Pizza Dough and Toppings – Daring Bakers

For the Daring Baker’s October challenge, Rosa of Rosa’s Yummy Yums challenged the Daring Bakers to make pizza like just like the pizzaiole/pizzaioli using the“Pizza Napoletana” recipe from Peter Reinhart’s “The Bread Baker’s Apprentice.

These days I seem to take two steps forward and three backwards so it was only yesterday I realized that the posting date was TODAY! I thought it was on Friday (don’t know why). At least I managed to make the dough yesterday and let it rest overnight in the fridge. The recipe was quite easy to follow.

This afternoon, after I took the pizza dough out of the fridge and let it go through the mandatory two hour rest, I prepared the toppings. There was no one home to take pictures of me tossing the pizza dough in the air, so I tried to take a picture myself tossing the dough using the timer on the camera; but really, the results were not pretty. I have a long way to become a pizzaiola.

I made four pizzas – one for each member of the family so this way they could each choose their favourite toppings.

At the request of my two daughters, I topped two of the pizzas with tomato sauce, Italian sausage, caramelized onions, black olives, red peppers and shredded mozzarella cheese.

The husband loves anchovies, so I topped his pizza with tomato sauce, anchovies, black olives and shredded mozzarella cheese.

I topped my pizza with tomato sauce, mushrooms, fresh mozzarella and fresh basil.

The pizza dough was the best dough I have made so far. All four pizzas tasted amazing! Much, much better then the take out pizzas we have tried. We could not finish our pizzas so the girls are happy to be bringing the remainder of their pizza to school for lunch.

Just before I put in the last pizza in the oven, I noticed that the pizza stone was cracked. Does anyone have any idea why that happened? Was the oven too hot? (550 degrees F.) Also, there was flour on the baking stone which burnt and cause the oven to smoke. I quickly turned on the hut fan, opened windows (it was cold!) to make sure the smoke detector would not go off. We have a very sensitive smoke detector which is hooked up to our alarm system. The last time the smoke detector went on, we had three fire trucks parked outside our house.

Rosa was supposed to host this event with Sherry of What did you Eat? and Glenna of A Fridge Full of Good. Tragically, Sherry passed away from suffering a massive heart attack last July and Glenna resigned from the Daring Bakers for personal reasons. I have visited Sherry’s blog many times. She was quite popular in the blogging community and is sadly missed. Rosa graciously decided to honour Shelly’s recipe choice for this month. Thank you Rosa.

For the pizza dough recipe visit Rosa at Rosa’s Yummy Yums. To view how the DB tossed and turned their pizzas, visited the Daring Bakers Blogroll.