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Sunday, April 3, 2011

Flat Bread

I am making flat bread, it won't be pizza, but hopefully it will be delicious. So far, I have been hydrating the following:

8 oz. King Arthur Guinevere Pastry Flour
8 oz. King Arthur Bread flour
12 oz. warm water
1/2 teaspoon sea salt

All measurements are by weight. The autolyse process was allowed to sit at room temperature for 40 minutes. Autolyse, it ain't pretty.

I then added:

1/4 cup sourdough starter
This was allowed to sit for 1 hour. Then it was kneaded with some bench flour to develop the gluten. Another rest, this time, the big sleep, into the refrigerator overnight. The dough was pulled on Sunday morning, allowed to rest for two hours at 67F, because that is what the kitchen was. I went to coffee for two hours. Made up some dough balls, with a light final kneading. Here is the final proof balls.
As you can see, the dough is quite soft, this is mostly due to the 75% to 80% dough hydration. This was on purpose to achieve the texture I wanted for these. I tend to be a dough puller, as opposed to rolling, pushing or tossing. There were pulled and topped with a couple of variations. The oven, by the way, was ripping along at 500F to heat the stone. I set the stone on the lowest rack, and switch to a high broil just before popping on the pizzas/flat breads. I did not have time, due to work demands to fire up the kettle. Here is Pizza One, with Arbequina Extra Virgin olive oil, grated parmigiana, paper thin garlic slices, sesame seeds and kosher salt.

Pizza Two was prepared with shredded potatoes, parmigiana cheese, Phu Quoc black pepper and Arbequiba extra virgin olive oil. As you can see, there was a little more creativity with the shaping of the pizza. It got even more creative becauce I spilled the olive oil onto the peel, this is never a good thing.
Odd shaped be darned, this pizza tasted great. It looks a little overdressed, but, it was actually just right. The potatoes, which were left over from yesterdays breakfast, crisped up nicely. For me, pizza is all about the bread and the bread on these pizzas was thin enough to have a bit of crack and still enough to taste very good.

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