I dedicate this book to my wife and my mother. These two women have been central to my life, my health, and the way I see the world.
Curtis Ide
Friends and Family Edition
Copyright © 2003, 2008 by Curtis Evan Ide,
Photographs copyright © 2008 by Curtis Evan Ide and Charles Henry (Nick) Ide,
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part, in any form.
ISBN 978-0-615-25860-7
I want to thank my wife Mariscela, my children Gabriella and Evan, and my brothers and sisters for eating so many pizzas! Mariscela has been especially supportive and helpful. She has given me solid confidence to continue. I must really thank my father Nick for taking some wonderful pictures and showing me that adding the pictures was an achievable goal. I am also grateful to my friends and their families who have eaten quite a few pizzas that I have made.
four of this book using FrameMaker and I found the program to be so very useful. Alas, I have switched to Microsoft Word for this last version. Word is not as easy for big books as FrameMaker is but it does the job if you are willing to work at it and Word was much less expensive.
Passionate About Pizza: Making Great Homemade Pizza has three parts to encourage you along the journey of becoming a better pizza maker.
Part One starts walking you through a systematic approach to making consistently good pizza by introducing the Passionate About Pizza System, and then further develops the system in subsequent chapters focused on detailed discussions of every aspect of making a pizza. Even the most practiced pizza chef will get some benefit (and enjoyment, I hope) from reading the chapters in part one.
Part Two covers recipes and has chapters listing dough and sauce recipes that you can use for any type of pizza. One chapter for each of the major types of pizza follows. Each of these chapters has detailed recipes for each of the common styles of one type. There is even a compendium of different pizza recipes so that you can always find a pizza recipe that suits your taste.
Part Three expands the Passionate About Pizza System into advanced pizza-making topics including a chapter on having a pizza party. For those with visions of making pizza professionally there is a brief introduction to advanced pizza making topics. The book ends with a chapter covering common mistakes and solutions to those problems called the “Troubleshooting Guide”. This guide gives a quick view of the problems that are likely to happen when a neophyte makes pizza the first few times. If you are new to making pizza, check out the troubleshooting guide.
The Passionate
About Pizza System
California-style Sourdough Dough
Sassy South of the Border Sauce
Black Olive and Roasted Red Pepper
Pizza
Chevre, Artichoke, and Roasted Red
Pepper Pizza
Fresh Plum Tomato and Mozzarella
Pizza
Fresh Tomato and Green Pepper Pizza
Pesto, Ricotta, and Prosciutto Pizza
Rajas Pepper Strips with Chicken
Pizza
Sautéed Peppers, Feta, and Garlic
Pizza
Sausage, Ricotta, and Fresh Tomato
Pizza
White Pizza with Chile Peppers
Part
one of Passionate About Pizza: Making Great Homemade
Pizza focuses
on the basic information and skills you will use to make pizza.
You will make great homemade pizza every time you try if you
ignite your passion and follow a systematic approach to making pizza. Plan your pizza-making activities, use the same equipment and
high-quality ingredients each time, use proven preparation techniques, rely on
your recipes, and work to make continual improvements.
The best pizzerias exude passion! The owner or pizza chef of a family run pizzeria is passionate about pizza, no doubt about it. This passion flows into their pizza and their customers taste it. It keeps the chef making great pizza year after year and it keeps the customers coming back for more of their pizza. The Passionate About Pizza System will help you develop and focus your passion into repeatedly making great pizza!
Put your passion into your pizza! The fact that you are reading this book means that you are willing to put effort into making a pizza rather than ordering one from a pizzeria or buying a frozen one from the grocery store. Go one-step further and put your passion into your pizza! Your pizza and all the things you do to turn it from raw ingredients into a finished pie are an expression of you. Your friends, your family, and you yourself will be able to tell when you make food with passion, so express yourself with gusto!
Pizzerias use the same ingredients, preparation, and baking time for every pizza they make to ensure that all pizzas come out alike. This system brings consistency, uniformity, and repeatability. A very good system will help make very good pizza.
A system is more than just a recipe; it is a complete plan for how to make a pizza from scratch. The Passionate About Pizza System will help you make each pizza better than your last. You will be able to create a mouth-watering taste sensation with every pizza you make.
A pizza made at home takes time to prepare. There
are two facets to this time. There is the time you must
spend actively working on the pizza and there is the time that some steps
require without your direct involvement. By understanding these
different activities and fitting them into the time you have, you can plan for
them in your routine activities to produce homemade pizza in a seemingly
effortless fashion. You must also decide which recipes you are going
to use in advance so that you allow for a sufficient amount of preparation time
and to ensure that you have all the necessary ingredients on hand. You
will find general information about planning your pizza on page
and further discussion about planning and executing a pizza party on page
226.
Equipment
You cannot really blame a bad pizza on your equipment but the equipment you use does have an impact upon the pizzas you make. You need the right kind of equipment to use for each task. Above all, you must be comfortable with the equipment you use. You cannot expect to become familiar with new equipment immediately but you will acquire new equipment as you progress. This book will help you through the transition and keep you making good pizza all the while. The chapter on equipment starting on page describes my equipment experiences and tips.
Ingredients
High-quality ingredients are necessary for making good pizza. Consistently good pizza requires the use of the same good ingredients each time you make it and a continual search for better quality ingredients. You can balance these two seemingly disparate goals. If you are happy with an ingredient, keep using it; if not, try to find a better brand or type. By making everything from scratch, you control the whole process. Some brands or types of ingredients work better than others do. On the one hand, a tomato is a tomato and flour is flour, but different types of flours and tomatoes have characteristics that affect the way the pizza turns out. If you decide to use prepared ingredients, use only those of the highest quality and those with which you are completely satisfied. There are tips based on my practical experience in the chapter on ingredients found on page 31.
Preparation Techniques
In its most basic form, pizza dough is as simple as flour, water, and yeast mixed together with a little salt. Good preparation techniques are the magic that turns these components into a wonderful-tasting pizza crust. As with many things, what seems simple about making pizza to the casual observer has subtleties that can cause downright fear and trepidation when facing a mass of dough alone in the kitchen.
It took me years to develop my goof-proof preparation techniques. Thorough discussion of the how and whys of preparation techniques will lead you through the fear and uncertainty until the techniques become second nature to you. The chapter on preparation techniques, from mixing the dough through serving the pizza and on to handling leftover pizza, describes the techniques in detail starting on page 39.
Recipes
A recipe describes the proportions of the various ingredients and the methods used to combine them to create the finished product. As such, a recipe provides a blueprint to success. If it is someone else's recipe, you can be sure that at least one other person used it with success. If it is your recipe, you can reuse it and fine-tune it so that you know that you will be successful. Do not look at a recipe as confining you; rather, look at it as a framework of known success that you can modify to suit the occasion.
There are really two parts to a recipe for pizza. The first part of the recipe defines the form (or style) of the pizza. For example, all Thick-style pizzas share certain common equipment and procedures for preparation. Similarly, all Thin-style pizzas share certain things, too. The other part of the recipe describes the flavor combination that makes up the taste. The form (or style) of the pizza is mostly independent of the flavor combination and vice versa. You can generally create any flavor combination with any style of pizza. You will get to the point where you can easily combine the two parts of recipe into any number of wonderful, custom combinations. You will find all the recipes in Part Two: Recipes starting on page 85.
“Practice makes perfect” is true in making pizza, as it is in any part of life. Actually, the quote should be “Perfect practice makes perfect” and this is understood by many professionals. You need to perfect your techniques if you want perfect pizza. That way, every pizza you make will be better than your last, no matter how long you make pizza, because you become more familiar with the system and fine-tune it to your own tastes. If you find a better way to do something, write it down so that you can do it every time. If there is something that you do not like by all means do not settle for it! Adjust what you are doing to avoid the problem and make things better. You will know your ingredients, recipes, preparation techniques, and order of preparation better than anyone else, and soon you will have your own system!
I encourage you to write notes to yourself about the way you
do each step. Writing things down helps you remember them
better (remember what your teachers used to tell you) as well as ensuring that
you can refer to them again when you do not remember.
In addition, the last chapter entitled “Troubleshooting Guide” found on page 235 focuses directly on continual improvement. You will find a listing of some of the problems that you might run into when making a pizza along with some suggested solutions. Ending the book with this topic helps put you in the habit of reflecting on what you have done to look for improvements to make the next time you cook pizza. I suggest that you get in the habit of looking for one or two such improvements each time you cook a pizza.
Part two of Passionate About Pizza: Making Great Homemade Pizza builds on the skills described in part one
and covers the various recipes that you will use to make your favorite pizza. Remember, there are two choices to make; the
form of pizza you want to have and the flavor combination you will use. Putting those together gives you the ultimate
control of your pizza! You
can mix just about any flavor with each of the different forms (or styles) of
pizza.
This section details the following:
Dough Recipes
Sauce Recipes
Thin-Style Pizza Recipes
Thick-Style Pizza Recipes
Pizza’s Close Relatives
Pizza Recipe Compendium
The
Passionate About Pizza System
You will make great homemade pizza every time you try if you
ignite your passion and follow a systematic approach to making pizza. Plan your pizza-making activities, use the same equipment and
high-quality ingredients each time, use proven preparation techniques, rely on
your recipes, and work to make continual
improvements.
Recipes
“Recipes; I never follow a recipe.” “I like to cook by feel.” “Recipes are for the timid.” “I like my pizza one way; I am not interested in other recipes.” I have heard many a pizza lover or good cook say things like that. My wife did not like to use recipes when she started cooking. Well, I think that you will benefit from recipes, even if you never follow one exactly. In this introduction, I will tell you why. My wife has become a convert over the years and uses recipes, now. I think you will, too.
I am going to do what editors generally considered a no-no in a book. I am going to repeat something verbatim! I am doing it because it is so important for you to understand what I am trying to say. This next paragraph is an exact duplication from the introduction of the Passionate About Pizza System in Part One: Foundation.
A recipe describes the proportions of the various
ingredients and the methods used to combine them to create the finished
product. As such, a recipe provides a blueprint to success. If it is someone else's recipe, you can be sure
that at least one other person used it with success. If it is your recipe, you can reuse it and
fine-tune it so that you know that you will be successful. Do not look at a recipe as confining you; rather,
look at it as a framework of known success that you can modify to suit the
occasion.
Let the recipes in the following chapters guide and inspire you, not limit you!
As I have mentioned before, there are two parts to a recipe for pizza – the form (or style) of the pizza and the flavor combinations. The following chapters describe the recipes in just that way. First, there are recipes for pizza dough and pizza sauces. There is one chapter for each of the major styles of pizza. Then, there is a chapter listing a broad range of flavor combinations, as you would normally find in a pizza cookbook. By giving you the two types of information separately, you can easily match the style (or form) you want with the flavors you want to suit your mood on any given pizza!
Part three of Passionate
About Pizza: Making Great Homemade Pizza expands
on the fundamentals of the Passionate
About Pizza System. Now
that you have a solid foundation of pizza skills and pizza recipes, you are
ready to expand into having pizza parties, countering the problems that may
occur, and exploring advanced or professional pizza-making topics.
The
Passionate About Pizza System
You will make great
homemade pizza every time you try if you ignite your passion and follow a
systematic approach to making pizza. plan your pizza-making activities, use the same equipment and
high-quality ingredients each time, use proven preparation techniques, rely on
your recipes, and work to make continual improvements.
Pizza is a great party food. It is so popular that almost everyone likes it. It would be hard to cook enough pizza to serve 100 (or even forty) people without using a large, commercial pizza oven. However, with a little foresight and planning, you can have a pizza party that is enjoyable for you as well as an opportunity to show off your pizza-making skills. First, harness your passion and be confident that your efforts will have excellent results!
Having a pizza party can be great fun – for you and your guests. On the other hand, pizza parties can be challenging for a pizza chef, especially if you are early in your journey into making pizza. Your key weapon in meeting this challenge is the Passionate About Pizza System! Here is how you do it.
Planning all the activities required for the pizza party will pay off. You will find that making toppings and sauce for more than a few pizzas can take several hours. It can take an hour or more to make several batches of dough. Finally, assembling and baking a bunch of pizzas can take another hour or more. Now might be a good time to reread the chapter on “Planning Your Pizza” starting on page 17. You may want to read it for the first time, if you have not yet done so. That section covers most of the time management issues you will run into.
It is my experience that it takes about one pizza for every four adults at a pizza party. Therefore, you can divide the number of guests by four to get the number of pizzas you should make. Do not forget to include yourself and your family in the count. Children may eat a little less pizza and teenage eaters will almost certainly eat more pizza, so adjust the number accordingly. If you plan to serve appetizers or salad with the pizzas, you can reduce the number of pizzas needed. If you want to ensure that you have leftovers, you can increase the number of pizzas by one or two. Overall, this rule of “one 14 – 16 inch pizza serves four guests” has stood up for many years of having pizza parties. I usually have a small amount of leftover pizza, just the way I like it! Remember, I am only giving advice and guidance. It is your party; you can and should make as much or as little pizza as you want to!
Choosing
Recipes
To increase your chances of success and reduce the risk of unforeseen problems you should use recipes that have turned out successful results for you in the past. It is okay to experiment; however, I suggest that you limit the uncertainties to a level that you are certain to manage. I have broken this rule myself and I came through but it was a little stressful.
I generally make thin-style pizza at my pizza parties because it cooks in about a third of the time that thick-style pizza requires. Since each thin-style pizza bakes in about twelve to fifteen minutes, you can turn out approximately four pizzas in an hour; this feeds about sixteen people an hour.
Ordering the
Pizzas
I do not mean calling in an order for pizzas. Rather, I mean, “in what order do you want to serve the pizzas?” You might serve the first pizzas as appetizers and the later pizzas as the main course. If you have not finalized your recipes, setting the order might help you decide which recipes to choose.