dem Backblech muss nun ein weiteres Mal ruhen. Am einfachsten ist es, wenn das Blech in eine Plastiktüte gegeben wird, da es so gut verschlossen ist. Bei einer Temperatur von 40° wird die Ruhezeit etwa 90 Minuten betragen. Belag und Backzeit für die Pizza ala Pizza Hut. Nachdem der Teig aufgegangen ist, kann er mit der vorher zubereiteten Tomatensoße bestrichen werden. Wichtig bei einer Pizza ala Pizza Hut ist es, dass der Pizzateig nicht so dick belegt wird, da der Teig sonst im Ofen nicht weich und luftig bleibt und ineinander zusammenfällt. Die fertig belegte Pizza braucht im Backofen etwa 10 – 15 Minuten. Wichtig ist es, dass der Ofen auf Ober- und Unterhitze eingestellt wird, Heißluft ist für diese Art der Pizza nicht geeignet. Ähnliche Rezepte und Beiträge. Kostenlos und nur für kurze Zeit. Download unseres Pizzateig Rezeptes. Unser beliebtes Pizzateig-Rezept direkt zum ausdrucken als PDF Datei. Die Geschichte der Pizza. Wer hat es eigentlich erfunden, dieses kreisrunde flache leckere Ding names Pizza, das aus der europäischen Esskultur nicht mehr wegzudenken ist? Ein Italiener? Dr. Oetker? Oder sogar die Schweizer? Die haben schliesslich auch das Kräuterbonbon erfunden. Weder noch, wenn man den Archäologen Glauben schenken darf. Denn die auf Stein gebackene Pizza soll ihren Ursprung gar nicht in Italien haben, sondern von den gleichen Leuten stammen, die auch die Erfindung des Gyros für sich beanspruchen. Die Griechen, bzw. damals noch die Etrusker, sollen in der Antike um 800 v. Chr. die ersten gewesen sein, die einen Fladen aus Mehl, Wasser und Salz mit Zutaten belegt und am offenen Feuer auf Steinen gebacken haben. Teigfladen nennt man zu dieser Zeit „Pita“, woraus sich im Laufe der Zeit das Wort Pizza entwickelt. Um 200 v. Chr. besetzen die Etrusker Rom und die Italiener kommen das erste Mal mit dem Rezept der Urpizza in Berührung. Während der römischen Eroberungsfeldzüge dann breitet sich das Rezept der Pizza über die Jahrhunderte im restlichen Europa aus, fristet aber bisweilen ein Schattendasein, denn die Pizza gilt eher als einfache Speise der verarmten Bauernbevölkerung. Die arme Bauernbevölkerung ist es dann auch, die eine einschneidene Veränderung bei der Pizza verursacht. Denn um 1520 finden die ersten Tomaten aus Südamerika über den Seeweg ihren Weg nach Italien. Durch den roten Warnfarbton hält man die Tomate in Europa lange Zeit für giftig. Doch in der Not frisst der Teufel bekanntlich Fliegen, und so beginnen die verarmten Bauern in der Gegend um Neapel herum aus der Not heraus, ihre bis zu diesem Zeitpunkt trockenen Teigfladen mit der Tomate zu belegen. Der Legende nach die Geburtsstunde der Pizza, wie wir sie heute kennen. Während man im restlichen Europa die Tomate noch als Zierpflanze betrachtet, entwickelt sich die Pizza mit Tomaten belegt in Neapel zu einer lokalen Spezialität und kleine Pizzerien spriessen in dem Städtchen aus dem Boden. Der Pizza haftet jedoch immer noch der Ruf einer Speise für arme Leute an, die nichts für elitäre Oberschicht ist. Im Jahre 1889 ist König Umberto mit seiner Frau Margharitha zu Besuch in Neapel. Er hatte von dieser leckeren Teigspezialität der Armen gehört, jedoch verbot es sich dem Adel zusammen mit dem Pöbel in einer Pizzeria zu speisen. So wird Raffaele Esposito, seinerzeit ein Pizzabäcker aus Neapel, beauftragt, für ihre Majestät eine Pizza in den Palast zu liefern. Raffaele Esposito belegt die Pizza in den italienischen Nationalfarben mit Tomaten, Mozzarella und Basilikum und gibt ihr den Namen „Margharitha“. Die Königin soll derart begeistert gewesen sein, dass die Pizza als salonfähig für den Adel erklärt wird. Das königliche Dankschreiben an Pizzabäcker Raffaele soll man noch heute an der Wand in der Pizzeria in Neapel finden. Anfang der 20. Jahrhunderts tragen die italienischen Immigranten das Rezept der Pizza nach Europa und in die USA, wo sie ihren kulinarischen Siegeszug antritt. In den 50er und 60er Jahren finden zudem Kühl- und Gefrierschränke den Weg in die heimischen vier Wände. So ist es wenig verwunderlich, dass 1957 das italo-amerikanische Brüderpaar Celantano in den USA die erste Tiefkühlpizza auf den Markt bringt. Die Pizza entwickelt sich zum Massenphänomen und ist mittlerweile beliebt bei Jung und Alt. Allein Deutschland verspeist gut 70% der Bevölkerung wöchentlich mindestens ein Stück Pizza. Man findet Pizza im Supermarkt, beim Italiener im die Ecke oder in Fastfoodketten wie Pizza-Hut. Ein Leben ohne die geliebte Pizza wäre nicht mehr denkbar.

Pizza hut rezept

Jeff Varasano's Famous New York Pizza Recipe. One of America's Perfect Pizzeria's: Zagat. Last Updates (color coded so you can see new edits): 10/18/06 (Text changed in Purple) 11/6/2007 A few new Pizzeria Rankings - Some of the best pizza in NY is also the newest. 03/13/08 Lots of new Pizzeria Rankings. 04/10/08 - Minor edits to big table of pizzerias. 6/24/08 Added a Google Map of the world's best pizzerias. 5/2/12 Videos explaining the various styles of pizza. Pizza is the most sensuous of foods. I get emails from around the world and one of the most common goes something like this: "Jeff, I had this one perfect pizza at a corner shop in Brooklyn in 1972 and I've been thinking about it ever since." I love that!. That's passion. Do you know how many forgettable meals have come and gone since then. What kind of pizza leaves a 35 year impression? Let me describe it to you. The crust is slightly charred. It has a crisp outer layer, but inside it's airy and light. The ingredients are not piled high, but instead are perfectly balanced. It's sweet, salty, full flavored but not greasy. The tomatoes burst with flavor. Each bite makes you hungrier for the next. If this is what you want, you've come to the right place. Reproducing this was no easy feat, but since moving to Atlanta what choice did I have? Dominos? It's been a bit of an obsession. I've had a lot of failed experiments. However now I can honestly say that the recipe is fully accurate and reproducible. The final breakthrough came in Jan 2005 when I finally got a handle on the proper mixing equipment and procedure. But do not think that following this will be easy. It's not. It will still take practice. Many others have confirmed that by following these steps they too have come to near perfection. This may be the most detailed, accurate and complete recipe on the net for making a true Pizza Napoletana. Pizza inspires passion. I've gotten about a thousand emails representing every continent. If you'd like to contact me, feel free to write at Jeff@Varasanos.com . It may take a little time for me to respond, but I try to answer all emails personally. I'm going to start a photo gallery, so if you have some success, send me a photo and I'll add it for others to see! At the bottom of this page, I have a List of the Best Pizzerias in the World which I've also places on this Google Map of The World's Best Pizzas. In addition I've created a second Google Map of Fan Favorites - places that have been recommended by fans of this site. I can't really vouch for these but if your in the area check them out and let me know your opinion. This dough was hand kneaded and baked in just 1 minute 40 seconds. Me - Do I look happy or what? Check out this perfect char. Even blurry pizzas are Tasty!. This pie baked in just 1 minute 40 seconds. What's better than a light springy crust with a perfect char. One of my best tasting pies ever: Check out many more photos at the bottom. I am going to add a lot more instructions and photos over the next couple of months, including specifics on how to culture the dough, so check back here occasionally. I may even do a few seconds of video here and there. Let me start off by saying a few things. First, this is about a certain style of pizza. This site is about the kind of pizza that you can get at the oldest and best places in the U.S. or in Naples. This is not about Chicago style or California Style or trying to reproduce Papa John's garlic sauce. This is about making a pie that's as close to Patsy's or Luzzo's or Pepe's or some of the top Brick Oven places. Not that these pies are all identical - but they share certain basics in common. Second, I want to say that there is a LOT of misinformation out there. Take a tour of the World's top pizza places (there's a list at the bottom of this page). None of these places publish their recipes. They don't write books. You are not going to see any of these places represented at the "U.S. pizza championship" where they compete at dough tossing or who makes the best smoke pork mango pizza.. The real pizza places are not at some trade show out in Vegas where they hawk automatic sauce dispensers and conveyor belt ovens. But somehow though, all the attendees of these shows declare themselves experts and write books and spread the same false ideas. There are about a hundred books and internet recipes that claim to give an authentic or secret pizza dough recipe. Oddly, while many claim to be secret or special, they are practically all the same. Here it is in summary. If you see this recipe, run screaming: Sprinkle a yeast packet into warm water between 105-115 F and put in a teaspoon of sugar to feed it. Wait for it to foam up or 'proof'. Add all your flour to a Kitchen Aid heavy duty mixer, then add the yeast and salt. Now mix until it pulls away from the side of the bowl. Coat with oil and leave in a warm place until it doubles in bulk, about 1-2 hours. Punch down, spread on a peel with some cornmeal to keep it from sticking and put it on the magical pizza stone that will make this taste just like Sally's in your 500F oven. I assure you, this will not make anything like a real pizza. It's weird - even chefs whose other recipes all come out pretty good, like Emeril, simply pass around more or less this same terrible recipe. Pizza is a true specialty item and a real art. It takes passion to make it right. I wasn't a restaurateur when I started out. But I did have a passion for doing this right. I'm not going to give you the 'easy home version'. I'm going to give you the version that makes the best pie I know how to make, even if it takes a bit more effort (ok, more than just a bit) There are a lot of variables for such a simple food. But these 3 FAR outweigh the others: The kind of yeast culture or "starter" used along with proper fermentation technique. All other factors pale in comparison to these 3. I know that people fuss over the brand of flour, the kind of sauce, etc. I discuss all of these things, but if you don't have the 3 fundamentals above handled, you will be limited. 1- It's all in the crust. My dough is just water, salt, flour and yeast. I use no dough conditioners, sugars, oils, malts, corn meal, flavorings or anything else. These violate the "Vera Pizza Napoletana" rules and I doubt that Patsy's or any great brick oven place uses these things. I've only recently begun to measure the actual "baker's percents" of the ingredients. Use this awesome spreadsheet to help you. The sheet allows you to track your experiments. Here's a basic set of ratios. The truth is that a lot of these recipes look the same and that you can vary these ingredients by several percentage points and it's not going to make a huge difference. You really have to learn the technique, which I'm going to explain in as much detail as I can, and then go by feel. Really, I just measure the water and salt and the rest is pretty flexible. The amount of flour is really, "add until it feels right." The amount of Sourdough starter can range from 3% to 20% and not affect the end product all that much. Weights are in grams. I also show this as both "Baker's Percents" (This has flour as 100% by definition and then all the other ingredients as their proportionate weight against of the flour) and using the Italian method which actually makes more sense to me, of showing the base as 1000 grams of water and all the other ingredients in proportion to that. Both methods are attempts to make the recipes scalable. Note that the addition of the poolish, which is half water, half flour, actually makes this a bit wetter, around 65% hydration . Note that this table had an error on it which was corrected on 11/30/06: If you use Caputo or any 00 flour, you may find that it takes a lot more flour for the given amount of water. Probably a baker's % of 60% or so. One reason I like to feel the dough rather than strictly measure the percent hydration is that with feel you don't have to worry about the type of flour so much. A Caputo and a Bread will feel the same when they are done, even though one might have 60% water and the other 65%. It's the feel that I shoot for, not the number. I vary wetness based on my heat - higher the oven temp, the wetter I want the dough. I've heard it said that NY has the best pizza because of the water. This is a myth. Get over it. It's not the water. The water is one of a hundred factors. I filter my whole house with a huge 5 stage system, so I use that. If I didn't have that I'd spring for a $1 bottle of Dasani. That will do it too. Salt only the final dough, never your permanent sourdough culture. For that matter, your culture is fed only water (filtered or Dasani) and flour. Never add any other kind of yeast, salt, sugar or anything else to your permanent culture. I use a sourdough culture that I got from what is probably the best pizza in the USA - Patsy's Pizza on 117th street in NYC. The place has been there for 80 years. The 'battery poolish' is about 50/50 water and flour. Buy the book "Classic Sourdoughs" by Ed Wood from www.sourdo.com to learn how to use a sourdough starter. The term sourdough does not necessarily mean that this has a San Francisco Sourdough flavor. The term sourdough just means any yeast other than "baker's yeast" which is what comes in the dry or cake form. There are 1000's of types of yeast. But the commercial products are all the same strain ( Saccharomyces cerevisiae) regardless of the brand you buy or whether it's dry or cake form. Commercial or "baker's yeast" gives a fast, predictable rise, but is lacking in flavor. All other yeasts are called sourdough. San Francisco sourdough is one strain. But there are 1000's of others. I doesn't have to taste sour, like San Francisco, to be called sourdough. It's just a term. You can "create your own" culture by leaving some flour water out on the counter. There are lots of kinds of yeast in the air in your kitchen right now and one of them will set up shop eventually in your flour water and begin growing. What will it taste like? Well, it's like setting a trap for an animal and waiting for dinner. It could be a pheasant. It could be a rat. You have no way of knowing. Do yourself a favor and skip this part and just buy or obtain a known high quality starter. www.sourdo.com sells strains from the world's best bakeries. I've seen many bogus things about the use of starters. A classic is that you can start a wild culture by setting out some flour, water and baker's yeast and the baker's yeast will 'attract' other yeasts. This is alchemy. It's like saying I put out dandelions and they attracted peaches. It makes no sense. Another myth is that you can get the same flavor out of packaged yeast as you can out of a sourdough culture if you handle it right. This is also alchemy. Can you get parsley to taste like thyme if you handle it right? These are distinct organism, like spices, that all have a different flavor. If you use a starter, and you should, then learn from Ed Wood. A sourdough starter actually consists of 2 separate organisms which exist in a symbiotic relationship. There is the yeast and the lactobacilli. Here's the cliff notes version of what's happening: All flavor really comes from the lactobacilli, all the puff from yeast. The yeast operate well at high temp. The lactobacilli at any temp. Therefore, to develop highly flavored dough put it in the fridge. The yeast will be mostly dormant, giving time for the lactobacilli to produce flavor. The flavor takes a day or more. So you have to keep the yeast on ice that long. Then you take it out of the fridge and let the yeast take over and produce gas. The yeast only needs an hour or two to do this part. This can happen very quickly in a warmer. There is no need for a gradual rise, because at this point the flavor is there. You can smell the alcohol in the dough. The yeast are just adding the bubbles at this point. This technique of refrigeration is called a "cold rise". There are warm rise methods that work too, but I have not gotten the best results with them after numerous attempts. In Naples they virtually all use a warm rise, so I don't doubt the technique can be made to work well. I may revisit this section later. The lactobacilli and yeast exist in pairs. Not every flavorful lactobacilli has a competent yeast partner. You may find that you've got a culture that has a great flavor, but the puff is not there. No problem. Give it a boost with plain old Baker's yeast, which has little taste but plenty of puff. I use 1/8 teaspoon of instant dry yeast for each batch of 3-5 pies, to give it an extra rise, but 100% of the flavor is from the Patsy's culture. There are 2 ways to ferment the dough: you can use a 'warm rise' or a 'cold rise'. The warm rise is harder. You simply leave it out at room temp and wait for it to rise. This is hard to control because it could take 10 hours or 24 hours. Tiny, tiny variations in room temp and the amount of yeast you started with will make all the difference. And if it's not risen optimally when you use it, the dough may end up flat and lacking in oven spring. So timing a pizza party this way is hard. By far the easier way to ferment the dough is the cold rise. And the results are just as good if not better. I prefer to age my dough at least 2-3 days in the fridge. I've aged it up to 6 days with good results. However, my culture is very mild. With some cultures 24 hours is the right amount of time and 2 days would be too much.. You have to get to know your culture. They are all different.. 24 hours is the minimum with a cold rise. There's more on this technique down below. 2- Flour: There is a lot of emphasis put on using the right type of flour. Personally, I think this focus is misplaced. Of course, it's important to use high quality ingredients. But improving your dough making technique is much, much more important than hunting down the exact right type of flour. The truth is that almost all flours sold are pretty high quality especially compared to what was available 60 years ago when Patsy Lancieri was making amazing pizza. That alone should tell you something. I currently use either using King Arthur Bread Flour or a blend of this with Caputo Pizzeria flour. I actually think that you can buy any bread flour available at your local supermarket and you'll be ok. Let me give you a quick flour primer. You can do a lot more internet research if you want, but here's the basics. There are two variables I want to focus on, the Percentage of Protein or 'gluten' and the type of mill. This chart will give you some typical ranges. However, there are no governing standards, so some vendors may call their flour High Gluten, for example, even though the product would fit into another category in this chart: Caputo, San Felice. Giusto, King Arthur, Gold Medal, White Lily. Giusto, King Arthur, Gold Medal, White Lily. Giusto, King Arthur Sir Lancelot, Gold Medal All Trumps. Lately I've gone back to using King Arthur Bread Flour. I've used AP successfully as well. The kneading seems to be more critical. Most pizza places in NYC use Hi Gluten Flour and many internet sources insist that Hi Gluten Flour is necessary to make real NY pizza. This information sent a lot of people off ordering expensive mail order flours. However, according to pizza guru Evelyn Solomon, the old timers used flour in the 12% range, which would be a bread flour. This confirmed what my own tests had shown me all along. Bread flour from the supermarket is just fine for making pizza. It has certainly been proven that you don't need high gluten flour to make highly structured bread. Ed Wood from sourdo.com makes great artisan bread using AP. In Naples they use 00 flour which has less gluten than AP. I've had great and horrible pies with all kinds of flours from all kinds of pizzerias. And I've made great and d horrible pies with all kinds of flours myself. Kneading and overall technique is more important than the flour in my opinion. Since putting up this site I've been urged to try other flours. I've made pies with at least 20 flours including these: King Arthur All Purpose (KA AP) - 11.7% Protein. King Arthur Bread (KA Bread) - 12.7% protein. King Arthur Sir Lancelot (KASL) aka Hi Gluten - 14.2% Protein. Gold Medal Bread Flour (formerly labeled Harvest King) - 12.5% protein. Caputo Pizzeria 00 (11.5%, but also a finer mill) Giusto's Artisan Unbleached - 11-11.5% protein. White Lily Bread Flour - 12.5 % protein. I can make a nearly identical pie with any of these except for the Italian 00 flour. It's mostly technique. I'm not saying that the type of flour makes no difference, but I am saying that it's a small difference and I've had great pies from restaurants with varying types of flour. Don't get too hung up on it. One is not 'better' than the other, it depends on the style you want. Currently I use a 50/50 blend of Caputo and KA Bread. Caputo gives bigger bubbles and a lighter spring. But I prefer to mix it with Bread flour to give it more strength. In Naples, the dough is very soft and hard to hold and often eaten with a knife and fork. NY street pizza is easily folded and held. They typically use a strong Hi Gluten Flour. My pies are closer to the Neapolitan, but not quite. You can still hold it, but sometimes it flops a bit at the tip. The 00 has a finer mill and also it will absorb much less water than the other flours. The 00 flour really is quite different than the others. If you are baking at under 750F, you should really not use 00. It will never brown and you'll have much more luck with another flour. The ratio of Flour and water can dramatically change the characteristics of the dough. Having said that though, I don't measure my "% hydration". I do it strictly by feel. Lately my dough has been much much wetter than ever before. Wetter dough stretches easier with less pull back. It seems to develop faster in the fridge. And it provides more steam for more puff in the final baked crust. The higher the temperature of the oven, the wetter the dough should be. At super high heats needed to make a pie in 2 minutes or less, you need a lot of moisture to keep it from burning and sticking to the baking surface. 3- Kneading - This is one of the most important steps. Follow along carefully. There are 100 recipes on the net that say you dump all the ingredients together, turn the machine on and you will have a great dough. It's not true. But once you understand these steps your dough will transform into something smooth and amazing. Kitchen Aid Mixer vs. Electrolux DLX mixer: I started a little revolution on PizzaMaking.com when I dumped by Kitchen Aid Mixer and bought an Electrolux DLX mixer. The DLX is a MUCH better machine. However, if you follow ALL the techniques here, you can get a good dough out of a Kitchen Aid. The DLX is easier to use. You can make a dozen pies or more in it at a clip, no problem. And you can really just let it do it's work alone. With the KA you sometimes have to stop it and pull the dough off the hook and continue. So I like the DLX. But I know many of you have already bought Kitchen Aids. As long as you follow the process carefully, you should be OK. The DLX takes a while to get used to, but now I'm really rocking with it. See Dough.htm for early experiments. Join groups.yahoo.com/group/Mixer-Owners for info on the DLX and how to use it. I use a DLX with the Roller and Scrapper attachments. I will put up photos of this process at some point. Some one else has posted a video of a DLX. The Wet-Kneading Technique with Autolyse. I call this process Wet-Kneading. It's the key to great dough: Autolyse - Autolyse is a fancy word that just means one simple thing. The flour and water should sit together for at least 20 minutes before kneading begins. It's a CRITICAL step. Some say that you should mix just the flour and water together, then after 20 minutes add the salt and yeast, then mix. Others say you can add all the ingredients at the beginning. I have found very little difference. Pour all the ingredients into the mixer, except just use 75% of the flour for now. So all of the water, salt, poolish (Video of Poolish), Instant dry Yeast (if used) and 75% of the flour are put into the mixer. Everything should be room temperature or a bit cooler. There is no need to dissolve the yeast in warm water or feed it sugar. 'Proofing' the yeast was probably required decades ago, but I've never had yeast that didn't activate. The yeast feeds on the flour so you don't need to put in sugar. The proofing step that you see in many recipes is really an old wives tale at this point. Mix on lowest speed for 1-2 minutes or until completely blended. At this stage you should have a mix that is drier than a batter, but wetter than a dough. Closer to batter probably. Cover and Let it rest for 20 minutes. One of the most important things I've found is that these rest periods have a huge impact on the final product. I've seen so much arguing online about the proper flour for making pizza. "You need super high protein flour to get the right structure for a pizza dough". People argue endlessly about brands and minor changes in flour blends, types of water, etc. A lot of this is myth and a big waste of time. The autolyse period is FAR more important to creating structured gluten development than is the starting protein percentage. Autolyse and knead properly and AP flour will produce a great pizza with a lot of structure. Do these steps poorly and bread or high gluten flour will not help you at ALL. This step reminds me of mixing pie dough. After you add the water to pie dough, it's crumbly. But after sitting for 20 minutes, it's a dough. The water takes time to soak in, and when it does it transforms the pie dough. It's really a similar thing here with pizza dough. Start Mixing on Low speed for 8 minutes. 5 minutes into it start adding flour gradually. This part is critical and it's something that I did not understand at all until relatively recently: Even if the dough is very sticky - that is it does not have enough flour in it to form a ball and it is still halfway between a batter and a dough - it is still working. This is where MOST of the kneading occurs. The gluten IS working at this point even though it's not a dough yet. If you are using a KA, and you lift the hook, the dough should fall off by itself. The hook should look like its going through the dough, and not pushing the dough around. It should be that wet until nearly the end. With the DLX you can play with the scrapper and the roller, pressing them together to allow the dough to extrude through the gaps. This really works the dough. The DLX mechanism is totally different than a regular mixer. After the first 6-8 minutes increase the speed of the mixer slightly. I never go higher than 1/3 of the dial on my mixer. Keep in mind that in the old days they mixed this by hand (Anthony at Una Pizza Napoletana in NYC still does). You should add most of the remaining flour. But you still want a very wet dough, so don't go crazy. At some point during this process the dough should be getting much firmer and should form more of a ball. Mix another minute or so a this stage You may find that the dough is sticking to the roller /hook and not really working too much at this point. This is why it's so important to do most of the mixing at the earlier, wetter stages. Once the dough is at this point, it is done. My recommendation is this: DON'T BE A SLAVE TO RECIPES AND PERCENTAGES . It's fine to use the spreadsheet or other measures as a guideline, but you have to judge how much flour goes into the dough by feeling it. Do NOT force more flour into the mix just to reach a number. If the dough feels good and soft and you still have flour you have not put in, don't sweat it. Leave it out. In the end you need a wet dough. In fact, even the dough has formed more of ball, if you let it sit, it should spread out a little and look a little limp. This is what you want, not a tight ball, but a slack, wet soft dough. One of the best ways to see how your dough is doing is to sprinkle a little flour on in and just feel it. It should feel baby bottom soft. If you don't sprinkle flour it will just feel sticky and not look smooth. But sprinkle a tiny bit of flour and now its soft and smooth. This is what you want. This is a much gentler recipe than most and it shows in the final dough. With Hi Gluten flours a commercial mixer and a dry dough, you will find that the dough is tough to work and consequently both the machine and the dough will get very hot. Commercial bakers compensate by starting with cool water and by measuring the temperature of the dough as they go. The procedures I'm outlining don't require this. The wet knead technique and the lower protein all but eliminates the friction. You can expect the dough to heat only about 3-4 F while mixing, so it's not an issue. Let it rest for 15-20 minutes. If you were to do a window pane test before the rest, you might be disappointed. Afterwards it will test well: Yes, this dough is so thin, you can read right through it. This is what is meant by "windowpaning". You never actually stretch it this thin when making a pie. But I just want you to see what is achievable. In fact, you can make an excellent pie without getting it this well kneaded. But you should know how to do this as part of your overall repertoire. This dough would never rip or fight with you when being stretched to perfect pizza size. This dough was made with King Arthur Bread Flour, not high gluten flour. You can achieve this windowpaning even with All Purpose flour. Technique and not the starting protein % is the key. Much talk on the web says that the dough's extensibility/elasticity will be affected by how long the dough rises and at what temp and the kind of yeast. In my opinion, these are very, very minor factors. The mixing/kneading process and the hydration are 90% of the battle. After the dough has been kneaded and rested for a few minutes, the deed is done. It's either going to spread well or it isn't. You can't fix it that much at this point by adjusting rise times and temps. If you find that your dough is not extensible enough or rips when you stretch it, odds are HIGH that it has not been autolysed long enough, not kneaded well enough and/or it's too dry. If you are using a Kitchen Aid Mixer you may notice that the ball sticks to the hook and kind of just spins around and doesn't seem to be really working. Mixing an extra 20 minutes seems to do nothing because it's just spinning helplessly on the hook. Ugh. Mix at a wetter more pliable stage and you can fix this problem. Pour out onto a floured surface and portion into balls with a scrapper. I use a digital scale. The dough at this point should be extremely soft and highly elastic. I use 310g per 13" pie. The more elastic the dough, the less you need. I store the dough in individual 5 cup Glad plastic containers as you see below. I wipe them with an oiled paper towel - super thin coating. This will help them come out of the container. But I don't want any oil in the dough. The rules for "Vera Pizza Napoletana" say no oil. I probably have literally one or two drops per ball. Oil the container and not the dough. You only need a drop or two of oil cover a whole container - you can kind of polish it with oil using a paper towel. In contrast, you'd need a teaspoon to oil the dough because you can't spread it so thin. Also the ball would probably need oil on both sides, which is bad because by oiling the top of the dough (which will end up being the bottom of the pizza), you are going to get oil on your pizza stone which will burn at high temps in an unpleasant way. Since you want to minimize the amount of oil, oil the container. For similar reasons, I don't use zip loc bags. Use a container. How wet should the dough be? I think many will be surprised to see just how wet I have my dough. With each of these, you can click the photo to enlarge. I'm showing these because I want you to get a sense of how that dough should look and feel. This high level of hydration is not necessarily best for low temperature ovens. But if you are cooking at 800F, like Patsy's, this is what you want: This dough has rested for 20 minutes in my DLX mixer. You can see how wet it is. This is enough for 6 balls of dough. It almost pours out (with a little push from a spatula). But you can see how easily it stretches and how wet it still is. I don't know the %hydration of this dough but it is 65% or higher, I'm sure. This is the unshaped mass. Next I sprinkle a little bit of flour on it and knead it by hand for 30 seconds, just to reshape it. In just a few seconds it looks totally different. The outside is drier because it has been sprinkled with flour. Inside it is still very wet and as I cut it with a dough scrapper into balls, I have to sprinkle a little more, just to keep it from sticking to my hands. I cut it and put it into these easy to find Glad containers. They cost about $1 each at the supermarket.. I've got like 15 of them. They are perfectly sized for individual dough's. I strongly prefer these to plastic bags. They are sealable and that keeps in the moisture. They stack easily in the fridge, and the dough comes out easily and without deflating the dough in the process. I spread the container with a drop or two of olive oil. I let them rest another 10 minutes, then put them in the Fridge for 1-6 days. If your dough is very wet it may start out as a nice looking tight ball, but over time in the fridge it looks like it's sinking into a disk. This may appear worrisome. When you see dough sinking there may be several causes. Dough that is 'slack' - overworked and/or old, will sink like this. But if you've followed these instructions this is not the reason your dough is sinking. The sinking is caused by the fact that the dough is very wet. Don't worry about it. It's probably going to be very good. This is the dough several days later. It's been sitting out warming up for about an hour. Notice that it has not risen that much. It does have more volume - probably about 50% more than the dough above. But it's also changed shape - it's so wet and soft and when it rises it kind of just spreads out. This is what you want. This dough is ready for baking. Most recipes say that the dough should double in size. This is WAY too much. In total the dough should expand by about 50% in volume. It would seem like the more yeast bubbles in the dough, the lighter the pizza will be. This is the intuitive guess. But it's not true. The yeast starts the bubbles, but it's really steam that blows the bubbles up. If the yeast creates bubbles that are too big, they become weak and simply pop when the steam comes resulting in a flat dense, less springy crust. Think of blowing a bubble with bubble gum. How tight is a 2 inch bubble? It depends: As you start with a small bubble and blow it up to 2 inches it's strong and tight. But at 4 inches it's reached it's peak.. Now if it shrinks back to 2 inches, it'll be very weak. So a 2 inch bubble is strong on the way up and weak on the way down. You want bubbles on the way up. If the dough is risen high, the bubbles are big and the dough will have a weaker structure and will collapse when heat creates steam. The lightest crust will come from a wet dough (wet = a lot of steam), with a modest amount of rise (bubbles formed, but small and strong). Some people start with a warm rise for 6 hours or so, and then move the dough to the fridge. I'm not a huge fan of this method. Once the bubbles are formed, I don't want the dough to get cold and have the bubbles shrink. This weakens their structure. What you want is a steady slow rise, with no reversals. Always expanding, just very, very slowly. My oven takes about 80 minutes to heat up. The dough finishes rising in about the same time. So I take the dough out and start the oven at the same time. 80 minutes might seem like a fast rise, but the real development is done in the fridge. Here is where experience will make a difference - I look at my dough a few hours before bake time and I make an assessment. If the dough has not risen much in the fridge I will take it out earlier than 80 minutes. If it's risen too much, I leave it in the fridge till a few minutes before bake. It really takes a good eye. You can make a last minute adjustment to speed it up by warming it. Before I turn my bottom oven on the cleaning cycle, I warm up my top oven to about 95F. If I think I need to speed up the dough, I can then place it in the 95F environment for while before baking. It's a little harder to make an adjustment the other way. If I find that it's rising too fast and my oven won't be ready for an hour, I'm kind of out of luck. I could chill it, but it's going to weaken if I do that. So I try to err on the side where I still have some control. The softer the dough, the faster the rise. It's simply easier for small amounts of carbon dioxide to push up on a softer dough. If the dough falls a little after rising, you've waited too long and you will find it's past it's prime. Ideally you should use it well before it's at it's peak. This takes experience. You are better off working with a dough that is under risen, than over risen. Over risen dough (don't do this). When you spread the dough, you will find that it's not great for spinning over your head. It would have been really great at this when you first did the windowpane test. But now that it has risen it's soft like butter and just stretches easily. Don't worry about the spin. If you want to impress everyone with spin, make a drier dough with a hi gluten flour and more salt and let it age for just a few hours and you can spin all you want. Never use a rolling pin or knead the dough or man handle it. You are just popping the bubbles and will have a flat dough. Build a little rim for yourself with your fingers,. then spread the dough. Can you see how smooth this dough looks? Spread the dough on the counter and then move to the peel. Marble is the perfect surface for spreading dough. One goal is to use very little bench flour, especially if you are cooking over 800F. At high temps, the flour will turn bitter, so you are better off shaping on the counter, then moving to the peel, which will result in less bench flour. With a very wet dough this takes some practice. You don't necessarily have to use a lot of bench flour, but it does have to be even. You don't want the dough sticking to the peel, of course. I put flour in a bowl and dunk the dough lightly, getting all sides including the edge, then move it to the granite counter. I put just a tiny amount on the peel, which I spread evenly with my hands. When I move from the counter to the peel, most of the flour on the dough shakes off.. Once on the peel, shake it every once in a while to make sure the dough is not stuck. Always shake it just before placing it in the oven, otherwise you may find that it's stuck to the peel and falling off unevenly onto the stone. At that point you probably can't recover well and you'll make a mess. So always shake just beforehand. When I make the pie, I work quickly, so as not to let the moisture in the dough come out through the tiny dry flour coating. Then, and this is important, I shake the peel prior to putting it in the oven, just to make certain it's loose. In fact, you can shake it at any time during the process. If you are taking too long to put on the toppings or there is some delay, shake again. Make sure it never sticks. Don't resort to using too much flour or any cornmeal or semolina. It just takes practice to use very little flour, yet still keep it from sticking. If you've made the dough correctly you should be able to spread it with no problem. If it is pulling back on you and trying to shrink, you have not mixed it enough. If you've done half the steps above, you should not be experiencing this problem at all though. You can spread the dough a bit at a time. Do it half way, then wait 10-15 seconds, then spread a little more, then a little more. Be gentle with it. This photo is from the same pie as this one. This pie was very interesting for many reasons. Although I have a lot of practice handling wet dough, this is the first time I've tried to hand knead in at least 5 years. 4- The Oven: I've got my oven cranked up to over 800 F. Use this section with caution: i.e. no lawyers please. I'm just telling you here what I did. I'm not telling you what you should do. You are responsible for whatever you choose to do. In Naples, Italy they have been cooking pizza at very high temperatures for a long time. There are some real physics going on here. The tradition is to cook with a brick oven. I don't have a brick oven. So this is what I do: On most ovens the electronics won't let you go above 500F, about 300 degrees short of what is needed. (Try baking cookies at 75 instead of 375 and see how it goes). The heat is needed to quickly char the crust before it has a chance to dry out and turn into a biscuit. At this temp the pizza takes 2 - 3 min to cook (a diff of only 25F can change the cook time by 50%). It is charred, yet soft. At 500F it takes 20 minutes to get only blond in color and any more time in the oven and it will dry out. I've cook good pizzas at temps under 725F, but never a great one. The cabinet of most ovens is obviously designed for serious heat because the cleaning cycle will top out at over 975 which is the max reading on my Raytec digital infrared thermometer. The outside of the cabinet doesn't even get up to 85F when the oven is at 800 inside. So I clipped off the lock using garden shears so I could run it on the cleaning cycle. I pushed a piece of aluminum foil into the door latch (the door light switch) so that electronics don't think I've broken some rule by opening the door when it thinks it's locked. Brick ovens are domed shaped. Heat rises. There is more heat on top than on the bottom. A brick oven with a floor of 800F might have a ceiling of 1200F or more, just a foot above. This is essential. The top of the pizza is wet and not in direct contact with the stone, so it will cook slower. Therefore, to cook evenly, the top of the oven should be hotter than the stone. To achieve this, I cover the pizza stone top and bottom with loose fitting foil. This keeps it cool as the rest of the oven heats up. When I take a digital read of the stone, I point it at the foil and it actually reads the heat reflected from the top of the oven. When it hits 850, I take the foil off the top with tongs and then read the stone. It's about 700-725. Now I make my pizza. As I prep, the oven will get up to 800Floor, 900+ Top. Perfect for pizza. Different ovens have different heat distributions. I experimented extensively with foil to redistribute the heat. I tried using one layer, multiple layers and I adjusted the amount I used on the top and the bottom. I also played with using the shiny side up or down, etc. Eventually, I worked out a simple system for myself. Some have tried to get high heat using a grill. This can produce high heat, but all from the bottom. One could adjust the differential, by playing games with foil. But an oven with heat from above is better. The exact temp needed depends on the type of flour and the amount of water. The more protein, the quicker it burns. Hi Gluten flour may burn at these temps. In general, I recommend higher gluten flours for lower temp ovens. This will yield a more NYC style pie. For a more Neapolitan pie I recommend lower protein flours and a hotter oven. I use Bread rather than KASL at these high temps. Caputo Pizzeria 00 flour has even less protein than KA bread. See my report below. Also the drier it is the more it burns. So in general, at high temps you need a very wet dough. I make sure that I cover any oven glass loosely with 2 layers of foil because it will shatter if a drop of sauce gets on it. With the foil it's fine. I make sure the foil is loose. If it's fitted to the glass, it will transfer heat too quickly and the glass is still in jeopardy. Another problem is that once the cleaning cycle starts, it just pumps heat into the oven and I can't reduce the temp. If I get a late start (my guests are late or my dough needs another 30 minutes to rise), I can't just shut off the oven and then start it up again in 15 minutes. Once I cancel the cleaning cycle, I can't start it up again until the oven cools below 500F (at least on my Kitchen Aid oven). Therefore I have to wait and cycle back around. It's like an hour ordeal. But I have worked around these issues and I now have enough experience that I can pretty much control my temperature. I can cool the stone, for example, by placing a metal sheet pan on it for a minute or so. It will absorb a tremendous amount of heat very quickly. I never do this with Teflon which releases unseen toxic chemicals over 600F. I Remove this pan with the peel, rather than with oven mitts to prevent burns. Occasionally I also place something in the door jam, like a meat mallet, for a few minutes to let heat out. Brick Oven vs. Other Ovens : I have a list of my favorite pizza restaurants at the bottom. All but one of these use coal fired brick ovens. But interestingly, the number 1 place uses a regular old gas fired oven that you see in any pizza store in NYC. This is Johnny's in Mt. Vernon, NY. Worth a pilgrimage for sure. They also use dry sliced Mozzarella instead of fresh. Go figure. That place is an enigma. They are also very secretive. I can tell you they definitely use a sourdough culture because I obtained it from pizza place across the street (yeasts can take over a neighborhood) but it died out. I'm going to get it again someday. Mmmmm. You don't need a brick oven to perfectly char a pizza. This was done in an electric. Patsy's is #2 on my list. It used to be #1 but my last 3 trips to were disappointing. There is a new guy working the oven and the pies are coming out like dry crispy flatbreads. It was NOT good. And I saw a review in a magazine that had a photo of a Patsy's pie and that one also looked dry and crispy and the article even described it that way. Yuck!. The reviewer at SliceNY.com also mentioned that he might downgrade Patsy's if they slip any more . So this means that Johnny's, which used to be tied with Patsy's, now sits alone at the top of my list. I've got it as Johnny's, Patsy's, Sally's, Luzzo's, Una Pizza Napoletana, me, then Sac's. Frankly, if they don't shoot the new cook, Patsy's could drop from my top 5 because right now it's resting on it's laurels. Lombardi's is just OK in my book. Nods for history, but too thick and gummy. Grimaldi's and John's are not in my top 10 either. But the original Totonno's is up there somewhere. Back to the Brick oven thing. I once bought a Patsy's dough and rushed it home to my oven in Atlanta and baked it. The dough itself was incredible. It was the most windowpaning, blistering and elastic dough I've ever seen, by a wide margin. Very impressive. But when I baked it, it was just ok. It tasted a little flat. It had less of a charred flavor even though it had a charred color. It actually tasted exactly like my own pies tasted at that time. By that was a long time ago. My own latest pies have overcome a lot of this. I'm aging my dough longer than Patsy's and I think that is making up for some of the difference. My opinion is that the coal and the fire adds about 10-20% but the rest is the heat distribution. If you can get that right in a regular oven, you are going to be thrilled with the results. Johnny's proves this beyond a shadow of a doubt. My latest pies are nearly perfect too. Some of these pies look & tasted just like a Patsy's pie, I'm not sure you could tell the difference. And believe me, I notice small differences or I wouldn't have come this far. These latest pies are really, really close. The photos above, as well as those below are good examples. I can't get advantages of the brick oven, but I make up for it by aging the dough longer and this imparts extra flavor. Of course, if you do have access to brick oven, especially one that uses coal, by all means use it. But LEARN to use it. I've seen too many brick oven places that make terrible pizza. Why? Because they think that having the oven is all they need to do. You still have to have everything else right. And I've even seen brick ovens where the heat is not right. I just saw a place with a Brick oven that had it set to 395F. Such a total waste of time. The oven does not work by magically transmitting brick flavor into the dough. It works by generating more heat than a regular oven. At least that's 90% of it. Yes there is a dryness to the wood burning and a smokiness and these are advantages of a brick oven. But mostly it's the super high heat that is important. Go the extra mile and get yourself the right digital thermometer and work the oven correctly. This will take a lot of practice. Check out Frankie G's cool brick oven and video. My first Brick Oven Experience : I just tried a friend's brick oven. We had a lot of trouble holding the temp right and most of the pies were cooked at 500-600F. So I'm not done experimenting yet. But I can say this: a 7 minute pie in a brick oven does taste better than a 7 min pie in an electric. So there definitely is something good going on in that oven. It has to do with the dryness of the bake. I will post more on this as I make progress. Dec 2006: I've now made 5 Brick oven batches. I'll fill in more detail later, but here's a photo of a 57 second pie. It looks pretty cool, but it was by no means my favorite pie: 5- I use a Raytec digital thermometer. I notice that every spot in my oven is a different temperature. I've learned what's going on inside. These brands are much cheaper than the Raytec. I haven't used them, but they look fine to me and are much cheaper, under $60: 6- Dry mozzarella cheese : This step is totally optional and I don't do this anymore. Early on I was having problems with my mozzarella cheese breaking down due to the high heat. I was also having problems with the sauce sogging up the dough. So I used dry boars head mozzarella, sliced on a machine under the sauce. This protected the dough. But I've since improved both my sauce and wet mozzarella management so I don't use dry cheese anymore. However, I should note that the only pie that I've tasted that might actually be better than Patsy's is Johnny's in Mt. Vernon. They use only dry sliced cheese. I'm not sure of the brand, but it is fantastic. Patsy's does not use this step, nor is it true Neapolitan. 7- Lay fresh basil right on the dry cheese or sauce. It's important that the leaves get a bit wet or they'll just burn. Just tap the tops with the bottom of the sauce spoon to moisten. Basil is great fresh out of an herb garden. I will post more on this someday. Don't wash your basil. It just kills it. You can put the basil on before the pie bakes or after. 8 - Sauce: For years I was so focused on the dough that I let the sauce lapse. I just didn't do much with it. But now I feel that my dough is consistently great, I have focused more on the sauce and it has really transformed into something wonderful. The key step is something I call 'Tomato Rinsing". But first let's start with the tomatoes themselves. There is a lot of talk about buying tomatoes grown in the San Marzano Valley which has rich volcanic soil. Others claim the region is now polluted. I don't know. All I know is what I taste. I've not been too impressed with San Marzanos I've tried. These are in rough order with the best at the top. Nutrilia (very hard to find but really good) Sclafani San Marzano (DOP Certified) Cento San Marzano (DOP Certified) Cento Italian (I used to have these ranked much higher, but they've fallen off) San Marzano Brand (grown in California, the liars) Pomi (in the paper box) LaBella San Marzano 'Brand' (not really grown in San Marzano valley either - more liars) Bella Rosa whole peeled tomatoes from http://www.escalon.net, Georgia Gold Red (local to me) and many cheaper brands. I have not this one, but Marco vouches for them, so they might be excellent. I don't think they are easy to find though. Others praise these, but I have not tried them: I know that Patsy's buys from Sassone in the Bronx (where I grew up). But I haven't tried a case yet. They may be repackaging any number of brands. Everyone vouches for Escalon, but I dislike them. The Escalon are round tomatoes, whereas most of the Italian brands are Plum tomatoes, which I strongly prefer. I also prefer the plain Cento Italian over the Cento DOP Certified San Marzano. Here are my Prep tips: Always buy Whole Peeled Plum Tomatoes and crush them yourself. Be careful of marketing tricks like cans that say Italian 'Style' instead of Italian. Italian Style means nothing. It's subjective. If I grew tomatoes in Chernobyl I could still claim they are Italian Style. Similarly there's a San Marzano 'Brand' which is grown in CA. I hate marketing gimmicks like that. The put the word 'brand' so small that you can barely read it. Shake every can as you buy it. If it sounds watery, it is likely to be more bitter. Try to get cans which sound more viscous. The sound will vary a bit by season. They try to pick and pack in just one season, but still there are seasonal differences even within the same brand. If you have a local tomato supplier, try those too. One time I bought a jar of tomatoes at a farmers market - no can. These were hand packed and they had no tin can taste. They were excellent but all the major suppliers use cans. Be on the lookout for jars someday. If you want to go crazy and make your own, try 'ugly ripe' heirloom tomatoes. The taste of these are amazing and I use these when I need whole tomatoes. When I open a can I taste it. Every can is a little different. About 10% of the cans I just throw out because they are too bitter and I put too much effort in the dough to waste it on a $2 can of bad tomatoes. DON'T make a sauce. That is, don't pre-cook the tomatoes. The tomatoes will cook on the pizza. If you cook a sauce first, it will cook again on the psizza, turning it brown and yucky. No need to make a sauce. Look at how overcooked many sauces are. The best places don't do this. This is actually the one step in this whole process that you can save yourself some time. I strain the seeds. This is really optional. If you do choose to do it, follow these steps, which seem obvious now, but took me a long time to flesh out: Pour the can out into a bowl. Cut the green/yellow stem ends off the tomatoes with your hands or a paring knife, then discard. Squeeze out the seeds into the puree and then Dip the tomato into the puree. You can even cut the tomato open to get out any remaining seeds, by essentially rinsing them with the puree. This will have all the seeds fall into the puree. Put the flesh back in the can. At the end of this process you have a can of flesh and a bowl of watery puree and seeds. Strain this, pouring the puree back into the can. In the strainer are then 90% of the seeds, all by themselves. Discard the seeds. Now crush the tomatoes. This is one of those areas where I made a recent change for the better and it's really helped a lot. I used to crush the tomatoes by hand. But it was always a bit chunky. Now I blend them with an immersion mixer ("boat motor"). I cannot tell you exactly why this has made a huge improvement in the TASTE of the tomatoes, but it has. I've done side by side taste tests. The tomatoes should be crushed but not pur ed. Go Easy. I have nothing against using a food processor or mill, but I will say that you should not crush by hand. Tomato Rinsing : All cans have some bitterness. You need some bitterness and you don't want to strip all of it out. But if the can is too bitter it's not good. I have a procedure I call tomato rinsing to remove some of the bitterness. But you have to taste the can and determine for yourself if it needs it. The better brands on my list don't. Here's the Tomato Rinsing procedure: Strain the tomatoes in a fine mesh strainer.. If the mesh is fine, the water will be mostly clear with very little tomato escaping. If the water escaping is very red, pour it back on top of the tomatoes and continue straining. Eventually the water will run almost completely clear. Here's the key. The water that comes out is completely bitter. Taste it. What I do is pour fresh water on top of the strained tomatoes and strain them again. Taste this second batch of water. It's also bitter but less so. You are removing bitterness and acid without losing a drop of red tomato. Instead you are replacing this bitter water with fresh water. You can repeat this several times if you like, but once or twice is usually fine. The net result is that what is left over, which is all the red tomato solids, is sooooo sweet and yummy. Here are some other things you can do to remove the bitterness. But don't go crazy adding tons of spices and things. It's mostly just tomatoes. Add some grated Romano cheese directly into the tomatoes. I use Locatelli Romano. Some have criticized this, but I like it. A bit of sugar will also help 1/4 - 1 teaspoon. Taste and see. A pinch of salt. A pinch of dried oregano, crushed by hand to release the oils. If you are used to putting garlic in your sauce, try these steps once without it. Taste and taste. So you are removing and then adding back water. In the end though you should have less water than you started with. The total weight is probably about 1/3 less than you started with. But the exact amount of water you remove depends on the overall temperature of the oven and the temperature differential in the oven.. There is not much time in a hot oven to evaporate the sauce, so the hotter the oven, the drier the sauce must be going in. But if the top differential is high, the sauce will evaporate too quickly and needs to start wetter. You have to test. Surprisingly, if the sauce is too dry, it's not as sweet. You don't want it soupy but don't overstrain either. This will take real practice with your oven. Sometimes after the first pie I add more water to my sauce. Again, this is another area where recent improvements have really transformed the sauce. I think that when the sauce is chunky (hand crushed) it's harder to get the amount of water right. Here's the strainer and Immersion mixer I use: Also, while straining, you are letting the crushed tomatoes sit uncovered and this really helps the tin can taste to dissipate. Prep the tomatoes when you make the dough. Even though you are not adding too much to your sauce, the tomatoes do better when the flavors settle in for a day and also the tin can taste dissipates. So prep a day or more in advance. Again, this is another recent change that has helped a lot. Refrigerate the tomatoes if you are not using them, but let them come to room temp when put on the pie. If the sauce is cold, the top of the dough is much colder than then bottom and you can end up with a thin layer of dough near the sauce that is gummier and less cooked than the rest of the dough. When you spread the sauce on the pie, put a little less in the center because the liquid tends to pool there. If you are using a very hot oven like I am, don't go too close to the edge. Too much sauce near the edge will keep the cornice from developing well. In most of the photos below I put the sauce too close to the edge myself. I will be more conscious of this as I go. Use about half of the sauce that you think you need. Trust me. Experiment with less and less ingredients on the pizza and you will see a surprising improvement in overall balance. Using Fresh Tomato. An alternative to canned tomatoes is fresh tomatoes. Even the best cans have a tinny odor, so you'd think that nothing could top fresh tomatoes. But using 100% fresh tomatoes is not necessarily the best thing. If you prepare fresh tomatoes and taste it raw, compared to canned, the fresh will win. But somehow, on the pizza, the canned will win. Partly it's that the fresh tomato taste is simply different than we are all used to and so it never tastes like your favorite pizza place. I've probably not experimented enough to say for sure. As I stated above, I don't recommend cooking your sauce before making a pizza, because the tomatoes will cook again on the pizza. If you think about it, the canning process itself forces the tomatoes to be heated once before sealing, then if you cook a sauce, that's heating #2 and then the pie is #3. So I recommend cutting back to 2 times. If you switch to fresh tomatoes though, you are back to just 1 time, on the pie itself. And for a 2 minute pie, that is not very much. So perhaps a solution, if you are using fresh tomatoes, is to cook a sauce. I will experiment a little more and edit this section. Another possibility is to blend fresh and canned. This has a lot of potential, I think and I will experiment with this more also. Here's a method for preparing fresh tomatoes: Start with great tomatoes. I use "ugly ripe" heirloom tomatoes. These are the best to me. FYI, they are really amazing raw for a caprese salad (tomato, Mozz, basil, oil, balsamic, salt, pepper). Other heirlooms are probably good also, as are fresh picked local tomatoes. After that I'd probably go for plum tomatoes. I'm not a huge fan of the vine-ripe brand. They look great, but the taste is so-so. Regular beefsteak tomatoes are really not worth the effort. Blanch them. Blanching is a pretty easy technique. You just put the tomato in boiling water for 30 seconds or less, then take it out and put it in ice water for 30 seconds, then you can just peel it by hand. Cored them with a paring knife and pull out most of the seeds by hand. Ground them a bit with an immersion mixer. Strained them. They were very, very wet and will lose a lot of weight in water. Added a tiny amount of sea salt and a few fresh basil leaves from the garden and that's about it. Cook them? As I said, this is my next experiment. After straining I figure that it would take about 3.5 lbs of tomatoes to equal one 35 oz can. Since Ugly Ripes are twice the price of any other tomatoes (they are VERY tasty) - $5.99/lb, this makes it over $20 for a small batch about equal to a $1.89 can. But who's counting. 9- Grate some Locatelli Romano and/or parmessian cheese right on top of the tomatoes & basil (do this whether you put some romano into the tomatoes or not). But don't over do it. Just a TINY little bit. But don't skip this step. It's really key to the sauce. Balance, balance, balance. 10- Sprinkle kosher or sea salt. 11- Fresh Mozzarella. I live in Atlanta, and getting good cheese is a real problem. It's the weakest link in my pie right now. In NYC all the mozzarella is packed in water, but it is still firm. Down here in Atlanta, I can't find great fresh mozz. It's either dry cheese or else water logged. If the cheese is too wet, it will break down on the pizza and even disintegrate into ricotta. Ricotta is made by processing the leftover water used to make mozzarella. If the mozz is not made right, it will actually break down into ricotta before your eyes. Not good. You can see this in some of my photos. In Naples they use Bufala Mozzarella which is made from water buffalo instead of cows. The problem with using Bufala Mozz here in the US is that it's mostly imported and usually not that fresh, especially during the summer. If you can find a good supplier, then use it. Also, note that all fresh dairy products sold in the US are made from pasteurized milk, whereas the European versions are often unpasteurized. If you've ever had butter or cheese in Paris, for example, you know that what we get here is bland in comparison. So reproducing what you tasted on your trip to Italy is difficult. There are a few American suppliers of Bufula Mozz including http://www.starhilldairy.com/prod_mozzarella.shtml which is available at many Whole Foods. Put only about 8-10 small pieces of cheese on the pie. Better to have a few dollops than an even mix. Trust me on this one too. If you find, as I did, that the cheese will not hold up to the intense heat and breaks down, there are few things you can do to keep the cheese from overheating on the pie prematurely: Dry the cheese extremely well by wrapping in a paper towel for 1-3 hours. You'd think the wetter it is the better it would hold up to the heat, but its not so. The water inside boils and degrades the cheese. Sometimes the cheese is so wet I have to change the wrapping several times. This might be avoided by simply draining for a long long time. I think Marco says he drains for 8 hours. Put the cheese on in cubes rather than slices. Start with cold cheese. Put a tiny drop of sauce on them which has to boil off first, thus keeping the cheese insulated for a bit. Doing all of these may be overkill. You have to experiment with your cheese. Many cheeses packed in water are unsalted. If this is so, put in 1/4 teaspoon of kosher or sea salt in the water, preferably at least a day before you use it. Don't over salt the cheese, as this may cause some inferior cheeses to break down somewhat. If you can't find a cheese locally, these are some suppliers that ship fresh mozz.. It's pricey to do it this way though: http://www.mozzny.com/ - Pretty good but not the best NY has to offer. They shipped them in a cold pack box and they came very fresh. If you don't have a local supplier, this is definitely a viable but expense choice. http://www.mozzco.com/ - I've not tried it, but these guys look very serious about their craft. Even more expensive than the previous one. Making your own cheese. Another alternative is to make your own cheese. I'm no expert on this, so I'm going to refer you to other internet sources. But I'm going to give a super basic primer. Good sources of info. Leeners - I would start here. Cheesemaking.com - this is an easy kit, but missing a few things. Google other recipes. There's a lot to learn. Do not use ultra-pasteurized dairy products. The ultra-pasteurization changes the structure and it won't curdle any more. Unfortunately, some states are allowing companies to remove the term 'ultra' and they are passing off ultra-pasteurized as just pasteurized. So be careful. Start with unhomogenized milk. You probably have to go to a farmers market or dairy for this. It should be about $6-$8 per gallon, which makes about 1 pound or a little more of cheese. When an animal is milked, it comes out as cream and skim and the process of homogenization blends them together. It's like shaking oil and vinegar, but the shake is so fine, it never settles out again. So an alternative to unhomogenized is to use cream and skim together. But most creams have been ultra-pasteurized, so you have to find one that is not. How many water buffalo do you own? Well if you have them, use them, otherwise, find a cow. Water buffalo milk has more fat, so one experiment worth trying is to add more cream to your cow's milk. Acidify the milk. Milk will curdle best at a ph level of about 5.2. From my experience, using a ph test kit or digital ph meter is essential. Citric Acid - the easy way. You measure the acid and blend it in and presto, it's acidic. But if you measure wrong, you are going to be unhappy with it. Note than many measuring spoon sets are not that accurate. 2 of my 1/2 teaspoons don't really equal one of my teaspoons, I discovered. There went 3 hours of my life I'll never get back. If you put in too much it will curdle but never form a ball and be stretchable. I've had the best results (nothing to write home about yet), using only 1.25 teaspoons per gallon of milk, which is much less than most recipes call for. Use a starter culture, just like you do for the dough. The culture eats the milk and make acid. It takes many hours though. Of course, this is the more authentic and flavorful method, but as with all these steps, more work. There are a lot of different cultures that can be used to vary the taste of cheese. Some recipes even just say start with buttermilk or yogurt. But for Mozzarella, the most authentic type is called Thermophilic, but even this seems to be a category and there are several varieties sold under that name. Just like with the yeast, there is a dry instant culture you just toss in and a wet, keep-feeding-it-forever variety. Additives. These are all optional: Italian Mild Lipase Powder - an enzyme. Other flavoring cultures. These are Lactobacilli that produce flavor but no acid. This mirrors the whole yeast/Lactobacilli combination we talked about with the dough. The yeast and Thermophilic organisms are doing the critical jobs of starting bubbles and changing the acid level. But the optional Lactobacilli are doing the flavoring. Calcium Chloride - helps to restore the balance between calcium and protein in store bought milk. It may also be needed with fresh milk. I've only seen this in the Leeners recipe. Rennet - Once the milk is acidic and heated to about 88F, you add an enzyme called rennet and it curdles in just a few minutes. Vegetable or animal. Rennet originally came from the lining of an animal's stomach, but most companies sell vegetable rennet. Tablet or liquid. Thermometer. These kits all use a hand held thermometer, but I prefer to use a digital meat thermometer, because you can just dip it over the side and get continuous readings. pH Test kit or digital meter. Once you've added the rennet, the milk curdles in a few minutes - it separates into chunky curdles and water whey. They you have to cut it to strain the whey out of the curds and then heat it by either microwaving it or pouring hot water (or whey) on it. I recommend the hot liquid because it gives more of a continuous heat, rather than the microwave method which has you heat it, then work it, then heat it again, etc. Be careful not to overwork the cheese or take out too much whey. Then you will end up pulling out all the fat and end up with a dry waxy cheese, like a Polly-O consistency. Watch this guy do it. He is starting with store-bought curd. It's a dark murky video, but worth watching. 13- Olive Oil - This is optional. In Naples they will typically put on a good olive oil. Many oils do not stand up well to these high temperatures. I had one pie at Una Pizza Napoletana in NYC with a very fruity oil from Calabria that was outstanding, even at the high temps. But I don't have the brand. The one's I've tried I can't recommend. 14- Assembly - From the time the sauce hits the dough, the dough is starting to water log. Water logged dough will not rise. This is actually an area that I still need to work on myself. Look at this picture from last night. The rise on the crust is outstanding. but under the sauce the dough has not risen well. In fact it's a bit gummy. The reason is that after I sauced the dough, I took a long time to get it into the oven. Once the sauce touches the dough, the pie should go into the oven seconds later. Have your ingredients laid out so that you can sauce the dough, throw on the other ingredients and get it into the oven immediately. 15- Into the oven for 2-3 minutes. There is a lot of talk about time and temp. Really, time is a better measure than temp. Ovens vary in temp from spot to spot and even 2 stones that have the same surface temp may have a different depth to that heat and that will really play out and affect the time. Ultimately, time is a better measure. There is a lot of debate online about how long it takes to bake a "true" Neapolitan pie. It started off as 2 minutes, then it went to 90 seconds, then 60, then 45 and recently 30 seconds. Some of this is a "boys and their toys" thing. Instead of arguing about horsepower people are arguing about oven temp. Chill out. It is true that in Naples, the pies cook very, very fast, usually in under 90 seconds. If your goal is a true reproduction of the Neapolitan style, then you may want to aim for this. But that is not the only style of tasty pizza. A pie that's cooked in 30 seconds is not necessarily better than one cooked in 150. The faster it cooks the less crispy and more airy it is. But this is only good to a point. Some dough that are cooked super fast have a burnt bitter outside and are raw inside. It takes a lot of practice to get it all right. Believe me, a 2-3 minute pie is going to be great if you follow these steps. My best pies were 2:10 - 2:30. Maybe it will get even better as I go down in time, but I'm skeptical of the 30 second pies. Patsy's makes a GREAT pie in about 4 minutes. Sally's, makes a great pie in 7. I've timed pies at Luzzo's in NYC at 1:55 and at Una Pizza Napoletana at 2:10. These are all notch places with great pies and crust. There's no question that a hot oven is important - you are not going to get a light airy crust with 10 minute pie. But once you are sub-5 minutes, you are easily in the range to make a great tasting pie, provided your dough formulation is correct. If you are having problems with your pie burning on the bottom in a very hot oven, increase the hydration of the dough. Wetter dough burns less. But also, you may have to adjust the balance of temperature (top vs. bottom) in your oven using aluminum foil. See the section above regarding the oven. 16- Remove from oven with a peel. When a pie cooks at these high temps, you may find that it is soggier than you are used to. In Naples, the pies are pretty wet and you cut them with a knife and fork and eat them on a plate. There are a few things you can do to lessen the moisture. Use less sauce and drain it well. But also, I put my pies on a rack when they come out so that any steam that is coming out of the bottom can escape. Just a 2-3 minutes on the screen then onto the metal round where they are cut. Don't cut too quickly. The flavors need to settle and they will be more distinct with a cooler pie. If you don't have a rack, you may find it helpful to transfer the pizza back and forth between the peel and the metal round, to allow the steam to escape from the bottom of the pie. Make sure you dry off the metal round between pies so that moisture doesn t build. With High temp pies, there is the possibility of it being a little soggy in the middle especially if you are using a lower protein flour, such as a 00 flour. Brick ovens are very good at sucking moisture out of the dough very quickly. The environment is very, very dry. One downside of an electric, even one at 800F, is that the moisture tends to pool. One easy solution is to remove the pie from the oven and place it on a perforated metal round such as this one. I place this on my stovetop so that the bottom is exposed, allowing moisture to evaporate for about a minute. Then I move to a regular serving round. I've seen several 'modern' brick ovens that are gas fired. Burning gas creates moisture and ruins much of the effect of the brick oven. Brick ovens should burn wood or coal. 17 -Season with oregano, red pepper flakes, black pepper and maybe a drop of olive oil (depending on how wet it already is). 18- Cut and serve. Good luck, but be prepared for a lot of trial and error. This is a pretty good idea of what you will see if your oven is hot enough. Except for a minor malfunction of the fresh mozz, this is a pretty awesome pie. The new cheese instructions given above have since solved this problem. You can see that the dry cheese underneath bubbled and charred a bit. It was good, but I don't use dry cheese anymore. I will cut some cross sections next time to you can see how light the crust is inside. This pie used hand crushed tomatoes which I think are too chunky. The spring back on the crust is excellent. The holes are big and the crust is light and soft. But this crust was too thin in the middle. Each pie is a learning experience. This pie had no dry cheese, just fresh mozz. Springs right back after squeezing. Notice that the tomatoes were crushed by hand and are chunky. I recommend blending them with an immersion mixer or food processor instead. This pie was awesome. Overall it's probably the best I've ever made. The dough was in the fridge for 6 days. When I took the dough out of the sealed container, it had the aroma of a fine wine. I bet it could have gone another few days without a problem. You can see from the color that I used fresh mozzarella from 2 different batches. Both were excellent though. The cheese breakdown problem has been solved. No dry cheese underneath on this one. This pie was made with KA Sir Lancelot (KASL high gluten flour) rather than my normal KA Bread Flour. The difference was pretty nominal. Flour is important but technique is more critical. The lesson of this pie is that the sauce should be a little thinner in the middle than anywhere else. Can you see it pooling towards the middle. Another lesson of this pie is that I need a better camera. My Sony CyberShot is small and chic, but takes mediocre close-up photos. Next KASL from the same batch. This was an excellent pie all around. It was comparable to the last bread flour batch that rose for 3 days, but not as good as the one that was 6 days old. That one was amazing. This pie was among the first with machine crushed tomatoes, rather than hand crushed. It was a huge improvement. This cross section shows the bread structure. See the holes. They are pretty big and the dough is springy. These cross sections are pretty good. The crust is well defined and high. While the bubbles are big they are not as pronounced as they could be. The likely cause: this dough over rose slightly. The big winner here was the sauce. This was among the first pies with the new sauce technique and it's really an improvement. Same pie on the bottom. Perhaps too charred, but good. This pie was a 6 day cold rise Caputo Pizzeria 00 with 56% hydration. Caputo dough seem to absorb much more flour. I tried a pie with a 3 day cold rise also. I know that everyone is raving about the Caputo. Frankly, I hardly noticed the difference. Nothing wrong with it. But I wouldn't go crazy trying to hunt it down. In the last 4 months, mostly to deal with claims on the net, I've tried KA AP, KA Bread, KASL and now Caputo. I'm right back where I started from. Specialty flour is not a huge factor in this process. It's like when you see people arguing about the relative merits of 2 different tensions pulls on $1,000 tennis rackets, meanwhile they go out and miss the ball by 8 feet. Forget it. Maybe if you are making pies at the 99.8th percentile and you want to move to the 99.9th, then you should be worrying about this. Otherwise, let it go. Work on the BIG 3 factors: high heat, a good sourdough starter and technique (mixing and fermenting). This is where you will move from the 50th percentile to the 99th. Then worry about the relative merits of the type of milling or exact mineral breakdown of sea salt from one bay to the next. As in everything, work on the fundamentals. This pie had excellent bubbles and spring. Another dough from the same batch rose 20 minutes less and was cooked at 725 (vs. 800 for the pie shown) and was dense with few holes. Technique, timing, heat - that's the ball game. Way down the list is the flour. This dough was a 4 day cold rise using a blend of KA Bread, KASL and Caputo. Very wet dough. The big thing here was that I used my Kitchen Aid mixer instead of my DLX. While the DLX is far the superior machine, I now have a lot more experience with technique using a wet-knead. The result: the dough was just as good in the KA as it was with the DLX. The DLX is capable of mixing much larger batches and is easier to use, but for 4 pies or less, and with the wet-knead technique, I can now say that the KA dough is just as good. Both pies were exactly a 2:30 at just over 800F. I've learned that the higher the hydration, the better it stands up to high heat. Dry dough will burn at high heat, but wet dough chars nicely. The cornice is not as well defined as it could have been, but the crust was super soft and tasty. These pies were as close to Patsy's as I've come. These were among my very best. They were amazing. The flavor, the texture, the sauce were incredible. But they were not quite as 'Neapolitan' as some are striving for. These were more NY. Comparing Cheeses. Obtaining fresh Bufala Mozzarella can be difficult. The first pie is with Bufala Mozzarella but it's not as fresh as I'd have liked. The second is with cows milk. You can see that they melt differently. These pies were a blend of Caputo and KA Bread, baked at 840F for exactly 2 minutes each. The charring on both pies was excellent. This is one of my first attempts at making my own Mozzarella Cheese. It's just unhomogenized milk, citric acid, rennet and salt. Actually this pie had homemade dough, cheese and sauce. The sauce was from peeling ugly ripe tomatoes and reducing them. You can see the cheese burned a little bit. But it tasted pretty good. I have a long ways to go in the cheese making department. If you use too much bench flour at these high temps you will find that the residual flour is bitter. But if you use too little you may find it hard to get the pie off the peel, especially since I am using a very wet dough. This takes some practice. If you can't slide the pie off the peel, you may have a mini disaster. A last resort way to recover is to fold the pie over into a calzone. This rustic looking calzone was the result of a trainee who forgot to flour the board at all. But no one complained. It was very tasty. The small amount of sauce on top will keep the top from burning as it puffs up closer to the heating element. I learned this trick from Luzzo's in NYC. If the ingredients inside the calzone are relatively dry (such as ricotta, mozz & ham), then the calzone is best if sealed. If the ingredients are wet, such as with this folded over tomato sauce, mozz pizza, then you may want to pop a small hole in the top to allow the steam to escape. Otherwise you may find the result in water logged inside. This calzone was more planned. It's one of my favorite combinations: Rosemary, sun-dried tomatoes, fresh chopped tomatoes, mozz and pepperoni. This is mostly for show - My current dough recipe doesn't really spin that well. I Think this one had mushrooms on it. I'm going to post a section soon with other toppings, like my clam pie and my onion pie. But margarita pie is still the classic by which pies are judged. This pie was made with regular old White Lily flour you can find in any supermarket. It did behave and feel a little different - it had a heavier, gummier feel when kneading. But once you have experience you can compensate for these things. My guests did not notice the difference and said it tasted the same as the King Arthur. The bubbles and spring were comparable to the King Arthur, but not as much as the Caputo. A classic Marinara Pie - Garlic Oregano, parmesan and olive oil, also using White Lily Flour. The quality of the ingredients is very important. I have scoured the lands, trying every brand of flour, tomato and cheese I could find. I've had cheese flown in, paying $75 for enough cheese for just one round of pies, I've even made my own cheese from scratch, starting with just milk. I've tasted every brand of tomato I could find and peeled and blanched my own from local tomato growers. And theses things do make a difference. But there's just no getting around the simple truth of 'the big three' - High heat, good natural yeast, and mixing technique. Getting these right will cover a lot of sins and getting these wrong will screw up the best ingredients. Witness the crust on this pie made with cheap old White Lily flour. This pie is Caramelized Onions with Emmenthaler Cheese. This combo goes well with fresh Thyme. This pie was very interesting. I made a fresh dough and then took an old dough that had sat in my fridge for about 10 days, and blended them together. This tends to make a very sour - sourdough. Not in a bad way, just very well developed and rich. Typically, if you do this, the dough will not have the lightest structure, but will be a little flatter and chewier. Again, not necessarily bad, but different. Still, some of my guests said this was one of my best ever. Also, I cut the cheese in cubes instead of slices and you can see the effect. It's similar to what Luzzo's did in the very next photo. Finally, this pie had a LOT of extra virgin olive oil on it. I often put none, but after trying Una Pizza Napoletana's pie, I gave it a try with a lot of oil. I think if I try this again I will go much lower on the sauce to compensate. This pie was also a little lower temp. Probably around a 3:00 or 3:15 pie. This is my Sicilian Pizza, based on my grandmother's style that she made when I was a kid, except with a well fermented sourdough crust. I wish you could have tasted this one. Wow, it was tasty. I made this with a sourdough culture given to me by a fan of this site. This pie is from Luzzo's on 1st Ave and 12th Street in NYC. Great place. I timed this at 1:55. The taste of the crust was virtually identical to mine. Notice how the cheese was put on in cubes and allowed to melt. This pie is from Una Pizza Napoletana, just a block from Luzzo's in NYC. Another great place. I timed this at 2:10. The taste of the crust was also very similar to mine, but more mild, less sourdough. It's texture was definitely softer than mine. Anthony used all caputo flour, but also uses other 00 flours at times. This pie uses fresh Bufala Mozzarella which was very wet. You can see how it kind of melts and puddles in the middle. This is not what most are used to, but very common in Naples. The really obvious thing about this pie was that it had very little sauce and a lot of fruity olive oil which held up very well despite the heat. He said it was from Calabria but had no brand since it was provided by a friend who grows there. I prefer more sauce, but the olive taste was very very nice too. This pie is from Da Michelle, which is considered one of the best in Naples. The is the authentic target. This is Trianon in Naples, which is also one of the best. Denino's - the best pizza on Staten Island. This is a similar style to Modern in New Haven. Wow. Tasty. Joe & Pat's on Staten Island. This is a similar style to Johnny's. Thin but much crispier crust than a Neapolitan. Pizzeria Bianco in Phoenix. With Ed Levine, guest judge of Iron Chef America and author of the great pizza book, "A Slice of Heaven". Also, the gracious host of this website :-). Isabella's Oven is new, but a solid contender. Calzone at Pizzeria Salvo in Naples. Me with Antimo Caputo at his factory and lab in Naples. Antica Pizzeria Brandi in Naples. This pizzeria claims to have invented the Margherita Pizza in 1889. The legend is that Princess Margherita was visiting Naples and the Pizzaiolo made 3 pizzas in her honor. For one he decided to match the red, white and green colors of the Italian flag, but using tomato sauce, mozzarella cheese and basil. And Viola, the modern pizza was born. This is me with Evelyne Slomon, pizza historian and judge at the U.S. Pizza Championships. She's perhaps the only person who's actually interviewed the old school NY pizza masters, such as Jerry Pero of Totonno's and knows all their secrets! Evelyne took me to Chez Panisse, the famous restaurant owned by Alice Waters, creator of 'California Cuisine' Me with flour miller extraordinaire, Keith Giusto. Cook's Organic Flour. Learning tricks at the San Francisco Baking Institute. Johnny's Pizza in Mount Vernon, NY. Boy, I'd kill for a slice of this right now. One of the best there is - Probably my all time favorite! Sally's Apizza in New Haven, CT. Aside from NYC, New Haven is probably the best pizza town in the U.S. There are at least 10 pizzerias there that are better than every pizzeria in my home of Atlanta. New Haven sports many styles of pizza, all good, but this is the quintessential "New Haven Style". No other town I've been in makes this kind of pizza. The pie below is half Marinara and half cheese. My photo of Modern Apizza, a few miles away, didn't come out that good. But Modern is even better than Sally's in my opinion. Franny's in Brooklyn. An amazing pizza. I created a few training videos for my staff on the styles of pizza. I decided to post these up as is, so pardon me if there are a few references other training materials. Styles of Pizza found in America - Walks you through about a dozen regional styles. Devolution of Pizza - This explains how pizza went from Naples to NY, then the chains that dominate pizza today. The World's Best Pizzerias. SliceNY has comprehensive listings, photos and reviews of hundreds of restaurants. In this article, I'm primarily interested in highlighting the very best places. Many of the best places are the ones that have stood the test of time. These are the 'old school pizzerias founded from 1905-1955. This article in SliceNY gives a good timeline that shows when some of these places opened. You will see that a good number of today's best places are spin-offs from just a few of the originals. But pizza is undergoing a revival. In the last 10 years, especially the last 5, a wave of excellent 'new school' pizzerias have opened. There are a few exceptions, but overwhelmingly the best places are either 'old school' or 'new school' with very few in between. During the 'Lost Years', 1960-1995, about all we got was junk like Domino's, Pizza Hut, CPK, etc. My quest began in 1998 with old school places like Patsy's.. But new places like Luzzo's have quickly risen to the top of a lot of lists. There is an organization called Vera Pizza Napoletana (VPN) that certifies that pizzerias are making authentic Neapolitan pizza. Most of these places prominently post their VPN certification, with one even claiming their certification is "an international award." However, no VPN pizzeria makes it into my top tier and several are among my bottom tier. Basically it's a marketing organization. You pay a few hundred bucks, you take a course and in a few days you are certified and can post a sign up that proves you are a great pizza maker. Yeah right. Personally, the certification means nothing to me. Certainly the best old school pizzerias don't bother with VPN. What makes a good pizza? I don't want to digress too far, but I used to teach a course on the topic of 'Mastery'. It's fascinating to me. There are a lot of similarities to the process of mastering things, regardless of the discipline. Whether it's the violin, karate, golf, finances, cooking - whatever- there are patterns which re-occur over and over. Understanding some of these patterns has definitely helped me improve my pizza tremendously. One pattern that you see is that you have to go through a long period where you learn lots of technique. However true masters have more than technical perfection and often violate 'the rules' of their discipline. Louis Armstrong and Frank Sinatra didn't hit every pitch or beat - they made up their own and it was better. True artistry has soul, not just technical perfection. In the Olympics, judges split the scores for technical merit and artistic impression. I know what they mean - Technically perfect can mean boring and lacking in character. I think that a lot of pizza bloggers are forgetting this. They are looking for technical perfection - how much spring is in the crust, how fast did it cook, how charred was it? I can understand that. But some are starting to sound more and more like wine connoisseurs, lost in the technical, and forgetting the total experience. Lots of people are ranking places high if they are "authentically Neapolitan." This is not my standard. Ultimately I really try to rank things on how they taste. Sometimes there's a pie that's technically perfect but yet I would never remember it the next day. It's got all the check marks, but I'd never crave it. A16 in San Francisco is a good example - very high marks for looking and being an 'authentic' Neapolitan Pizza. But somehow it's just missing something. It has no soul to it. Johnny's, in contrast, may not have the 'oven spring' or other characteristics that many look for, but it's pretty much perfect. I go there looking to have 3 or 4 slices, but usually end up eating a whole pie of 8. No one at A16 is licking the plate like that. As I've been to more and more pizzerias I've struggled with how to rank and classify them. People have been sending me recommendations and the list has grown a lot. I actually visited 95 pizzerias in 2007. I've decided to reorganize the rankings into 4 Tiers: Tier 1 - These are the places that I highly recommend. These are worth the drive or even the flight. Tier 2 - These are places that have a good reputation and have very good pizza but I can't quite recommend going out of your way for them. If you are in the area and are going on a pizza tour, you may want to include them. Technically, a lot of these places are good, but again, they are missing something. You can see my rankings for these places dip down into the 4's. I'm grading on a curve and with so many places to rank it was hard to space them. In Atlanta, these places would get 9's and Atlanta's current 'best' would be a 2. Notable - I've decided not to rank these. I list them but I don't give a number. Some of these places (Ben's for example) used to be great but now ride on their reputations only. Some are notable but not great. Take for Example, GoodFella's on Staten Island. It's the original unit that spawned the GoodFella's chain. I wanted to list it because a zillion people have told me to check it out and if you are a pizza nut like me you may want to pop in someday. But what can I really say about it. I can't really give it a number because it's really just an average NY pizza. I could walk through Brooklyn and pop into a random pizzeria and it's 50/50 that it may be better than GoodFella's. So short of listing every pizzeria in NY and ranking all of them, it's hard to rank GoodFella's. Yet it does get some buzz so I wanted to list it. Naples Pizzeria - I really really struggled with how to rank the pizzerias that I visited in Naples, Italy. I had 21 in all. I list the 10 that are well know below. The rest were mostly street pizzas. I decided in the end to list the Neapolitan Pizzerias separately. They are ranked in order with the best one, Gino Sorbillo at the top. However, the spread between the best and the worst was very tight. They were all remarkably similar and utterly unlike any American pizzeria. A few American places, like Zero Otto Nove, A Mano and Franny's are close in style, but given how consistent the real Neapolitan places were, it would be a mistake to put any of the American places in with them. The Neapolitan pizza is a definite style. When I returned I wrote up a 10 page report for a few friends on what I liked and didn't like about the style. I won't bore you with all of that. I'll just say this: it's an acquired taste. Most Americans would not fall down and say "oh this is the best pizza I ever had". At the same time, I now understand the snobbery of some of my Italian friends who say that what we make here is "not really pizza". We are world's apart. The pizzas cook very fast in Naples. They really do cook in 45-60 seconds. This makes them very, very soft and doughy. They are also very wet and don't hold up well when you pick them up. But they are fresher and more about an expression of the ingredients, which is the Italian way. Overall, for my personal taste, I like the top end NY and New Haven places best. Compared to most pizza in the U.S., even compared to regular NY street slices, these high end NY places have a lot of Neapolitan influence. But they bring their own character to the table too. Fake Pizza - I've traveled around and visited lots of places that have been recommended to me or that make it high on Zagat or CitySearch.com lists, etc. I don't want to be insulting, but it's pretty clear to me that those recommending many of these places have never had real pizza. The locals have no reference. For example Atlanta.CitySearch.com used to give number rankings and Domino's scored 9.3 out of 10. What can I even say about that? Meanwhile, back in NYC. NY is not only ahead of the world, it's pulling farther and farther ahead. New Entrants like Zero Otto Nove are solid performers. To help you on your tour, I've now plotted all my favorite places on this color coded Google Map. These include Tier 1 & Tier 2 , the Naples Pizzerias and also the ones I haven't been to yet . The others may not be worth a special trip so I left them off. Where you are choosing between many, places with a dot in the middle of the map tag are better bets. Use the Mouse Wheel to point and zoom into the city that interests you. In a future version, each pizzeria will have a blog page where you can post your review. If you are in NYC, let me recommend that you take Scott's Pizza Tour. I met with Scott and he's a really passionate and knowledgeable guy. I may even appear as a 'guest expert' someday on one of his tours. Not that he needs it. He can talk up a storm about pizza and he makes the tour a lot of fun! Scott and me at Joe's Pizzeria on Carmine Street. So Finally, here is the list of what I consider to be the best pizzerias in the world: Mount Vernon, NY. I talk about this place above. It's very non-standard, but deserves it's ranking at the top. Closed Sunday, Monday and whenever they feel like it. This place easily has the WORST service of any restaurant you are likely to visit. They don't like their customers and it shows. But it's probably the most consistent place on the list. Crispy and NOT for those looking for Neapolitan style. But it's the kind you can't put down and will crave forever. 30 W Lincoln Ave, Near Gramatan Ave. Not as good as Patsy's was in it's prime, but probably the best Neapolitan style currently in NY. Between 12th & 13th St. Wow, I had some die hards tell me Modern was even better than Sally's or Pepe's, but I didn't believe it. But they are right. It was outstanding. All three New Haven Places are a similar Style, very different than mine, but really good. Excellent. Interestingly, the only Wood oven high on the list. (now joined by Franny's) Between 1st & 2nd Avenues. Jeff Varasano's House. I had to get in here somewhere. I've been moving up steadily. On a good day I may be even higher than this. For example, my New Haven clam pie is better than Sally's and my sauce usually better than Una Pizza Napoletana. Many who have tried have said I'm better than Luzzo's and even Bianco's. I'm creeping up on #1 :-). The key to my ranking is that my crust is more flavorful than almost any other. Plus I have a secret sauce I don't publish (sorry). Johnny's still blows me out though. This listing is for my home, not for Varasano's Pizzeria. It's hard to be objective about the business and I've been told never to rank it here. But I haven't decided yet. As of today (May 6, 2009, open 6 weeks), I'd say that the pizza is at about 70% of where I want it to be. A good pie would be tier 1, but some of the pies coming out are clearly not near that. All the top places,especially those baking under 3 minutes, have consistency issues. Now that I'm in the biz, I can see why. But we are working hard every day to get better and more consistent. Lots of training and experiments. You'll have to decide for yourself, but if you've read down this far you know that I'm serious about delivering the best. Listed on Food Network as #1 in the U.S. Spin-off from Pepe's. The service is super, super slow, but the pizza is yummy. This used to be a 10 - the gold standard. The single best pie I ever had was from Patsy's. But it has fallen off a lot and may drop further. If you get a great pie, it's still one of the best in town. I recommend ordering a well done, fresh mozzarella Pie. But try a slice with the regular mozz too. May 2007: I just had a pie there that would put this back in the #1 position, but it's so hit and miss I can't guarantee you'll get that on your visit. 2287 1st Avenue. Between 117th & 118th. Very true to the Neapolitan Standard, except the sauce is a little more balanced. However the second time I went it wasn't as good. But my 3rd trip in July 2008 trip was excellent. 295 Flatbush Ave. The Original on Coney Island is pretty amazing. Light, well charred. This is classic NY style pizza. Very tasty sauce. Worth the trip. Manhattan Location is Terrible. Westchester Location is pretty good. Spin-off from Lombardi's. 1524 Neptune Ave. Coney Island, NY. Clam pie Amazing. Tomato Cheese very good too. LOTS of people have emailed me that this place had slipped way down. I popped in several times in the past few years and it didn’t even look that good. But Wow! My last visit was a huge comeback. It looked great, tasted great. The big surprise of the trip. This Video gives you some flavor of New Haven Pizza. Get the Clam pie here, then go to Modern for the chesse pie. Get the Sicilian Slice, it's the best around. 316 Mamaroneck Ave. Really good for both Sicilian and regular. A great 'everyday slice'. Some may say I've put this too high, but I love it. I had this place as a perfect 10 after my first try, but the second one was very disappointing. It's worth the pilgrimage though. Watching Dom is a Zen experience. Check out the video (watch to the end) 1424 Avenue J (Take the Q train to Ave J and it's right there) Outstanding. It reminded me a lot of Modern or Louie & Ernies. A little crunchy. Bursting with Flavor. By far the best of Staten Island. 524 Port Richmond Ave. (Cross Street: Hooker Place) Standard 'Street Slice', just better than most. Doesn't look like much, but has a great flavor. Maybe the best Sausage slice I've had. 1300 Crosby Avenue (Near Waterbury Avenue) Pelham Bay, Bronx. Take the #6 train to Buhre Ave. Crosby Ave starts there. Spin-off from Patsy's. I had this twice in the 1990's and was not impressed but it's better on my last visit and people swear by it. 19 Old Fulton Ave. Under the Brooklyn Bridge. Best walk-in Slice in NYC. It's probably slipped a little and may no longer deserve this ranking, but I kept it in. This was the place that really set me off on my pizza quest. It's the first 'great' pizza I had. I used to drive from LaGuardia directly here when I visited NYC. Carmine Street, Near Bleeker. Sadly this place just closed. Good pizza but didn't have a good business model. I wish them luck in their next venture. Tier 2 - The low numbers are only because I'm grading on a curve. Solid Neapolitan pizza. I liked it better than my guests though. 2357 Arthur Ave. One of the best Walk-in Slice Joints. Classic NY 'street pizza'. Great Sauce. Great Grandma Slice. 69 Seventh Avenue South (At Bleecker) White Plains, NY. No one has ever heard of this dive bar that happens to make pizza, but my buddy dragged me there and I have to admit it's up there. It almost made Tier 1. Get a sausage pie. This pizza is in the style of Modern, Louie & Ernies and Denino's. In NY, even places that don't know they make great pizza, blow away pizzerias in Atlanta that think they are world class. 600 Mamaroneck, Ave, San Francisco, CA. Run by Evelyne Slomon. Somewhat overly crispy crust, but very flavorful. Not light or Neapolitan, but overall very good. 825 San Pablo Ave, Albany, CA 94706. San Francisco, CA. Very Neapolitan. Excellent texture on the crust, but somewhat lacking in flavor. Sauce was somewhat bitter. Overall good, but the topping combinations didn't go well together. Could be better. This is the highest VPN certified place on the list. 2355 Chestnut Street. Was great the first time, not so great the next. I probably need to retest this one as this ranking is over 7 years old. 101 Old Saw Mill River Rd. Spin-off from Lombardi's. Overrated in Zagat, which often overrates places in popular neighborhoods. ( More people hit John's in Greenwich Village, than Patsy's in Harlem, so this pumps up John's rating). Not great, but still a good pie. 278 Bleecker Street. First Pizza place in the US. Worth a trip for the history and the atmosphere, but not a great pizza. Kind of a tourist trap. Somewhere in the last few years they TOTALLY redid their recipe. The pie they served 5 years ago bears NO RESEMBLANCE to what they do now. It's actually better now, but don't think what you are eating is what Lombardi served. The history is lost. 32 Spring Street. San Francisco, CA. Very Neapolitan, but like many of these places, the texture is great, but the flavor is missing. It was technically more like a 9 (good oven spring, good char, fresh bufala cheese, etc), but I'd never crave it or remember it the next day. Like A16. 320 Magnolia Ave. Ok, but dough is tasteless except for the char. 200 Park Ave, Near Grand Central. Interesting Sicilian Style slice. Not super, but pretty tasty. Excellent the first time, not so great the next. 831 Nicollet Mall. Minneapolis, MN 55402. Tasty, with a light sweet sauce and nice cheese. But the sauce goes to the edge, so there is really no crust at all. 1758 Victory Blvd. Near Manor Rd. (From Ferry, take 61 bus). 187 Bedford Ave (L Train to Bedford) Long line and pizza-only menu made me think the pizza would be great. Good, but not great. 41 Kenmare St (Near Mott) I had a delivery slice once that was pretty good but when I went in person it was pretty average. 108-26 Ascan Ave. Tier 3 - Notable, but not ranked. Like too many places trying to duplicate the Neapolitan standard exactly, the dough was undercooked and floppy, and also the sauce was too watery and bitter. However, the gelato is the best I've ever had. Pizzaiola Roberto Caporuscio is no longer the owner of this place and it may have just taken a cliff dive. 24 Franklin Ave (at Chestnut Street) Good try, but not up to the better places on the list. Pizza was too thick and was raw inside. 28 Carmine Street (Near Bleecker) Spin off of DiFara's, but just a shadow of it. 146 W. Houston St. Arturo's Coal Oven. Can be great on a good day. Very smokey. Old school and was much better years ago. 106 West Houston St. Tasteless dough and some kind of smoked mozz and cooked sauce. 1260 Amsterdam Avenue. Near 122nd Street. Went way down hill. 201 W 11th St / 44 Avenue A. Used to have an amazing Sicilian Slice. I've heard of going downhill, but this place just took a cliff dive. 123 Macdougal St. Mario Batali's place. Skip this and go to Batali's Babbo. These are not really pizzas. They are flatbreads. Pretty lame. Nice place, but the pizza just doesn't measure up to all the Brooklyn competition. Good cheese though. (between Prospect Pl & St Marks Ave) Alice Water's famous restaurant started the 'California Cuisine' craze. The pizza was good, but not up to NY standards. Worth the trip but more for the rest of the menu. 1517 Shattuck Avenue. My second favorite on Staten Island, but still way below Denino's. 862 Huguenot Ave. Tasty brick oven pizza, but flat crust. It's a great place to go to get the classic NY Italian menu, but the pizza was just OK. 1476 Hylan Boulevard. This is the original unit that spawned the chain. Cool old school atmosphere and not bad pizza, but certainly not going to impress the serious pizza hunter. 1718 Hylan Boulevard. Huge Disappointment. A lot of people recommended this place and many put it up there with Denino's. I have no idea why. I had both a whole pie and a takeout slice and they were lame. 2155 Hylan Boulevard. This old place with a dive bar atmosphere has a cult following and was absolutely packed. But I think it's largely due to the super cheap prices. It's paper thin and kinda crispy. But mostly it was just greasy. Very inexpensive cheese just dissolved into grease. One of the Original Deep Dish Places. I had just a few hours on a layover at O'Hare and got to quickly taxi it out to Malnati's and Giordano's. I like Malnati's a bit better, but honestly, I don't get the Chicago pizza thing. It's ok, but certainly not hard to do and nothing I would remember if it were not for the famous name. It's more like a pizza casserole, than a pizza. 6649 N Lincoln Ave. Lincolnwood, IL 60712. Stuffed pizza. But there was so much stuff on it that there's a block of of cheese inside that never even melted. It still had square cut marks. If I wanted to eat a block of cheese, I don't think I'd need to come out to pizzeria. Hmmm. But it was not bad. Just not impressive. Chicago, IL 60611. The clear favorite. 32 Via Tribunali. Largo Arso 10/16 - San Giorgio a Cremano. Antica Pizzeria Costa. Very traditional. Some think it's the best, but we placed it below several others. Via Cesare Sersale 1/3. Pizzeria Port Alba. Via Port'Alba,18 Naples 80134. Not to be confused with it's cousin Gino Sorbillo. This is a tiny 10 seat place about a block from Gino Sorbillo. Mario Batali's Favorite and the most crowed in town. Beautiful place. Three levels. Don't visit Naples without seeing it. However the pizza didn't blow us away. Via P. Colletta 46. Pizzeria Di Matteo. Via Tribunali, 94 Naples 80138. Birth of the Margherita pizza. Touristy, but worth the visit. Just walking down the charming block it's on made it worth the visit. Salita Santa Anna di Palazzo 2. Il Pizzaiolo del Presidente. Via Tribunali, 120/121. Next up to be Tasted. Chris Bianco is a fanatic from the Bronx. Some say it's the best in the USA. Ever since he got the #1 spot in Ed Levine's book and the got on Oprah, the place as a 3 hour line. However four people have had both mine and his and three say that mine is better :-). Of course that's what they say to my face, LOL. I fully expect to put this in Tier 1 when I finally get to try it. 623 East Adams Street. Ron Molino's place. Great reputation. Supposedly one of the best. 703 Washington Road, Mt. Lebanon. To be Tasted. The place gets rave reviews but some of my friends have said it's overrated. 1769 W. Sunnyside. To be Tasted. Owned partially by Mario Batali and run by Nancy Silverton of La Brea Bakery fame. It's supposed to be good, but not great. The consensus is that it's good but gets too much press because of it's famous owners. 641 N. Highland Avenue. To be Tasted. Brad Sumeri's Place. 1776 Horizon Ridge Parkway. To be Tasted. But by all accounts much better than Pizzeria Paradiso which gets too much press for pretty lame pizza. 3715 Macomb St. NW. Old school (1925), should be pretty good. 11 1/2 Thacher Street. 111 Chelsea Street. Artichoke Basille's Pizza. Probably the most talked about new place in NY. I'll be trying this one in July. (between 1st Ave & 2nd Ave) New York, NY 10003. 2342 Arthur Ave. 603 Crescent, Ave. Between 101st & 102nd Streets. I can't wait to try this one. Review. Supposed to be similar to Pepe's. New Haven, CT 06511. 111 Campbell Ave. 3825 Whitney Ave. Some swear by it, but other say it's just ok. I'll have to try it and let you know. 350 Hawthorne Ave. My friend scouted this place and said it was very good. 377 Cromwell Ave #B. 577 S. Main Street. I actually walked into this place but through a mix up to complicated to explain, I never got to eat the pizza. 5008 Telegraph Ave. Aside from Bianco's in Phoenix, I get more mail about this place than any other west of Chicago. And it's pretty much all positive. The photos look really good to me too. I can't wait to try this one myself. 4741 SE Hawthorne Blvd. Another Portland place that gets a lot of emails. But it's rep is not as high as Scholl's. 304 SE 28th Ave. (at corner of Pine St.) 913 E. Pike Street. This place gets a fair amount of attention, but my friends who've tried it say it's overrated. 4411 Stone Way North. 24369 Halstead Road. Original Deep Dish. Chicago, IL 60611. 162 E Superior St. Chicago, IL 60611. 704 Cleveland Ave S. St Paul, MN 55116. Huapai, 0810, New Zealand. 4 Market Row, Electric Lane. 183 Lavender Hill. London, SW11 5TE, United Kingdom. +44 20 7228 2660. Feel free to send more recommendations as I'm always on the lookout for great places. Aside from the pizzerias listed above, I'm also looking to tour several areas that supposedly have good pizza. Over Xmas I went on a Staten Island Tour with a local who emailed me and we hit 6 pizzerias in one day. I've done tours like that in several places and it's always fun. I want to try these locations next. If you've got some pizzerias to recommend or if you want to tour with me, drop me a note: New Jersey - Surprisingly, I know almost nothing about NJ pizza. Sao Paolo Brazil. Anywhere else you want to recommend. Good luck to all. Feel free to email me with questions or comments:

Pizza hut rezept

Das hier, das ist nicht einfach ein Brot. Es ist der Beweis, dass ich dafür etwas zum Leben erweckt habe, das mein Leben überdauern könnte und danach womöglich an die nächste Generation übergeht: Mein eigener Lievito Madre . Lievito Madre heisst übersetzt Mutterhefe. Ein Weizensauerteig nach italienischem Vorbild. Damit kann ich mit blossen Händen – wann immer ich es möchte – ein kleines Wunder vollbringen. Nämlich mit nichts als Wasser, Mehl und Salz richtig gutes Brot, Pizza oder Focaccia backen, die es in solcher Ursprünglichkeit und mit so einer komplexen, feinsäuerlicher Aromatik nirgendwo zu kaufen gibt. Und damit wir uns gleich richtig verstehen, wir sprechen hier von echtem Brot. Aus einem Teig, der es in sich hat. Nämlich dutzende Arbeitsschritte, geübte Handgriffe, Beobachtungsgabe, Erfahrung und Zeit. Sehr viel Zeit. Manchmal 48 Stunden. Dabei entwickelt er einen unvergleichlichen Geschmack, eine besondere Textur und eine bessere Verträglichkeit. Kein Vergleich zum flachen Geschmack von Brot, das husch-husch mit gekaufter Frischhefe gebacken wird. Von Industrie- und Supermarktbroten reden wir schon gar nicht. Mit all den haarsträubenden Zusätzen, ihrer schwammigen Konsistenz und ihrer geschmacklichen Leere. Meine Vorstellung von Brotbacken geht so: Ich will es verinnerlichen. Im Schlaf können. Etwa so wie man Rad fährt. Ohne gross zu überlegen, einfach aufsitzen, intuitiv die Balance halten und so lange in die Pedale treten wie es nötig ist, um ans Ziel zu kommen. Ich will keine komplizierten Rezepte abarbeiten. Keine Knetmaschinen anwerfen. Kein Chemiestudium absolvieren. Niemand, der aus der Tradition zu hause Brot bäckt tut das. Es ist wie mit der Herstellung von frischer Pasta. Eine italienische Nonna braucht keine Anleitung dazu. Sie tut es aus Erfahrung, aus dem Handgelenk. Und sie bekommt sie grandios hin. Immer. Zur Erinnerung: Das erste Mal habe ich vor neun Jahren in dieser Geschichte über Pinocchio von Lievito Madre geschrieben. Der Bäcker im Dorf meiner Eltern, Cesidio, der die beste Pizza bianca der Welt bäckt, hatte mir erzählt, dass seine Hefe von seinem Vater mit einer überreifen Birne angesetzt wurde. Damit war für mich eigentlich klar, dass ich nie im Leben etwas ähnliches zustande bringen könnte. 2011 erzählte mir eine Schwedin am Foodphoto Festival in Tarragona, dass jeder in ihrer Familie selber Brot bäckt. Und zwar mit dem eigenen Sauerteig, der an alle Familienmitglieder weitergegeben wird. Sie verriet mir weiter, dass in Schweden viele Hotels die mitgebrachten Sauerteige der Gäste gerne in dafür vorgesehene Kühlschranke einquartieren. «Haha! Ihr verreist mit einem Sauerteig im Gepäck?» spöttelte ich. «Natürlich, wenn man den nicht füttert, stirbt er!» Füttern? Ich verstand nur Bahnhof. Es fesselte mich zwar, aber es war zu weit weg. Ich hatte nichts mit schwedischer Brotkultur am Hut. Ein paar Jahre später – es liess mich nicht los – setzte ich dann eine erste Mutterhefe an, deren Rezept in meinem Buch Italien vegetarisch von 2014 zu finden ist. Eine Pasta Madre eigentlich. Es gibt in Italien zwei Arten, den Sauerteig zu führen. Die Pasta Madre wird jeweils im Verhältnis 2:1 Mehl und Wasser aufgefrischt, was ihr die Konsistenz eines Teiges verleiht. Ein eindrückliches Exemplar dieser Art zeigte mir Thomas Morazzini in Umbrien, der mir seine Eleonor vorstellte, eine Mutterhefe von 65 Jahren! Die Liebe, mit der er über das Backen und seine Eleonor sprach, beflügelten mich erneut. Auch meine österreichische Nachbarin, Käthi, hat mir ein wunderschönes Brotbild eingebrannt. Sie erzählte mir, dass sie in ihrer Grossfamilie auf dem Bauernhof nur einmal im Monat Brot gemacht haben. Die Mutterhefe habe man zwei Tage wässern müssen, um sie wieder zu aktivieren. Sie wurde offen aufbewahrt und trocknete langsam ein, bis sie nach drei Wochen zum Leben erweckt wurde. Geformt wurden jeweils 12 Laibe. Ausgebacken wurden sie beim Bäcker. Und dann – jetzt kommts: Packte man das Brot in Leinensäcke und bewahrte sie im Keller auf. Käthi blickte mir tief in die Augen und meinte: «Du, ich sag dir, das letzte Brot aus dem Keller, das schon seit drei Wochen da hing, das war das beste Brot überhaupt! Ich habe nie wieder irgendwo ein so gutes Brot gegessen, ehrlich.» Nach ein paar Monaten hatte ich mit meiner bestehenden Mutterhefe etwas Mühe. Immer mehr empfand ich das Auffrischen als lästig. Die paar Minuten für die wenigen Handgriffe mit abwägen, mischen und kneten waren mir zuviel Aufwand, für die eher dürftigen Backresultate, die ich im Gegenzug zustande brachte. Ich wollte nochmals von vorne beginnen. Mit einer überreifen Birne, wie Cesidio’s Vater! In dieser Zeit sah ich mir unzählige italienische Tutorials auf youtube an, las italienische Foodblogs mit brutal beeindruckenden Amateur-Bäckern und liess mich von der neuen Kalifornischen Welle der Artisanal Bakers wie Chad Robertson von der Tartine Bakery mitreissen. Dabei stiess ich auf die andere Art der italienischen Sauerteigführung: Li.co.li – lievito madre in coltura liquida. Der ist flüssig und einem Roggensauerteig ähnlich. Das Mischverhältnis zum Auffrischen ist 1:1 Mehl und Wasser und wesentlich pflegeleichter. Den Ansatz mit der Birne hatte ich allerdings verworfen, nachdem ich irgendwo aufgeschnappt hatte, dass man als Starter (eine zuckerhaltige Lösung) am besten etwas aus der unmittelbaren Umgebung (zum Beispiel eine Frucht aus dem eigenen Garten) verwendet, weil dann die Hefen in der Luft aus derselben Umgebung besonders aktiv sind. Und so ging ich vorletzten Oktober fest entschlossen zu unserem Sauergrauech-Apfelbaum, pflückte ein besonders reifes Exemplar und beschloss, das Rezept (falls es denn gelingen würde) eines Tages hier mit euch zu teilen! Das ist es: Rezept für Lievito Madre. Apfel in der Küche 1-2 Wochen reifen lassen, bis er süsslich duftet und die Haut etwas ledrig wird. Apfel grob in Würfel schneiden, mit Wasser bedecken und 48h mit einem Netz abgedeckt fermentieren lassen. Wasser abgiessen und 100 g davon mit 100 g Vollkornmehl mischen. Mit perforierter Klarsichtfolie abdecken und bei 26 Grad reifen lassen, bis sich das Volumen verdoppelt hat (etwa 12h) 1 Woche lang alle 12 Stunden wie folgt auffrischen: 50 g Mehl plus 50 g Wasser. Die Hefe sollte Aktivität in Form von Bläschen zeigen und angenehm riechen (leicht alkoholisch). Ab da kann man mit ihr backen. In einem Weckglas im Kühlschrank lagern und mindestens 1x pro Woche mit 50 g Mehl und 50 g Wasser füttern. (Statt Vollkornmehl kann man ab dann auch helles Mehl verwenden) Mein Apfelwasser roch angenehm süss nach Apfelsaft und leicht alkoholisch. Schon nach den ersten 12 Stunden hatte sich das Volumen vom Ansatz verdreifacht! Mich durchströmte die höhere Spannung Glücksgefühl als der Blitz der Frankenstein zum Leben erweckte. «It’s alive!» verkündete ich mit geschwellter Brust. Ich roch daran. Es war noch nicht der Geruch von fein säuerlichen Hefe, sondern nach Erde, Mehl und ja – neugeborenem Leben. Wichtig ist, dass man einen geeigneten Ort findet, der konstant 24 bis 26 Grad hat. Bei mir war das der Heizkörper mit einem dicken Brett drauf, das die Hitze etwas abschirmt. Ich musste etwas tüfteln und mit einem Thermometer messen, bis es passte. Temperaturen über 28 Grad lassen die Hefebakterien absterben. Ist es zu kühl, brauchen sie zu lange oder werden gar nie aktiv. Falls sich Schimmel bildet, ist der Versuch misslungen. Verwerfen und nochmals beginnen. Tut sich nach 12 Stunden nichts, kann man versuchen, in kürzeren Abständen aufzufrischen. Ich bewahre meinen Lievito Madre (etwa 250 g) in einem Weckglas auf und lagere ihn im Kühlschrank. Zur Kontrolle notiere ich das Datum der letzten Fütterung auf einer Etikette auf dem Deckel. Spätestens nach fünf Tagen frische ich ihn jeweils auf. Diese Routine zwingt einen, mindestens einmal pro Woche etwas damit zu backen. Das Ritual, das sich dabei einstellt, ist befriedigend, erdend – und unbezahlbar. Bei Raumtemperatur blubbert er schon bald los und nach etwa 2 Stunden quillt er förmlich aus dem fest verschlossenen Deckel. Ich muss schmunzeln, wenn ich an die Schwedin zurückdenke. Selbstverständlich kommt meine Hefe mit ins Gepäck wenn ich verreise. Sie übernachtet dann schon mal in der Minibar des Hotelzimmers und wird alle paar Tage aufgefrischt. Ich würde sie nie zuhause ihrem Schicksal überlassen und riskieren, dass sie eingeht, während dem wir faul am Strand liegen. Doch der Weg zu einem wirklich guten Brot, das glücklich macht, knusprig ist, mit einer weichen, saftigen, grossporigen Krume, dabei geschmackvoll, ausgewogen und formvollendet – dieser Weg, ist der härteste und steinigste, den ich je gegangen bin. Wirklich, ich habe in der Küche schon alles halbwegs so hinbekommen, wie ich es mir gewünscht hatte. Aber Brotbacken hat mich Demut gelehrt. Dieses so alltägliche, vermeintlich banale Lebensmittel ist das perfekte Beispiel dafür, wie man an etwas Einfachem kläglich scheitern kann – oder ein Meisterwerk daraus macht. Oh, ich habe viele Rohrkrepierer produziert. Fladen, die so hart und appetitlich waren wie eine verstaubte Asbestplatte. Übersäuerte Laibe mit einer klebrigen Krume oder kiloschwere Brocken ohne Seele. Einmal hatte ich einen Tausch vereinbart: Selbst gemachten Wein gegen selbst gemachtes Sauerteigbrot. Ausgerechnet mit einem befreundeten Food- und Wein-Journalist! Ich hatte mich so darauf gefreut. Hatte den Teig sorgfältig 24 Stunden lang geführt. Er hatte eine tolle Konsistenz, die richtige Spannung, ein feines Aroma. Und kurz vor dem Backen ist er mir einfach zerronnen, sich buchstäblich in ein Nichts aufgelöst. Das Ding ist ja: Ich weigere mich, Rezepte zu befolgen. Man sagt ja gemeinhin, kochen geht auch Pi mal Daumen. Aber backen ist eine ganz präsise Chose. Da muss man schampar penibel zur Sache gehen und jedes Mikrogramm genauestens abwägen und Temperaturen aufs Grad genau einhalten. Bullshit. Wenn dem so wäre, würden ja alle Bäcker nur 1a Spitzen-Brot produzieren. Wir wissen, dass das eine Illusion ist. Leider sind die, die ihr Handwerk wirklich noch beherrschen und ernst nehmen immer mehr in Unterzahl. Natürlich habe ich Bücher über Brotbacken in die Hand genommen. Und meistens wutschnaubend in eine Ecke gepfeffert. Im Ernst jetzt? Ein Rezept für Pane Pugliese mit Sauerteig und dann zusätzlich Frischhefe dazugeben? Wollt ihr mich verscheissern? Dieses Brot (eines meiner liebsten!) ist weltweit das einzige mit geschützer Ursprungsbezeichnung. Nachweislich mit 100% Hartweizen und nichts als Lievito Madre gebacken. Und ihr gebt Frischhefe rein? Das ist ja wie Viagra einwerfen, ihr Schlappschwänze! Als würde mir jemand Stützräder für mein Velo empfehlen. Hier, damit du nicht umfällst, du Trottel. Das ist schlicht inakzeptabel. Ich teile hier gerne das authentische apulische Rezept, das mir als Leitplanke dient. Was ich allerdings gelernt habe: Das Rezept alleine garantiert noch kein Erfolg. Erst durch viel Übung gelingen die einzelnen, entscheidenden Schritte, die zu einem befriedigenden Ergebnis führen. 120 g aktiver Lievito Madre 600 g italienisches Hartweizenmehl (Semola rimancinata) 400 g Wasser (24 Grad) 20 g feines Meersalz. Lievito Madre über 12 Stunden bei Raumtemperatur 3 mal auffrischen. Lievito Madre, Mehl und 380 g Wasser in einer Schüssel grob von Hand mischen (3 Min.) Zudecken und bei 24 Grad 1 Stunde reifen lassen. Teig flach drücken, Salz darüber streuen, restliche 20 g Wasser dazugeben und alles von Hand verkneten, bis der Teig geschmeidig und homogen ist (5 bis 10 Minuten). Teig in der Schüssel dehnen und falten (Teig mit beiden Händen von jeder Seite hochziehen und wie eine Serviette zur Mitte hin falten). Zugedeckt bei 24 Grad 30 Minuten gehen lassen. Weitere 3 Mal im Abstand von 30 Minuten mit nassen Händen dehnen und falten. Nach dem 4. Mal dehnen und falten sollte der Teig sehr weich und voluminös sein Eine weitere Stunde zugedeckt gehen lassen. Teig auf eine bemehlte Arbeitsfläche geben, Oberfläche bemehlen. Mit der Handfläche durch leichtes flachklopfen und zu einem rechteckigen Teigstück formen. Die kurzen Seiten dehnen und zur Mitte hin falten. Um 45 Grad drehen und nun vom kurzen Ende her dicht einrollen, damit der Teig eine kompakte längliche Form bekommt. Durch Rundwirken zu einer straffen Kugel formen. Bemehlen, zudecken (z.B. mit der Teigschüssel) und 30 Minuten ruhen lassen. Gusseisen-Bräter mit Deckel im Ofen auf 250 Grad vorheizen. Teig nochmals kurz zu einer Kugel wirken, damit die Oberfläche wieder Spannung bekommt, mit einer Rasierklinge einschneiden, z.B. zwei längliche Schnitte nebeneinander oder 6 Schnitte über Kreuz wie ein Schachbrett. Auf einem Backpapier oder einer Backschaufel absetzen und weitere 10 Minuten zugedeckt ruhen lassen. Brot vorsichtig in den Gusseisen-Bräter legen, Deckel drauf und 30 Minuten auf der untersten Rille backen. Deckel abnehmen und weitere 15 Minuten offen fertig backen. Brot auf einem Gitter auskühlen lassen Frühestens nach 2 Stunden aufschneiden. Ich habe weiterhin Rezepte quergelesen, mir aber meinen eigenen Weg gebahnt und einfach probiert. Es ist ein anderes Lernen, wenn man immer wieder auf die Schnauze fällt, den Fehler sucht und dann jeden Schritt noch einemal besser und sorgfältiger macht. Es ging nur langsam voran. Aber immerhin, von Brot zu Brot wuchs meine meine Zuversicht und die Anerkennung der Leute, die davon probierten. Meine geliebte Pizza bianca hingegen wollte einfach nicht nach ihrem Vorbild aus dem Vecchio Forno in Pescasseroli gelingen. Mal schmeckte sie zu banal, mal zu sauer, mal war sie zu flach und zu hart, mal zu hoch und zu weich. Bis sie eines Tages so aussah: Aussen krachend knusprig und innen aromatisch und luftig. Und meine Familie und Freunde, die die Pizza aus Pescasseroli kennen, meinten, Mamma mia, Claudio! Was hast du getan? Diese Pizza ist wie keine zuvor und definitiv noch ein bisschen besser als die in Pescasseroli. Ist das crazy? Das man vor Glück den Tränen nahe ist, nur weil man etwas gebacken hat? Aber genau das ist es. Das ist genau der entscheidende Unterschied, nachdem wir alle suchen. Der aus einem einfachen Essen einen aussergewöhlichen Bissen macht, der die Leute so tief berührt, dass sie beinahe erschrecken. Porno di forno. Wer hat die Grössten? Oft geht es auch um die perfektesten Handgriffe beim Dehnen und Falten von sehr klebrigen Teigen. Um das Formen eines perfekten Laibes oder dessen ästhetisches Einschneiden. Ich schaue mir vor allem die Handbewegungen minutiös ab. Durchforste die Kommentare und befolge Tipps zu Mischverhältnissen. Brot backen, ist etwas Aufregendes. Wenn ich weiss, dass ich am nächsten Tag Brot backen werde, schlafe ich mit den Gedanken daran ein. Ich überprüfe mehrmals, ob der Wecker auf Mitten in der Nacht auch wirklich gestellt ist. Und bevor ich aufwache, gehe ich im Traum die verschiedenen Schritte durch. Es fühlt sich an, wie vor einer Prüfung. Ich weiss, dass ich es kann und ich freue mich auf das Ergebnis. Aber ich habe auch Angst zu scheitern, weil ich etwas vergesse oder falsch mache und das Brot dann nichts wird. Also nehme ich im Traum rechtzeitig die Hefe aus dem Kühlschrank und stelle beruhigt fest, dass sie schöne Bläschen an der Oberfläche hat und aktiv ist. Dann wäge ich Mehl und Wasser ab, mische, knete, dehne, falte und so fort. Das ganze Tralala. Ich gehe den ganzen Zyklus durch wie ein Sportler, der mit geschlossenen Augen sein Rennen im Geiste abruft. Dann wache ich auf und mache mich eifrig ans Werk. Manchmal backe ich aber auch einfach so nebenher. Hole die Hefe wie zufällig aus dem Kühlschrank und frische sie so lange auf, bis mir die schaumige Konsistenz zusagt. Dann fange ich an einen Teig zu führen, ohne dass ich festgelegt habe, was draus werden soll. Immer im Vorbeischlendern prüfe ich die Konsistenz und den Duft vom Teig. Während der Zeit, in der ich abends etwas lese oder schaue, stelle ich den Timer und gehe alle 30 Minuten kurz in die Küche, dehne und falte den Teig eine Minute und gehe wieder meiner anderen Beschäftigung nach. Dann packe ich den Teig in den Kühlschrank und backe irgendwann ein Brot, eine Ciabatta oder eine Pizza damit. Vielleicht nach 12, 24 oder erst nach 72 Stunden. Alles kein Problem. Denn so habe ich mit Brotbacken vorgestellt: Ich will es verinnerlichen. Im Schlaf können. Etwa so wie man Rad fährt. Ohne gross zu überlegen, einfach aufsitzen, intuitiv die Balance halten und so lange in die Pedale treten wie es nötig ist, um ans Ziel zu kommen. Es gibt keine alleinige Wahrheit beim Brotbacken. Nur einen eigenen Weg. Und den muss jeder selbst gehen. 2016 betrachte ich als mein erstes Bäcker-Lehrjahr. Ich habe einen Apfel aus unserem Garten gepflückt und daraus meinen Lievito Madre angesetzt. Damit habe ich jede Woche gebacken. Ein Brot, eine Pizza, eine Focaccia. Es gab niederschmetternde Tage. Viele. Und Tage der Euphorie. Einige. Es gab Tränen der Verzweiflung und der überwältigenden Freude. Die Reise hat gerade erst begonnen. Wer mag, kann mich begleiten. Falls ihr euch auch auf den Weg macht: Viel Glück! was für eine geschichte! danke! Claudio – jede Zeit braucht ihre Helden. Du bist für mich einer – zumindest in der Küche. Du bist wieder einmal die Erste, liebe Katha ! Und ich habe so lange dafür gebraucht. Schau, dass du schleunigst zu einem heimischen Apfel kommst! Danke dir, lieber Thomas . Wer weiss, vielleicht kann ich dich damit auch zum Heldentum anstiften? Dio mio: Das liest sich ja wie im Rausch geschrieben! Grossartig – aber auch ein wenig furchteinflössend. Werde ich Vergleichbares je selbst schaffen? Zumindest bin ich jetzt „angefixt“ – auch wegen der wunderbaren Bilder. Ein wirklich schönes Brot zu backen: Nicht das schlechteste Ziel. In der Küche werke ich schon seit Jahrzehnten ziemlich respektlos – aber vor dem Backen habe ich noch immer sehr viel Respekt! Genau so dachte ich ja anfangs auch, Lichtblau : Schaff ich eh nicht. Und wenn, will man irgendwie eine Abkürzung finden. Aber die gibt es nicht. Und das ist auch gut so. Die Freude, wenn man es schafft, ist umso überwältigender. Nur Mut! Geht mir auch so, Thomas . Aber es ist ein Handwerk wie jedes andere auch. Und das lässt sich erlernen, wenn man nur will. Man kann gar nicht aufhören zu lesen! Ich glaube, es liegt noch ein reifer, bayerischer Apfel in der Obstschale … Claudio! Welch famose Geschichte. Ich habe diese Woche meine Reise begonnen, bisher war sie eher…niederschmetternd. Ich sag’s mal so, Du hast Einiges an Vorsprung, aber ich folge Dir… guten Rutsch! Unglaublich inspirierend! Danke. Na ja, lieber Claudio, das liest sich ja schon spannend … aber so lange ich nur lesen und nicht probieren kann, bleibt es halt Theorie … 😉 (zwinker). Aber wer weiss, 2017 ist noch lang und vielleicht findet so ein Brot ja mal den Weg zu mir? Liebe Grüsse von dem, der mit dem Zaunpfahl winkt, PS. und Dir und Deinen natürlich ein unglaublich tolles neues Jahr! 😀 Do it, Patrick ! Und alles Liebe für 2017. Uwe , da mach ich mir bei dir keine Sorgen. Du gehst deinen Weg, keine Frage. Viel Glück! Danke, Fabio ! Oder der Herr lieberlecker findet mal den Weg zu mir 😉 Happy new year! wunderbar beschrieben … den Ansatz mit der Frucht kannte ich nicht und werde damit neu anfangen … meine ersten Versuche mit Sauerteig waren so, dass ich dann auch mangels Zeit und Geduld irgendwann auf Hefe umgestiegen bin … ein Problem war ummer die Temperaturführung … beim lesen fiel mir gerade ein, dass ich ein Gerät im 1/1 GN-Format mit RollHaube habe (nennt sich Cool+Hot), das von minus 5 Grad bis plus 70 Grad in Gradschritten steuerbar ist … damit werde ich versuchen, die Temperatur zu steuern … vielleicht kann man ein besseres Ergebnis erziehlen … ein Tipp noch: ich habe es mal mit einem grossen Karton und einem Heizkissen als „Gärschrank“ probiert, was ganz gut funktioniert hat … Euch Allen viel Erfolg … möge es gut tun … PS: ummer heisst natürlich immer … und erzielt schaut ohne h auch besser aus ? Wunderschön, lieber Claudio. Viele Brote wünsch ich Dir fürs nächste Jahr (und ich mach mich auf die Suche nach einem Apfel…). Lieber Gruss, Sylvan. Danke, Edgar , lustige Idee mit dem „Gärschrank“. In italienischen Anleitung steht oft, der ausgeschaltete Backofen mit eingeschaltetem Licht sei ideal. War es bei mir nicht. Hab 32 Grad gemessen. Definitiv zu warm. Ou, ja, mach das, lieber Sylvan ! Dir ein gutes Weinjahr und überhaupt nur das Beste. Solche Leidenschaft braucht man beim Brotbacken ? Viel Erfolg weiterhin! Nur ein kleiner Hinweis: Hefen sind Pilze (Eukaryoten), keine Bakterien (Prokaryoten). Danke, liebe Petra ! Die frechen Biester schleichen sich überall rein – habs aktualisiert. Dir auch ein erfolgreiches Backjahr! Ich habe noch nie Brot gebacken. Beim Lesen des Berichts wird einem ja ganz anders! Hut ab vor soviel Leidenschaft. Danke Claudio, Du machst mir mit Deiner wunderbaren Geschichte Mut. Vielleicht schaffe ich es irgenwann auch einmla, so schönes Brot zu backen und nicht die tellerflachen, brettharten Diskusscheiben wie bisher 😉 …wollte ich ja auch machen. aber jetzt habe ich Angst! Danke für den vielleicht schönsten Artikel deines Blogs bislang. Seit Jahren animieren mich deine Einträge zu den verschiedensten ‚Schandtaten.‘ Nie zu meinem und meiner Gäste Schaden. War bereits in der Küche auf der Suche nach so einem Apfel. Und wurde fündig. Allerdings suche ich noch die 24-26-Grad-Ecke in der Wohnung. Danke, Käthy . Ich fühle mich auch ganz anders, seit ich so backe 😉 Auf jeden Fall, liebe Margit! Ich hätte es mir anfangs ja auch nie träumen lassen – und plötzlich gehts. Die gehört dazu, capitan . Hab ich heut noch! Ist wie bei allen Herausforderungen so. Aber wenn mans mal geschafft hat, ist das Gefühl unbezahlbar. Frohes Neues! Danke für das vielleicht schönste Lob, Carsten ! Wünsch dir alles Glück. Seit ich deinen Blog entdeckt habe, lese ich mit Genuss deine Beiträge! Ebenso deinen heutigen Post. Brotbacken ist faszinierend, dachte ich schon vor ein paar Wochen bei diesem Artikel: https://www.dasmagazin.ch/2016/11/18/die-kultur-das-brot-und-ich/?reduced=true. Besonders Hingabe des Bäckers… He-he, da bekommt der Spruch „Brot für Brüder“ eine ganz andere Bedeutung. Grande Cinema Paradiso – wieder einmal. Happy New Year! All the best! Wow! Ich bin tief beeindruckt! Sehr tief! Habe auch den Vierus. Nach Dietmar Kappl. Sauerteig in dem neben natürlichen wilden Hefen stets auch säurebildende. Bakterien vorhanden sind. Die Gasbildung,hauptsächlich Kohlendioxid, erfolgt hauptsächlich durch Hefen. Die Säuerung, vorwiegend Milchsäure, bruhtauf die Tätigkeit der Bakterien. Danke, Désirée . Hatte den Artikel auch gelesen. Schöner Text! Und Malin, die Breadexchange-Frau, verfolge ich natürlich auch 😉 Thanks, Frenk , likewise! Muss dir mal eine Pizza bianca machen. Aber vorher festschnallen – katapultiert dich gleich nach Pescq! Reinhold , schon verrückt, wie wir von Brot fasziniert sind. Eigentlich sollte es ja etwas total Alltägliches sein 😉 Wenn das mal kein gesunder Virus ist, Thomas ! Ja, endlich mal ein Virus, der total glücklich macht 🙂 Und, zwecks Ansteckung zum Nachbacken: Sind die 120g aktiver LM aus Deinem Rezept schon die Zielmenge oder ist das die Ausgangsmenge für das dreimalige Auffrischen? Lieben Dank und herzliche Grüße, limette. Zielmenge! Liebe Limette . Dann wünsch ich einen höchst ansteckenden Verlauf 🙂 Super – und was mache ich nun mit meiner Pasta Madre? 😉 Und noch ein NerdTipp – ich bastel eine Gärbox aus einerStyroporBox, einer ThermostatSchaltuhr und einer Heizmatte für Terrarien. Geht super! Ist nur nicht so romantisch wie Ofenoder Heizung. Geil! Selbstgebastelte Gärbox. Pass auf, dass die Sicherung nicht rausknallt, Stephan . Jetzt kannst du loslegen: Backe, backe Brote! Danke für diesen wundervollen Bericht – wer Lebenskrisen kennt sollte anfangen Brot zu backen – das schafft Freude und SInn. Die Gärbox mit der Terrariummatte (wie Thomas das beschreibt) ist für mich seit einigen Monaten ein Meilenstein. Der Wahnsinn, ich möchte nur noch Brot essen! vielen Dank für diese wunderbare Geschichte einer großen Liebe! Du hast mich verführt mit deinem Apfel, er liegt schon im Wasser! Ich bin sehr gespannt und freue mich! Buon anno 2017. Cordiali Saluti Andrea. Wie schön! Man kann Dein Brot schnuppern, lieber Claudio! Und ich schwörs: Das Nudelholz meiner geliebten Oma duftet immer noch nach ihrer Hefe..obwohl sie schon lange nicht mehr lebt. Haben an Dich gedacht als wir im Herbst (jaja…als es in den Abruzzen gescheppert hat) nach Deinem Rezept Lenticche (aus Santo S.!) mit Quadrucci gekocht haben, natürlich mit Mutti und einem tollen Montepulciano im Glas. Und mit ein bißchen krossem Guancale aus Amatrice drauf. Gibts sogar als Foto-Doku…kann ich hier halt nicht einstellen! Es war jedenfalls HIMMLISCH. Sehr viel Freude und Sinn, Wolfgang , auch wenn der Weg des Amateur-Bäckers manchmal durch ein dunkles Tal führt. Geht mir im Moment auch so, Chris . Zum Glück kann ich nicht so viel aufs Mal backen! Der Vorteil: Ich esse insgesamt weniger Brot, weil ich lieber kein Brot kaufe (und esse) als schlechteres. Buona fortuna, cara Andrea ! Möge die Macht des Backens mit dir sein. Simone ! Ihr wart wider da? Wie schön! Wie hat der Cucciolo auf den Heimatbesuch reagiert? Cari saluti e buon anno! Claudio! Du erinnerst Dich! Der Cucciolo ist nun schon drei und freut sich immer, wenn er in Molina ist. Da ist er ja jedes Jahr. Nun hat Mo noch eine Sorellina, 15 Monate, zur Seite, die Lagotto romagnolo in den Genen hat und wir hoffen, dass Lina vielleicht mal mit der Tartufo-Suche beginnt. Unser Freund dort handelt damit und könnte sie „anlernen“ 🙂 Buon anno! Cordiali Saluti a tante belle cose! Dein Beitrag hat mir sooo viel Freude bereitet. Ich habe schon oft versucht meine Leidenschaft für das Kochen und Backen zu beschreiben. Besser als Du es hier getan hast geht es nicht. Ich werde mir den Artikel ausdrucken und demnächst statt einer eigenen Erklärung meinem Gegenüber in die Hand drücken. Wer dann immer noch nicht versteht was mich bewegt, der wird schwerlich zu meinem näheren Umfeld gehören können. Lieber Claudio, das ist tatsächlich einer der schönsten Beiträge, die ich auf einem Food Blog gelesen habe. Ich war erst abgeschreckt durch den langen Taxt, aber dann konnte ich nicht mehr aufhören zu lesen. Die Fotos dieser wunderbaren Brote machen Mut und da fällt mir ein,…ja ich habe noch zwei kleine Rubinette in der Küche im Obstkorb. Vergessen worden um jetzt lange weiter zu leben?…vielleicht. Ich glaube, da wird heute Abend noch was passieren. Vielen Dank für diese Brotgeschichte. Toll, lieber Claudio. Dass Brot sich dem interessierten Laien erst einmal ziemlich hartnaeckig verweigert, musste ich auch lernen. Ich hatte Brot, das nach Brot schmeckt, hier in Wien (Brotgewuerzmanie: Koreander, Anis, Kuemmel) so vermisst, dass ich ebenfalls selber zu experimentieren began. Sollte selbstredend ebenfalls bloss mal so aus dem Handgelenk zu machen sein – noch nicht einmal die Waage kam bei mir zum Einsatz. Entsprechend fade oder versalzene Versuche unterschiedlichster Konsistenz waren die Folge, bis es schliesslich ganz gut klappte. Bloss eine derart herliche Krumme, wie von Dir erschaffen, habe ich nie hin gekriegt. Doch von genau dieser haette ich ja eigentlich getraeumt… Wahrscheinlich war die Supermarkthefe Schuld!? Macht wirklich Appetit auf die Lievito Madre. Deine Brotgeschichte ist schoener wie jeder Liebesroman und spannender als jeder Krmi. Deine beiden Buecher habe ich mir aus der Schweiz in die Dominikanische Republik schicken lassen. Lange darauf gewartet, endlich angekommen. Reine kulinarische Lust. Ich gehe mit ihnen ins Bett. Danke Claudio und es Guets Noeis! Eine sorellina? Herzallerliebst, Simone ! Mit Freude gelesen, danke, Dorothea ! Gutes Gelingen, Katrin ! Gabor , genau das ist ein Teil des Mutterhefe-Zaubers, die luftige Krume, probiers! Viel Vergnügen beim Lesen und Nachkochen, saludos, Susanna ! Juhuuuu, es lebt. Ich brauche einen Namen für das Baby. Ich kann dich so gut verstehen, mit deiner Brotleidenschaft – der ich auch verfallen bin. Wat´n Zufall seit 3 Wochen bin ich stolzer Vater eines LM. Muss jetzt ständig backen, weil mir die Deckel von den Gläsern wegfliegen (Potenz eines Hulk, hattest du geschrieben) Mag die Pizza zwar eher flach-knsprig; aber geschmacklich (mit LM gebacken) bin ich in meinem persönlichen Shangri La angekommen. Bei den Broten halte ich es ähnlich wie du – nur keine Wissenschaft draus machen, schön auf´s Gefühl hören, sich genügend Zeit nehmen und auch mal was riskieren – ist doch nur Mehl und Wasser 😉 Mach´s gut! Peter. Die Kunst und Hingabe zum Kochen/Backen wurde selten schöner und besser beschrieben! Hallo Claudio, was für eine schöne Hommage an den Sauerteig! Nach dem Erstansatz der LM hast Du ja, wenn ich richtig mitgezählt habe, etwa 1600g Sauerteig. 250g bewahrst Du für’s nächste Mal auf. Was machst Du mit dem Rest? Alles Gute für 2017 🙂 Aaawww! So süss, Katrin , gratuliere! Wow, Papaglück, Peter L. , kannst stolz sein! Danke, Franzi . RanAnDenSpeck , ich hab fortlaufend etwas davon verschenkt oder auch mal entsorgt, bis ich auf die für mich ideale Menge von 250 g gekommen bin. Sensationelle Geschichte Claudio! Danke dir. Mit dieser Anleitung habe ich heute das erste Mal ein reines Sauerteigbrot gebacken – und was für eines! Sensationelle Geschichte Claudio! Danke dir.Mit dieser Anleitung habe ich heute das erste Mal ein reines Sauerteigbrot gebacken – und was für eines! Bravo! Dein Brot sieht super aus, Claudia . ich habe zufällig deinen Blog gefunden und der erste Beitrag war „Leib und Seele“. Ich bin total begeistert und habe direkt meinen eigenen Lievito Madre angesetzt. Ich bin totaler Anfänger was das Brot backen angeht und hoffe er überlebt trotzdem bis er backfähig ist. Meine Frage: Welche Mehl- und Wassermenge fütterst du auf wie viel LM? Ich bin mal auf meinen ersten Backversuch mit dem LM gespannt 🙂 ich habe zufällig deinen Blog gefunden und der erste Beitrag war „Leib und Seele“. Ich bin total begeistert und habe direkt meinen eigenen Lievito Madre angesetzt. Ich bin totaler Anfänger was das Brot backen angeht und hoffe er überlebt trotzdem bis er backfähig ist. Meine Frage: Welche Mehl- und Wassermenge fütterst du auf wie viel LM? Ich bin mal auf meinen ersten Backversuch mit dem LM gespannt 🙂 ich staune über jeden deiner Beiträge und bin von diesem begeisterter als sonst. Den Ansatz einen Hefestarter aus heimischen Früchten zu ziehen ist total genial. Ich frage mich jedoch, ob dies wirklich das Geheimnis des LM ist. Denn im Prinzip züchtet man sich einen triebstarken Weizensauerteig. Demnach vermute ich, das dies auch – evtl sicherer und besser – mit der Umzüchtung eines Roggensauerteig zum Weizensauerteig gelingt!? Im guten RST sind ja auch vielen Wildhefen aus der unmittelbaren Umgebung wie verrückt start. tolle Bilder! Gehen die Rezepte auch mit einem normalen Sauerteig? Könntest du noch dein Rezept für die Pizza Bianca veröffentlichen 🙂 Ich drück die Daumen, SarahG ! Menge steht oben beschrieben: 50 g Mehl und 50 g Wasser. Steffen , kannst du gerne versuchen, aber die Aromatik von Roggensauerteig ist schon mal was ganz anderes. Sven , geht bestimmt auch mit einem anderen Sauerteig, aber wie gesagt, sobald Roggen drin ist, kommen viel stärkere und auch säuerlichere Malz- und Röstaromen durch, die du z.B. bei einer Focaccia nicht schmecken möchtest. Neee! Bei der Umzüchtung nimmt man 10 gr. Roggensauerteig und je 50 gr Weizenmehl und Wasser. Und dann vom Weizensauerteig wieder 10 gr und je 50 gr. Mehl und Wasser. Nach 10 mal anfüttern ist da nur noch 0,02 gr Vom Roggensauerteig drin. ABER EGAL: Ich probiere es einfach aus und werde dir berichten. Ich bin hin und weg von der ganzen Geschichte, habe meinen Lievito gezüchtet und die ersten Backversuche gestartet. Aber wie bringe ich nun meinem Lievito bei, dass er den Teig auch wirklich anhebt und das Brot schön luftig und knusprig wird? Oder anders herum – wie kommen die Löcher ins Brot? So cool, Verena ! Tja, das mit der luftigen Krume ist eine Kunst für sich. Je länger du den Lievito verwendest, desto stärker wird seine Treibkraft, dann werden die Löcher automatisch grösser. Die hohe Schule aber ist, wie du mit dem Teig umgehst. Dehnen und Falten gibt ein stabiles Glutengerüst. Vorsichtiges Formen, ohne dabei die Gase entweichen zu lassen, geben dem Laib Struktur und ein luftiges Inneres. Dafür gibt es kein Rezept oder Anleitung. Es ist Übungssache. Ich habe mir nächtelang Videos angeschaut von Bäckern, die ihre Handbewegungen erklären. Hi Claudio, wäre klasse wenn du mal ein paar deiner Lieblings Bäcker Videos verlinken würdest. Backe jetzt seit gut zwei Jahren aber solch eine Porung wie bei dir habe ich noch nie geschafft;-) Grazie mille, Claudio, jetzt ist mir einiges klarer geworden! Und ja, es ist eine Reise und sie bleibt spannend. Wir bleiben dran… Sven , da gibt es so viele, der einzige Link, den ich gespeichert habe, ist der hier: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-Dc5lShvHQ von da aus kannst du dich weiterklicken bis ins Unendliche. Verena : Gute Reise! Ich backe seit Jahrzehnten Brot. Die Entwicklung ging so: Viel (1 Würfel/kg Mehl)frische Hefe, Weizenweissmehl, Fett im Teig – dann Halbweissmehl – dann Ruch- und schliesslich Vollkornmehl; vom Supermarkt oder Landi in Bäckerqualität. Fett reduziert und schiesslich weggelassen. Weniger Hefe, aber mehr Zeit brachte eine merkliche Verbesserung. Dinkel hat mich nicht befriedigt. Dann auch mit Roggenmehlanteilen experimentiert; reines Roggenbrot auf Hefe war und bleibt ’schwierig‘. Hartweizenanteile waren ‚interessant‘. Zufrieden mit Hefebroten, doch dann meldete sich die Neugier: Es wurde Zeit für Sauerteig-Experimente, einige sind misslungen, bevor es erstmals klappte. Dann für einige Zeit je einen Roggensauer- und Weizensauerteig gezüchtet, bis ich sie versehentlich vertauschte und nichts mehr ging. Blogeinträge lesen blieb frustrierend, da ich das Fachchinesisch nicht verstand, nie. Zweifel an meinen geistigen Fähigkeiten und eine neue Boulangerie Artisanale vor Ort gaben dem hausgemachten Sauerteig den Rest. – Dann bin ich auf Mehl aus lokalem Anbau aus einer lokalen Mühle umgestiegen. Die unglaublich verbesserten Resultate bei Hefebroten brachten mich zu neuen Sauerteigversuchen. Und jetzt klappt es; ich füttere ihn (Weizen) ein- bis zweimal pro Woche. Den Unterschied zwischen LM und Weizensauer weiss ich immer noch nicht – gibt es einen? Hin und wieder füge ich dem Teig ein Brösmeli Frischhefe zu, manchmal einen Löffel Honig, manchmal darf der Teig in der Wärme, manchmal in der Kälte reifen, manchmal 3-4 Stunden, manchmal bis 48, manchmal ist er nass und sehr klebrig, manchmal gut von Hand knetbar, manchmal mit, dann wieder ohne stretch-and-fold, manchmal mische ich verschiedene Mehlsorten und Mahlgrade, manchmal forme ich die Brote (Zopf, Knöpfe, Gärkörbchen) oder backe auf dem Blech oder im Tüpfi. – Eigentlich bin ich derzeit ganz zufrieden mit meinen Brotbackskills, doch die Brote in diesem Blogeintrag könnten mich zu neuen Versuchen verleiten. Merci! Wunderbar beschrieben, Bea , danke. Hoffe, mein Beitrag gibt dir weiteren Auftrieb! Und ja, LM und Weizensauerteig ist dasselbe. In Italien gibt es noch weitere Namen dafür: pasta madre, lievito naturale oder crescente (=wachsend/zunehmend). Dein Brot sieht fantastisch aus und ich bin gerade dabei deinen Lievito Madre nach zu züchten. Heute werden Apfelwasser und Mehl vermengt. Eine Frage zum nächsten Schritt. Du schreibst: eine Woche lang alle 12h mit 50g Wasser und 50g Mehl auffrischen.“ Gebe ich dies einfach hinzu? Dann habe ich aber nach einer Woche eine riesengrosse Menge. Oder nimmst du einen Teil vom Ansatz und gibst 50/50 hinzu? :-/ Lieben Dank und schöne Grüsse. Toll, Christiane , drück die Daumen! Bei mir hats mit der Menge gut geklappt. Es spricht aber nichts dagegen, jeweils ein wenig zu entnehmen bis du 300 g hast und dann fütterst du 50 g Mehl und 50 g Wasser. Gutes Gelingen! Hallo Claudio, Du schreibst „Mit perforierter Klarsichtfolie abdecken und bei 26 Grad reifen lassen, bis sich das Volumen verdoppelt hat (etwa 12h)“. Die 26 Grad gelten für die ganze Woche oder nur für die ersten 12h? Grüße Thomas. Ja, Thomas , durchgehend zwischen 24 und 26 Grad. Das ist sehr wichtig. Danke für die Info. Die Temperatur ist in der Tat entscheidend. Ich hatte das Glas erst im Eingangsbereich des Heizungsraums deponiert. Nach 12h musste ich leider feststellen, dass sich da nichts verdreifacht hatte. Dann habe ich den Brei direkt vor den Kessel gestellt – und siehe da, er lebt! Buona sera Claudio, zweiter Versuch, meine Mutterhefe zu züchten! Die erste Hürde geschafft: hab den Grundteig „Apfelwasser + Vollkornmehl“ heute Nacht mit ins Bett genommen 😂 und siehe da, diesmal hat das Wunder geklappt und der Teig hat sich verdoppelt! Hurra! Muss ich nun die ganze erste Woche nach jeder Fütterung auf die Temperatur achten? Oder kann ich wieder alleine schlafen? So gerne würde ich eine Colomba Pasquale mit Livieto Madre backen! Ob das noch klappt? Ich bin mal gespannt! Cordiali Saluti Andrea. Super, Andrea ! Ja, konstante Temperatur ist sehr wichtig – und wie du siehst, fühlt sie sich wohl bei dir. ein spitzen Beitrag, wirklich toll. Deine Hingabe zum Backen ist beeindruckend und sehr ansteckend. Ich wollte Dich zwei Dinge fragen. Könntest Du bitte das Rezept für die „Pizza bianca“ veröffentlichen, die Pizza sieht genial aus. Dann wollte ich Dich noch fragen was der Unterschied zwischen dem flüssigen Lievito Madre und dem Pasta Madre solido ist, geschmacklich und von dem Anwendungsspektrum. Herzlichen Dank und herzliche Grüße. Danke, lieber Christian . Die Anleitung für Pizza bianca werde ich sicher mal ausführlich beschreiben. Vom Rezept her kannst du dich inzwischen an das vom oben aufgeführten Pane Pugliese halten. Einfach ein gutes Pizzamehl dafür verwenden, wie zum Beispiel das Manitoba von Mulino Marino. Hab sie aber auch schon mit Alnatura oder Demeter Campo Verde 405er Mehl wunderbar hinbekommen. Der grosse Unterschied ist, dass der Teig nach dem letzten Arbeitsschritt für 24 Stunden im Kühlschrank reifen muss. Der Unterschied zwischen den beiden Hefen ist, dass der flüssige Lievito Madre viel unkomplizierter zum Auffrischen ist. Dauert keine Minute. Geschmacklich kann ich keinen Unterschied feststellen. Sind beide superaromatisch mit einer feinsäuerlichen Note. herzlichen Dank für Deine Antwort, in was für einem Gefäß reift man denn den Teigling für 24 Stunden im Kühlschrank? Ich denke mal nach den 24 Stunden wird der Feigling dann gestürzt und dann weiss ich nicht weiter. Faltet man noch mal oder gleich in den Ofen? Herzlichen Dank für Deine Hilfe. Ich verwende eine Salatsschüssel, die ich mit Folie abdecke. Du kannst aber auch Tuppergeschirr mit Deckel oder professionelle Teigwannen verwenden. Vor dem Backen muss der Teig in Form gebracht werden. Je nach Brot ganz unterschiedlich. Pizza und Ciabatta werden nur gestreckt und 2x der Länge nach wie ein Brief gefaltet. Für Brote gibt es unzählige Methoden. Schau dir am besten mal Videos an. Ist eine Kunst für sich! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-Dc5lShvHQ. Ein sehr motivierender Beitrag, danke! Zwei Fragen, die du mir vielleicht beantworten könntest: – Was bringt das dreimalige Auffrischen innert 12 Stunden beim Pane Pugliese; führt ein einmaliges Auffrischen mit der dreifachen Menge zu einem weniger treibfähigen Resultat? – Kann ich meine pasta madre nicht einfach zur Li.co.li umerziehen, indem ich das Wasser-Mehl-Verhältnis ändere? Mein Lieblingsbrot ist übringes aktuell das pane Maggiore mit ebenfalls hohem Wasseranteil, aus dem Maggiatal nach deutschen blog-Rezepten… Lieber David , 3 Mal nacheinander auffrischen macht die Mutterhefe luftiger und triebstärker. Pasta Madre in li.co.li umwandeln müsste problemlos gehen. Beim nächsten Auffrischen einfach die gleiche Menge Mehl und Wasser füttern. Starte mal mit 25 g Pasta Madre, 50 g Wasser, 50 g Mehl. Gutes Gelingen! Ich verstehe zurzeit noch nicht wirklich wie das auffrischen funktioniert. Wie du dir vielleicht denken kannst bin ich Neuling im Backen. Ich habe zu Anfang einen Sauerteig mit dunklem Weizenmehl und einen mit hellem Weizenmehl angesetzt. Mit beiden waren die Erfolgserlebnisse bisher dürftig, aber daran muss ich selber arbeiten. Nun zu meinem aktuellen Problem: Ich habe auf verschiedenen anderen Blogs gelesen, dass der Weizensauerteig mit einem Anstellgut, das heißt nur mit 10g 7-14 Tage alten Sauerteig und jeweils 50g Mehl und Wasser aufgefrischt werden soll, da er sonst stark an Triebkraft einbüßt. Welche Erfahrungen hast du mit dem Lievito Madre gemacht? Reicht das einfache Auffrischen mit 50g Wasser und Mehl? Kommt er dann nach dem Auffrischen direkt wieder in den Kühlschrank oder lässt du ihm noch ein bisschen Urlaub auf Raumtemperaturien? Ich möchte nicht ohne ein Erfolgserlebnis des guten Gebäcks im Sommer nach Neapel. Saluti da Colonia. Salve, Leo . Ich habe immer um die 100 g Lievito im Kühlschrank. Manchmal mehr, manchmal weniger. Kommt immer darauf an, wie viel ich backe und was davon übrig bleibt. Am Tag vor dem Backen, nehme ich ihn um 8 Uhr aus dem Kühlschrank, entnehme 100 g und frische mit 50 g Mehl und 50 g Wasser auf. Den Behälter (verschliessbares Glas oder Tupperbox) stelle ich auf den Heizkörper, wo es immer an die 24 Grad hat. Nach 3-4 Stunden hat sich das Volumen verdoppelt. Dann frische ich zwei weitere Male mit 50/50 g auf; am Mittag und gegen 16 Uhr. Das Volumen verdreifacht sich dann und ist super luftig, wie ein Schaum. Dann setze ich meinen Teig damit an. Was an Lievito übrig bleibt, geht wieder in den Kühlschrank. Das Brot im letzten Bild (Ciabatta) sieht hammer aus – sehr schöne Porung. Wie heisst es genau und gibt es dazu ein Rezept? Hilfe, Claudio! Ja, auch ich habe mich auf den Weg gemacht, den beglückenden, steinigen des Brotbäckers. Dein herrlicher Wegweiser hat mich dazu animiert und die Züchtung der Apfel-Lievito ist gut gelungen. Das Glas sitzt im Kühlschrank und mein Baby wird gehegt und gepflegt. Nur meine ersten Backversuche endeten in kleinen Tragödien – aber auch darauf hattest du mich ja vorbereitet. Ich habe Brot 1 mit Pizzamehl gebacken: Tipo 00 im gusseisernen Bräter und Brot 2 mit 550 Mehl auf dem Backstein. Optisch sahen beide Laibe supertoll aus, das Innenleben war aber total speckig und die Brote ungenießbar. Kannst du mir verraten, welches Mehl (außer dem von dir angegebenen semola rimancinata) funktioniert? Ich vermute nämlich, dass das der Grund meines Scheiterns war. Noch gebe ich nicht auf. Liebe Grüße aus Waiblingen, Ute. Glückwunsch, Ute ! Dran bleiben, das kommt schon gut. Am Mehl liegt es bestimmt nicht, sondern an der Teigreife. Hast du den Lievito wirklich 3x bei Raumtemperatur aufgefrischt? Und war er locker, schaumig und im Begriff weiter zu wachsen, oder schon wieder zusammengefallen? Und der Teig? Hast du über die beschriebene Zeit gedehnt und gefaltet? Zu einer straffen Kugel geschliffen? Es braucht jetzt Geduld und viel Übung, dann werden deine Brote immer besser. Gutes Gelingen!