Will Bosworth

This weekend I made some regular pizzas.

Dough: 500g 00 flour, 350g water, 1 tablespoon salt, 1/8 teaspoon of yeast. Mix at 8am, knead at 11am, dough balls at 2pm. Pizza at 6pm.

Here’s a photo-blog of the final steps:

Usually I am halfway through eating when I remember I should have taken more pictures of my pizza for my popular pizza blog! Tonight was an exceptional ‘za worthy of a post despite minimal photography.

First, I made the Al Taglio dough from the Elements of Pizza. Highly recommend! It comes out a bit lighter than a typical (excellent) “grandma” sheet-pan pizza. Second, I followed the mega slice cutting pattern covered in the King Arthur Book of Pizza. The KABoP just came out, and I found it in the new books rack at the Somerville library. It was a great read, and I picked up my newest favorite pizza technique:

Speaking of Grandma pies(!), I recently had a religious experience with a slice(s) at Vinnie’s Pizzeria in Williamsburg. I’ve been wanting to write about the whole thing: How I felt before, during, after. How cool everyone working there and eating there was. How I still remember exactly how it tasted, but can’t put into words. Anyway, it looked like this:

Last week, my girls attended a birthday party on the same night as Family Pizza. You know what the means? They were already going to be full of pizza, so I had a chance to express myself through the medium of pizza toppings.

This week was also our first go at a Walden Farms meat delivery: 10-ish pounds of assorted meat things, reportedly ethically raised. (Initial impression: Pretty good. Maybe really good). Long way of saying that I was working through a two pound hunk of ham and had a bunch of very-good ham sandwiches all week.

So, how about a ham-sandwich pizza? I was first turned onto pickle pizza by a Hot Box pie I had in the middle of a snow storm at Bow Market a few years ago. At the time, it felt like a risk but turned out to be a revelation.

For this one, I grated the ham and placed it under the cheese, and put the chopped pickles on top. My wife is not a pickle fan, so only half the pie was fully dressed. Predictably, the unpickled side was a tad overcooked; the pickled side a bit undercooked. My wife said it tasted like a really good ham and cheese panini. I was all around pleased and felt it was worth writing home about.

I cut a bunch of corners: the dough was prepped in a rush; didn’t get to rest as long as it should have; used pre-shredded cheese (gasp). It still turned out: 7/10 for a pizza, so a strong 11/10 on a normal-food scale. The other pizza was plain cheese with anchovies and was also excellent. Fortunately, I left enough plain slices un-anchovied for my kids to top off their birthday pizza. They reassured me that yes, my pizza is better than from the store 🙂 .