How-To: Make Homemade Pizza with Frank Pinello

You know, one thing you hear a lot is that cooking is an art and baking is more of a science and I think

pizza

falls in the middle of that, you have to be very specific when you try it, but when you get into the

pizza

itself is part of it and the deal was made, then you really get creative in any way you want. One thing I love about Pisa is that in one part you have to be super scientific and then in the other part. On that note, you can let your mind go, hey, I'm fine, oh oh, I'm the owner/operator of Best Peach in Williamsburg Brooklyn and the host of the pizza show here at munchies and today we're going to go over some of your favorite recipes of New York pizza, but for the home cook, so the real pizza enthusiasts, we are going to

make

the dough and we are going to work on two different types of very popular New York style pizza, one of them is It will be a classic Naples style pizza, the second will be grandma's square pizza.

I usually tell people to go to their local petrie and buy some dough, but people you know are willing to try and

make

the dough at home. It's a really fun project to make and when you really start to perfect it, you can really see the difference in the pizzas. Let's review the ingredients. You're basic AP flour, a little salt, we have a little dry yeast. Excellent olive oil and let's start with the water. Water in the dough making process is very important. You know, the atmospheric effects are great. You may hear people talking. If it's cold outside, you have to use warm water and vice versa.

It's very important. Today is a beautiful day in New York so I'm just going to use warm water to activate the yeast a little bit and we're going to use a cup and a half of water in extra virgin olive oil. so we are going to make two tablespoons of olive oil not much and we only want to add a little bit of fat to the dough from there we are going to go to our youth in the best of cases we use fresh baker's yeast it is a lot It is easier to find dry yeast in the supermarket and we're going to put in about 10 grams of yeast and if the grammar goes too far, it's not a big deal and, last but not least, there's salt.

I mean, we don't want to season less. our dough, so we're going to take some kosher salt, a tablespoon and a half for the flour, that's three and a half cups. I like to do a little pull in the middle and then start adding now if you find that while we're working it through the dough, it feels a little too wet. What you want, you can always make little adjustments related to the olive oil and before we put the yeast in, we'll go to the sink and just bloom and what. What I mean by bloom is add a little bit of warm water to these, let it sit for a couple of seconds, mix it with your fingers and essentially I wanted you to turn it into a paste.

One of the things you hear a lot about pizza is that piece. It's a living being, you know, it sounds strange, but it's not this living Jesus, you know, when you make pizza and you work with dough, it's like dealing with a pet, essentially, you always have to take care of it, the activity is constantly happening inside the bread and I tell people over and over again that making pizza is not easy, it is difficult, but if you make enough pieces, you do it right, there are no shortcuts, you have to make a lot of them, so now we are going to incorporate the east.

It is important to put everything there and if you have a little difficulty reaching the bottom of the cup, that's it, after the sink, a little water, shake it a little with your finger and back. Now we have all the main ingredients incorporated into this bowl and believe it or not, the yeast is already starting to work. Making the dough by hand is following what I like the most, you know, throwing all these ingredients in the bowl and then just watching the dough come together and then in a few minutes it will rise and be ready to cook, it's just that there's something really basic in it, but for some reason it relieves stress, so when you're mixing the dough it's very normal that you can get a little bit that doesn't stick to your fingers and it will be difficult to get it out, it might be a little sticky.

One of the best techniques is to wash your hands with flour and you'll get all those little bits of dough that will just run off. Your hands again on that was a little less than what one of my first mentors taught me and I still use it to this day now that we have the pizza dough in a nice bowl with flowers spread out on the table, like it got that light bulb. and put it on top, look at that, it's already beautiful and now we'll get into the actual kneading process to make the dough. Gluten is like a rubber band, if you stop playing with it too much it becomes stretchy and stretchy and then in turn it becomes elastic.

It's hard to eat from the beginning, we teach our guys to be gentle with the deltoid so you can feel when you start to fold this dough and you can see that it's not as dry as it looked and it's starting to get a little bit. sticky, I really like the consistency, but I'm going to add a little more fluidity and really the point at which you stop putting a flower is when the dough no longer sticks to your hands and we're already there right now, yeah, sure that is seen. okay now, but it's not quite ready, we're going to put the dough back in the bowl, put some saran wrap on top and let it relax and when it cools, that's kind of magic, at best.

Cases, pizza we generally like to improve our dough for 24 hours and what that does is give it time to develop character. Here it is not really necessary for it to rest so long. If you have a nice warm kitchen you can take out the gel and let it sit for an hour, but if you want to do the same process we do, very simple, all you have to do is take this ball of dough, wrap it in cling film and put it in your refrigerator in a back corner and once you see it start to rise after 24 to 48 hours your dough is ready when you give a dough like this enough time to show that you know the yeast is starting to break down the protein strains of wheat when you eat that pizza easier to chew and essentially if you digest it, I kid. we hang around our customers a lot and they say I can't eat anymore, the best pizza I eat, you know, three pies this week.

I tell him, listen, man, we burn it with your bench scraper or spatula, just take it from the bottom. flip it over and then you put the top on the bottom, the bottom on top so it's nice and moist, a little bit of flour in the bowl and we'll saran wrap it and leave it for 20 minutes and there you have it. The dough is made, that's the hardest part of this folks, all we have to do is get to this point and now we'll get right to the fun part, so a couple of tips when you're making pizzas, you only need two or three. pieces of equipment that will make your life much easier, one of them is a pizza peel, you know, we've all seen one of these classic pizza peels and the second is the stone, these are the pizza stones that are very hot right now because we have one heating up, I'm just taking it out just to show you that it really doesn't make sense to take this stuff out on every pizza, so on the bottom rack it makes the most sense to me, we really want that stone to be the hottest possible.

As soon as we can, as soon as the pita sits, it develops that cross that we're all looking for in a New York-style pizza. It had always been sitting for 20 minutes. This dough really came out well. It is a beautiful test. Some wrinkles are visible. there and the first thing we are going to do is divide it into portions correctly. A 10 to 12 inch pizza is what makes sense as a standard oven in the kitchen for the round pizzas we are going to prepare. Start with a pizza that is good for one or two people. The pizza dough we just ate was approximately 700 grams.

Once we cut it and create these smaller slices, it will be much easier to roll out the pizza first thing. What we're going to do is use basketball flour, now we have pizza number one that looks like it's ready to go, it's a little bit formed, it feels really good, so the first thing we're going to do is determine which side was the top. and which side was the bottom, just because of the steam, no texture on the top, I realized that this is the top of the pizza and the reason is that we want to maintain the moisture when it cooks, we will take some flour and we'll start to appeal floral and now we get into the fun part where the fingertips to make a crust all you're doing is not touching the edge.

I roll it out and it may not look much like a crust now, but once it starts to cook because you didn't push down that part of the edge that the RIM will puff up when we put the ingredients in. You see, we put lighter ingredients in the middle and heavier ingredients on the outside because when that crust puffs it pushes everything inward. Throughout this whole process it's important to be gentle and aware of how you hold the dough, if you start off nice and easy, turning it from one hand to the other, that's really one way to start and then once you start to get better, you can put your knuckles, your hands and your knees and start rolling it out this way as you start to develop a feel for the dough, you're really getting right to the shell and I know there are some of you that I tend to want to Being a perfectionist, that's driving you crazy.

You can take the pizza cutter and simply cut a perfect circle. Now we are at the point ready to put on some tomato sauce when it comes to tomatoes and tomato sauce. What you need here is a San Marzano tomato or a tomato that you know comes from California somewhere local. What we are looking for in a tomato, a basket pizza, is acidity and minerality, and the process is literally just opening a can of ten tomatoes or food, grinding them and then adding salt, the cooking of this salt is done in the oven, this is approximately four hours with a ladle.

I'd say we're just going to take three ounces, not turn it up all the way, and then judge. and when you start with that tomato right in the middle and then with the bottom of the ladle you want to remove the sauce from the center, from there we move on to the one classic ingredient, in my opinion, that defines New York pizza and that is dried oregano we're going to sprinkle the oregano here with cheese on a roll this is a first year cheese that we make at best pizza it's very easy to go to any local store in the neighborhood fresh mozzarella to split it with your hand, which I like do is try to balance my proportions.

This will draw out a lot of fat and a little bit of moisture, so I try not to use too much cheese, so I'm getting ready to throw this in. pizza in the oven right now and just designate things you don't want, like wet spots on the peel, if there's a sauce stain there, it's no big deal, a little flour and you clean it up, so right now the pizza stone It's inside our oven and the oven is at 500 degrees. We set the stone with the oven, so as you increase the heat you gently slide it at a little angle, but yeah, you're not really nice. well, that song is nice, that's the speech that became nice.

I won't be angry. She was a homeless prostitute, so it took this teacher about 10 minutes to cook. This is your classic 10-inch pizza, good for one or two people. The nice thing about this is that modern stones get very hot on the bottom so it started to get that caramelization around the edges, the cheese broke up really well, the ratio looks great, we have some beautiful basil that we selected from immediate. in the garden here at lunch cheese and what I'm going to do is just combine it and put it on top of just your classic Nopalito and score pizza margherita, it's simple but delicious, the last thing you want to do is cut it like this.

You can use a regular knife or a pizza cutter. Always works. What we really want to hear is that crunch when you cut the pizza and just leave it like that. Whatever you prefer, there you have it. New York style pizza at home. This is a difficult pizza to make. It's not easy, so if you don't get it the first time, don't get discouraged, keep going. Let's make the GRANDMONT pizza. You know, the first time I had grandma's pizza was on Long Island at a restaurant called Umberto's and to me it's a very simple pizza, we're going to start with a nice generous amount of olive oil on the bottom of the pan and As you can see, I'm not going to hold back, so if you wash your hands and want to predator and this is a technique that may seem a little interesting or strange, but what we're going to do is take just a little bit of olive oil. olive and stretch our dough right over this shell and what that does is rather than the flour or the electric slider, this allows it to stick here we go and you can see that this is really nice and sturdy, it has a lot of air.

I'm trying to be as gentle as possible without popping any bubbles, essentially have the same size dough in the pan lift up one corner instead of walking into the dough so you can lift it all up and then you can't put it right on top. I don't like my pizza to be too thick and doughy, so in a situation like this where I have so much of it hanging on one side, I'll just take my pizza cutter and cut it very quickly and add a little bit ofplastic on the pizza. up and we're going to let this pizza rest for about 10 minutes.

The rollout gives us a nice airtight wrap or we'll set it aside in the warm area for 10 minutes so one of the distinctive parts of grandma's pizza is by far grandma's sauce I love a balance of salty and acidic and this sauce is never cooked, it isBasically, just take the tomatoes, pour them into a bowl, mash them with your hands, season with salt and pepper to your liking and then add whatever else you want in there, the pizza has been on the side fermenting for approximately ten. minutes you could see it said it had risen you could see the bubbles really coming out what I like to do is not touch this this pizza has spread out like I wanted one of the telltale signs of grandma's pizza is the cheese first here the Grandma, that's a nice layer of mozzarella cheese, so now we have our blank canvas for the sauce.

What I like to do is always mix it up, make sure there's no salt or seasoning on the bottom and then just a ladle and We're going to go straight down and the stripes when this part of the quotes is very important to me that you can see the crust and you can achieve and you can see the sauce, so the proportion is very important. Alright, the oven right now is at 500 degrees. Click on this piece for 10 to 20 minutes. Okay, let's take a look. We'll just take your basic bench scraper and the corners, just rub them along the side. spatula and try to reach just below we have our grandmother's pizza, obviously it is a rectangle, it is ideal for parties, in the best of cases, we will cut the pizza in half, we will have regular portions, we will cut it into thirds when you are code allows you to choose the best piece, so I'll understand it pretty well if I say so myself