ER Bakes – Dan’s Pizza

Our President Dan DaRocha recently made Pizza while locked in quarantine. Check out the video above for his take on a classic family favorite.

Transcription

Hello Everyone, Dan DaRocha here, President of Erika Record Baking Equipment. This past weekend my family and I were craving homemade pizza. We have had our share of frozen pizzas and some frozen pizzas are great but, others are not so much.

So, I went to my bookshelf and I grabbed “Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast” by Ken Forkish. So, it’s a pretty famous recipe book and it’s got a great pizza dough recipe, a “same day” pizza dough recipe that I’ve used many times in the past. I flipped through it and found it but if you Google “Ken Forkish pizza recipe” I’m certain you’ll find this on the internet.

So, basically making this “same day” pizza is an all-day affair. First, we have to take our instant dry yeast, hydrate it, and set it aside. Then autolyze the dough, once the water in the dough is combined, you let that sit for 30 minutes. Then, we combine salt and the yeast and incorporate everything by hand. We let it sit for a while, about an hour, then we added a nice fold to it. Then, we moved it to a new tub, put some olive oil in the tub, put some olive oil on top of the dough, covered it, and we put it in the oven just to proof. A nice warm nap for about 4 hours.

We came back in the evening and saw that the dough doubled in size, which is great. We did our best to handle the dough very gently when making our dough balls because we didn’t want to de-gas it, we wanted to keep those nice big air pockets in the dough as much as possible.

After we divided the dough, we let it rest for about another 60 minutes, and then it was pizza making time! We took a pizza stone, put it in the oven, and cranked the oven up to 550 degrees.

The pizza sauce was pretty basic. We took San Marzano tomatoes and kicked it up a little bit with salt, oregano, olive oil, and garlic. Then for the topping, we just went with mozzarella cheese, very simple, very plain, but awesome. 6-7 minutes at 550 degrees about enough made perfect little pizzas.
Our family bonded over the pizza-making process, we laughed, we joked, and my wife and I were about to share a nice bottle of wine just standing around the kitchen. It was a great finish to the weekend and a great start to the next week.

Our team hopes that this message finds you well and that you remain safe and stay strong. We hope to see you again soon. Take care.