We Make Authentic Italian Pizza (Not)

I first learned about oo flour while reading Heat by Bill Buford. Given the husband's semisuccessful attempts to make pizza dough in the bread machine, I hunted down some genuine oo flour for him, popped it into the 'fridge and reminded him of its presence and the awaiting pizza-making opportunity. He finally got around to it. And what a culinary misadventure he had!

--The Faudie

My previous attempts at producing pizza crust dough using a bread machine have been passable at best (and disappointing at worst). Then along came an opportunity to try again, in the form of a bag of a high-protein wheat flour, Molino Bordignon Farino Tipo 00. Go ahead and click the link. I'll wait for you to return.

Are you back? Great! As you may have noticed, that Web site was Italian. But according to the Babel Fish translation, "Flour Type 00" is a "product obtained from the grinding and consequent national and foreign tender grain sifting freed from the substances strangers and the impurities." Also: "White woman introduces itself like powder, deprives of substances strangers and lumps." Okay, so maybe something gets lost in the translation. But you definitely get the sense this isn't any plain, run-of-the-mill flour! In fact, this is exactly the type of flour specified in the rules of the Verace Pizza Napoletana Association, an international trade association whose purpose is to promote the culinary tradition of the Neapolitan pizza. (And no, I didn't know any of this when I embarked on this particular culinary misadventure. I just wanted a pizza!)

Because a genuine Italian flour such as this one calls for a genuine Italian recipe, Angela searched online and found the following pizza dough recipe from Forno Bravo, a maker of Italian wood-fired pizza ovens:

Authentic Vera Pizza Napoletana Dough Recipe

4 C Molino Caputo Tipo 00 flour
1 1/2 C plus 2 T water
2 t salt
1/2 t dry active yeast

1. Mix the dough in a stand mixer, by hand or in a bread machine. If you are using a stand mixer, mix it slowly for two min., faster for 5 min. and slow again for 2 min.
2. Cover the dough and let it rise for 1 1/2 - 2 hours, or until double.
3. Punch it down and push out the air bubbles.
4. Form the dough into a large ball, then cut it into 4 to 5 equal pieces.
5. To make your pizza balls [Ha! --The Faudie], shape each piece of dough into a ball. Gently roll your dough into a ball, then stretch the top of the ball down and around the rest of the ball until the outer layer wraps around the other side. Pinch the two ends together to make a smooth ball with a tight outer "skin." Set your ball seam-side down where it can rest. Dust your pizza balls with flour, and store them under a damp towel, in a proofing tray, or under plastic wrap. This will prevent the outside of the ball from drying out and creating a crust, and becoming difficult to work with. The top of the pizza ball should be soft and silky.
6. Your pizza balls will need to rest for about an hour to become soft and elastic so they can be easily stretched into a thin crust pizza.

Yield: 4 to 5 crusts

Nutritional Info
Not provided, but remember: Se mangiate troppo alimento, ingrasserete.

The Husband's Futzings
So I have an authentic Italian flour and an authentic pizza dough recipe, and what do I do? I totally ignore the instructions and let the bread machine and its dough setting do all of the work instead. (But I did follow the ingredient listing very closely, with the only substitution being my use of the Molino Bordignon Farino Tipo 00.)

The pizza gods--no doubt part of the same pantheon as the FSM--did not take kindly to my deviation from the recipe. After loading all the ingredients into our trusty Welbilt model ABM-3600, Angela and I retired to the living room to wait while the machine prepared the dough. Only after much time did we realize the machine was being too quiet for too long following the first kneading cycle. Although we've used the ABM-3600 dozens of times without incident, the machine had turned itself off. (All fear the wrath of the pizza gods!) Fortunately, when Angela restarted the machine, it remembered where it was in the cycle and proceeded from there.

Once the dough was finished, we raced to make up the time we'd lost due to the bread machine malfunction. Even the boy was pressed into service to help roll out the dough. (This time we transferred the dough directly from the bread machine to the pan, which worked out fine.) Deviating once again from our authentic Vera Pizza Napoletana recipe, we elected to use all the dough for one thick-crust pizza, rather than four to five thin-crust pizzas. And in defiance of the Verace Pizza Napoletana Association's rules, which state that only fresh, all-natural, nonprocessed ingredients--such as San Marzano tomatoes and all-natural fior-di-latte or bufala mozzarella--are acceptable, we topped the pizza with our favorite ketchup-based BBQ sauce and a variety of processed cheeses, chicken and pepperoni. So much for authentic!

Il mio italiano è autentico ugualmente (non)

For all the drama, the finished pizza wasn't too bad--considering that the recipe didn't specify a baking temperature (we opted for 450 degrees) and that the oven wasn't fully preheated when I put the crust in for its initial baking and that the oven got shut off somewhere between the first and second baking [I really need to teach the Walker men how to use Lumpy. --The Faudie]. I should have given it a little more time in the oven, but hey, supper was running late and we were hungry. Sometimes you have to cut your losses and eat your pizza with a slightly underdone crust.

The taste was certainly fine, though perhaps not as good as the taste of that one crust we made using a bread machine recipe--you may remember that as the crust I found reminiscent of Little Caesars. So either I screwed up the Vera Pizza Napoletana pizza dough recipe or my tastes are just different from those of the Verace Pizza Napoletana Association. (Or probably both.)