It is the fourth Saturday in April. I am again making pizza on a Saturday afternoon because I have plans for Sunday. Tomorrow is our wedding anniversary and we are going out for a nice dinner. No need to spoil my appetite by having a heavy pizza lunch. That is something I can instead do for today.

Ken has been making some pizza lately and he is also using Frank Pinello’s dough recipe. He has been using the dough after a one hour rise and has been saying that the crust in the pizza is too dense. I’ve never actually tried the recipe as a same-day dough so I thought that would be a fun experiment to try for today. The planned schedule was:

• 12:00pm - turn on the oven, start making the dough
• 12:30pm - finish the dough, let it rise on the counter
• 1:30pm - finish the rise, start making the pizza
• 2:00pm - done eating and head out to MicroCenter

I compared the recipe as Frank said it in the video, to the copy on the Munchies web site, and to the copy that I have. First up was 3½ cups of flour:

That came in at 495 g today which is close to the 500 g that I have written down.

What wasn’t close was the yeast. On the Munchies web site it says 1 teaspoon of active dry yeast. In the video he says 10 grams. This is a teaspoon:

Ten grams is more than a single packet of yeast. I was using one teaspoon for the overnight dough and that worked well, and maybe even too well, because I ended up reducing it to half a teaspoon. A one hour rise probably needs more punch so I was thinking that maybe the 10 grams is more appropriate for today’s pizza. I’m not sure but it was worth a try. I opened up two yeast packets and measured out the 10 grams.

I then measured out 1½ cups of water and this came out to 342 grams.

My notes has 325 grams. I’m not sure which one is more correct. I kept the 1½ cups of water without any adjustments.

There is a salt discrepancy in the recipe. In the video he says 1½ tablespoons but the web site says 1 teaspoon. This is not the first recipe that I’ve tried where this error was made and that difference in salt can ruin the batch. Someone in the YouTube comments stated that 1 teaspoon is the correct amount and that is also the amount I have in my notes. I think he simply was reading off the wrong line on a cue card somewhere. That weighed out to 8 grams and my notes rounds that up to 10.

Olive oil is 1½ tablespoons in the video and 2 tablespoons on the web site. That difference isn’t going to be disastrous. I weighed out 2 tablespoons and got 25 grams. My notes says 5 grams. I have no clue why that is so far off. I guess that I forgot the 2 and only wrote down the 5.

I combined all the ingredients and mixed it in the bowl until it looked like this:

When mixing, the dough starts out feeling dry at first, but it gets stickier the more that you start working it. It is tempting to put water in at the very beginning when it is dry, and then it is tempting to put flour in when it gets sticky. At this point I took the dough out of the bowl, started kneading, and set the timer for 10 minutes. The stickiness will go away as the dough tightens up during kneading. I only add flour as a last resort when it is too sticky to knead. It ends up looking quite smooth when kneading is complete.

I oiled a bowl, oiled the dough, and put the dough in the bowl:

I finally found my dish towels. They were in a pile of other cleaned laundry items sitting on my bedroom dresser. I think they have been there for six months or so. It’s obvious that I haven’t been hitchhiking lately. They got put to good use today:

After one hour, the dough looked like this:

It expanded quite a bit. Total weight was 860 grams so I split the dough into three 280 gram balls and threw out the excess. One is for today, one is for the fridge, and one is for the freezer. I placed the for today on the cutting board:

I then used my fingers to press out the dough as much as possible until it got to here:

Ken said he was using a rolling pin so I decided to do the same. I stretched it out until it got close to being 12 inches in diameter:

Today I’m keeping it simple. A cheese pizza with 90 g of cubed mozzarella cheese and Ledo’s sauce:

After baking in the oven for seven and a half minutes, it came out looking like this:

I got a little sloppy on the cheese coverage but I’ll just use a bit more next time. The crust didn’t develop any bubbles and didn’t have any charring but that is probably what happens when using a rolling pin. The dough did have a nice chew and looked great from the side:

I was actually expecting it to be thinner than that but it puffed up a bit in the oven. It didn’t taste dense to me and was rather pleasant to eat. Terri came down at this time, had a few slices, and was also happy with the result. She also took this photo:

This turned out to be a good pizza. Letting the dough sit overnight does improve the taste by an order of magnitude but if you want to make some pizza, and make it quick, this works. Using the 10 grams of yeast was probably the right call. Maybe it would have been too dense at 1 teaspoon. I might try that next time but make two doughs in case the first one doesn’t work.

After pizza, Terri and I went to MicroCenter and I stumbled across this:

I’m not really sure why I found a mini digital kitchen scale at MicroCenter, but I’ve been meaning to pick up up for some time now. I finally got one. I just didn’t expect to find it there.