KING BOLETUS: Pizza Party Redux

First you gotta make your dough. I was inspired by this recent recipe/article in the NY Times to give sour dough crust another try. Unfortunately, the writer lost me at "using your fingers, break the starter dough into 1 inch pieces." I still don't know what that's about and I don't feel like finding out. So I did it my own way, roughly following the proportions in the recipe and using about 3/4 farina 00 and 1/4 all-purpose flour. I let the dough sit for about 8 hours then dividied into 4 pieces, which rose for another 24+ hours on the counter covered with saran wrap.

Because my starter was going crazy - presumably celebrating its longest stretch out of the fridge since the fall - I made some more dough at the same time that I separated the original batch into individual balls. For this one, I used only all-purpose flour, not knowing if I would be using it for pizza or just a loaf. In the end this dough was also called into service; you can read about the results below.

Next, you gotta make the cheese. Here are a couple of snaps of the almost-mozz sitting in whey. The cheese came out pretty firm again. I think next time I'm going to let the curd reduce down slowly in simmering whey rather than kneading, which seems to squeeze all the juice out.

Pizza Time

Number One: a two-cheese white pizza topped off with prosciutto di parma and arugula. The cheeses were: a delicious aged chevre from Capriole's stand at the farmer's market and a strong Italian blue made from buffalo milk.

Number Two: a combination of crimini, oyster and portobello mushrooms with tomato sauce, mozzarella and basil.

Number Three: a three-cheeser with my mozzarella added to the chevre and blue, tomato sauce and prosciutto only on half the pie. This one got the arugula treatment as well. Bit of trouble getting him in the oven, but delicious warts and all.

Number Four: portobello and roasted red pepper with mozz and aged chevre topped with basil.

Number Five: another three cheeser. Notice the puffier crust. This was the first of the two pies made with the second dough. I don't know if the driving factor in the difference between the doughs was in the flour-mix or the condition of the starter when they were made, but I suspect the latter. My starter literally puffed several inches out of its jar twice during the 16 hours before I made the second dough, while it was significantly tamer in the run-up to the first. The dough itself was also considerably more active during its 24 hour rise. Lesson learned is that the starter really needs to stretch its legs after coming out of the fridge. There is a real balancing act for pizza though - these last pies had a great crispy-chewy texture and good char, but they were also noticeably sour, which is not always what I'm looking for in a pizza crust.