It’s hard to believe- with pizza now so ubiquitous it seems to be everywhere- that, not so long ago, pizza was little-known here in Minnesota. I grew up in one of those new neighborhoods that sprouted from the potato fields fringing northern Minneapolis, in what is now Brooklyn Center. Back then, within sight (on a clear day) of the awe-inspiring Foshay Tower, my parents had to drive into Robbinsdale to do their shopping. As the suburbs grew, so did the shopping centers, and some of them included the first little hole-in-the-wall pizza joints. Anyone growing up in this area in the 60s must recall dining at Taco Towne, or Broadway Pizza, where we were served delicious pizza with a crust made from dough that was run through a sheeter to make it as thin as possible, and cut into squares, of course.
I began my foray into the world of home pizza making in Junior High. I (meaning my mother) would buy the boxed pizza “kits” made by Jenos, to create my first pizzas. In the box there was a small can of sauce, a little sack of flour, a pouch of yeast, and a slightly larger pouch of parmesan cheese. I would dump the flour into a bowl, add the yeast and the proper amount of water, and stir it all together with a fork. Once the dough began to rise (I think I waited about 5 minutes), I would press the mass onto a cookie sheet, add the sauce and cheese from the package, and then add some freshly grated mozzarella from a block in the refrigerator. Oh yeah, included in the sauce were little chunks of pepperoni.
By today’s standards, these were truly awful pizzas; but I loved them, and made them frequently. Since a parlor pizza was generally outside of my budget, I guess the big appeal was its affordability, and the pleasure I got from making it myself. As a college student in Bemidji in the 1970s, the $5 bill my mom would staple to the top of her weekly letter had to go- by necessity- to staples like potatoes, noodles, Blue Bonnet margarine, and Blatz. A windfall of cash, however, meant a trip to Dave’s Pizza. Their thin, crackly crusted pizzas, topped with globs of their own garlic-laden sausage -put on raw and cooked right on the pizza- was, and still is, the very best.
Saturday night became pizza night in our household shortly after Peg and I married, and it has continued for 30 years. The mainstay was the pizza crust from Betty Crocker, baked on a perforated 16” aluminum pizza pan. But I also delved into the world of Neapolitan type pizzas attempted on a baking stone using a pizza peel, with a house full of smoke being the typical end result.
Peg, being from New York, was fine with the thicker, more bread-like crusts, but I wanted a true Midwestern thin-as-can-be pizza, cut into squares (of course). While perusing my favorite recipe book- Amy Thielen’s “The New Midwestern Table”- I came across her recipe for Cracker Crust Pizza. Not only was she creating just the type of pizza I wanted, but she also shared my fondness for Dave’s Pizza. I made it pretty much as Amy described for my first attempt, and it was a “home run” in our household (I had attempted cracker crusts in the past, which one of my resident critics had likened to cardboard). As time went on, I made a few changes, like using olive oil instead of canola oil, and adding just ¼ teaspoon of yeast. I find that the small amount of yeast adds just a touch of loft to the crust, without the oven spring that can inflate the crust like a giant pita.
I started baking on 6” quarry tiles about 20 years ago-after my high priced (and much too small) baking stone broke in half. In fact, I am still using those same tiles. It takes 6 full-sized tiles, and 3 half tiles, to line an oven rack. This creates roughly an 18”x15” baking surface. I use a tile cutter to cut tiles in half. At 50-75 cents apiece, it is easy to see their appeal to a frugal guy like me. I use only American-made tiles that I trust to be free of whatever may be in the tiles manufactured where scruples are lax (remember the radioactive sheetrock imported from China?). Not only do I bake pizzas on them, but they are also ideal for baking baguettes. Out of laziness more than anything, the tiles tend to stay in the oven much of the time-even for standard baking. They pre-heat fairly quickly (roughly double the amount of time needed to pre-heat an oven without tiles), and I believe they help to moderate the temperature swings of our electric oven. I find the 3rd position up from the bottom to be a good rack height. When installing them, I put the half tiles in the back, since they could more easily tumble out while removing pizzas.
Caution: Only install and remove tiles from a cool oven, and avoid dropping a tile onto the glass oven door, for obvious reasons. Covering the glass with the transfer board or a large cookie sheet when installing or removing the tiles is a good idea-just in case.
Although we own a large aluminum pizza peel with a long wooden handle, it is a relic from our commercial food production days that mostly hangs unused as a decoration on our wall, since it requires wide-open spaces to operate it-something our home kitchen lacks. There is no need for a pricey peel, so unless you already own one, simply make yourself a transfer board. I use 1/8” hardboard from the building supply store. A 2’x4’ piece costs about $4, and will make 3 transfer boards. First cut the board down to 18”x48”, and then cut it into three 16” wide pieces. This board is only used to transfer the highly vulnerable unbaked pizza atop a piece of parchment paper. The oven and tiles will be 500 degrees, so the board must spend as little time in it as possible. Since the parchment slides easily from the board, this is a quick and smooth 2 second transfer. The board will not be used for the removal of the pizza. By that time the pizza is sturdy enough to survive being slid onto a pizza pan for slicing.
In a pinch a 16” diameter pizza pan can be used to transfer the parchment-lined pizza to the tiles. Since the pan has a rim, however, the fragile pizza must travel up and over it, like a slinky, which may send loose toppings- such as balls of sausage- cascading onto the hot tiles, or the bottom of the oven. Alternately, a large rim-free cookie sheet may be used, if you can find one big enough, or want to make smaller pizzas.
Equipment
It is simple, inexpensive, and fun to turn your home kitchen into a Midwestern Pizzeria on Saturday night (or even Friday night). This is all you need:
Six 6” unglazed quarry tiles and 3 half tiles
16”x18” Transfer Board
15” wide roll of Parchment Paper (this is the widest most stores sell)
Rolling Pin
Standard kitchen supplies such as a mixing bowl, pizza pans, cooling rack and pizza cutter
The Dough for Two 16” Pizzas
2 Cups All-Purpose flour plus another 1/3 cup or so on-hand
¾ Cup room temperature water
¼ Cup olive oil (canola oil works too)
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon sugar
¼ teaspoon instant yeast
Add ¼ cup of olive oil to a mixing bowl. Using the same ¼ measuring cup, fill it 3 times at the faucet with water to add ¾ cup of water to the oil.
Add the salt and sugar, and stir with a rubber spatula to dissolve it. The sugar is something I am tempted to cut out, but I do think it helps with the tenderness of the crust somehow, and gives the small amount of yeast something to munch on.
Stir in ¼ teaspoon of instant yeast. I add yeast just to puff up the margins a bit to make the edges the most coveted part of the pizza. Too much yeast may cause the crust under the toppings to inflate, which sends the toppings tumbling from the slopes. This will occasionally happen anyway -even without yeast- so just watch for them, and poke them with a knife to deflate them while the pizza is baking.
Add 1 cup of flour to the liquid, and use the rubber spatula to create a smooth mixture. Add the second cup of flour, and stir with the rubber spatula to incorporate all of the flour. Use the scoop & sweep method. Scoop into the flour to over-fill the cup, and sweep across the top with a flat knife to level the surface. This will still be wet, sticky dough at this point, so stir in another tablespoon or 2 of flour, as needed. Turn the dough out onto a work surface coated with about a ¼ cup of flour. Start working the dough, grabbing flour from the surface as you go, to get the dough to the point where it can be kneaded without the dough sticking to your hands. The amount of flour needed to get to this point varies with the type of flour being used. I generally use Gold Medal Unbleached All-Purpose flour, since it is found in most grocery stores. We want smooth, supple dough that is not too wet or too stiff. Knead for 3-5 minutes to develop the gluten. The dough should feel a bit tacky, but not stick to your hands.
This can also all be done (more easily) using a stand mixer. Use a rubber spatula to blend the first cup of flour into the bowl containing the water, oil, salt, sugar and yeast. Then add the second cup of flour and attach the dough hook. While it is turning, add just enough more flour, 1 tablespoon at a time, to get the dough to just clean the sides and bottom of the bowl. This should be about 2 and ½ tablespoons. Then continue with the dough hook until the dough is smooth and supple-usually about 3 minutes.
Stretch the skin of the dough to form a tight ball, and cut it in half. If you are particular- or poor at judging sizes- use a kitchen scale to get 2 dough halves of equal weight. Stretch the skin of each of the halves to form 2 round dough balls. Set each ball onto a bed of flour, and press them to form round discs about 6” in diameter. Flip them to coat the tops with flour, and cover them with a towel for about a half hour (or longer) to let the dough relax.
Time is our friend here. Once the dough is relaxed, it can be easily pressed by hand into a roughly 12” round. Then switch to a rolling pin, and roll the dough into an oval. Turn the dough 90 degrees, and roll again to create a fairly round, uniform shape about 14-15” in diameter. Flour is also our friend, so use enough under and on top of the dough to keep it from sticking, but don’t overdo it. Too much flour on the crust is not very tasty. Without enough flour, parts of the dough will stick to the counter, resulting in an amoeba-shaped crust.
Place a 15”x18” piece of parchment paper on the transfer board, and then carefully lift the dough onto the parchment. The dough is fairly sturdy at this point, and you should be able to slide an arm under it to support it for the transfer. You may even want to shake off excess flour at this point, if you are comfortable doing it. Just support the dough well with your arm and open hands to avoid poking a hole through it with a finger. Arrange the dough on the parchment, and use the rolling pin to enlarge the dough to maximize the available space on the parchment paper. This will mean having a slight oval shape to the pizza, which I think just enhances its rustic appeal. If we try to do all of the rolling-out on the paper, it tends to start bunching up under the dough. It is best to just do the finish work on the paper, in my opinion.
All the while, the oven has been preheating to 500 degrees-or as high as your oven will go if it does not go up to 500 degrees. Give the oven about 30- 45 minutes to pre-heat the tiles.
Toppings
What you choose to put on your pizza is your call. Part of the beauty of this method is that, although the crust is very thin, it can be loaded up with lots of good stuff (within reason) and come out unscathed. I would never attempt to transfer a pizza such as this without using parchment. Well, I guess I shouldn’t say never, since my pizza making past is laced with disasters. My attempts to transfer heavily laden crusts, using a peel and copious amount of flour or corn meal to get it to move, has resulted in the smoke detector going-off, and our guests having flour encircling their mouths and down their shirt fronts. The alternative was to have the pizza stubbornly resist budging from the peel, with results that I don’t even care to think about. Thank goodness those days are gone for good.
Italian Sausage
A simple sausage pizza with perhaps some olives, pepper, mushrooms or onion, is our favorite. Many times, however, the sausage just stands alone. I like to buy whole pork butts when they are on sale, grind them up and freeze away one pound packages of ground pork. Pork butts (shoulder) have just the right lean to fat ratio for sausage. Store-bought ground pork tends to be a bit higher in fat than we want, but it works, too. Alternately, store-bought bulk Italian sausage can be purchased for your pizza. Be advised, however, that seasoned sausage does not store well in the freezer for more than a couple of weeks, before developing an off-flavor. It is not spoiled; it just starts to taste rancid due to the seasonings.
1 pound of ground pork (thawed)
½ Tablespoon (1 and ½ teaspoons) salt
¼ teaspoon each of: cracked fennel, anise, ground coriander, sugar, All-Purpose seasoning
1/8 teaspoon (or less) red pepper (optional)
What is All-Purpose seasoning? It is a go-to seasoning that we use in just about everything. It is a blend of 1 part ground black pepper, 1 part of onion powder, and 2 parts garlic powder. We buy the large plastic jars of these seasonings for about a buck apiece, and blend them together in a large flip-lid jar. Just be sure to buy onion and garlic powder, not salt.
If it seems too tedious to add tiny amounts of seasonings for each pound of pork, make up a bulk (4x) seasoning batch. Mix 2 tablespoons of un-iodized salt, one teaspoon each of the other ingredients (except for the red pepper-just add ¼ teaspoon), and store it in an air-tight container. Use 1 tablespoon of this mixture for each pound of ground pork.
Distribute the seasoning well into the meat and drop small globs of the raw sausage on top of the pizza. The meat will fully cook during the 10 minutes it spends in the oven, while releasing tasty juices onto the pizza. Precooking the meat results in overcooked sausage.
Sauce
Once again, this is your call. We grow and strain San Marzano tomatoes, which makes a thick, wonderful sauce that we sometimes use on our pizzas. For a quick and easy substitute, a 15 ounce can of Dei Fratelli (or other brand) tomato puree makes an excellent sauce for 2 pizzas. The only ingredients are tomatoes and a bit of citric acid. I open the can, and stir in a teaspoon each of dried oregano and All-Purpose seasoning, and perhaps a bit of salt. I am sure other brands of puree will work. Otherwise, for up to 4 pizzas, a 24 ounce can of Hunt’s Garlic and Herb pasta sauce makes for a quick and inexpensive pizza sauce.
I find that 8 ounces of shredded cheese is about right for each pizza, as well as about ½ cup of grated parmesan. I do sauce first, parmesan, shredded cheese, then toppings and a sprinkling of oregano. We also do white pizzas, with a blend of ricotta, half and half, and parmesan.
If you are going to load on diced peppers or onion, I recommend first microwaving them a bit to remove some of the water. Too much topping-especially wet topping- interferes with the browning of the crust in the center of the pizza. Lift an edge and look underneath for patches of nicely browned crust. If the bottom is still pale, give it another couple of minutes.
Once you are comfortable with this method, I am convinced that you will be turning your kitchen into a Midwestern Pizzeria, and turning out pizzas that get rave reviews.
