I feel bad – its April 9th and this is my first real post of the month.  Sigh.  Life gets busy sometimes I guess.  However – not all is lost.  I’ve made some progress on some long running projects from previous months so I guess it’s not all bad (more on that soon).

The goal of making the pizza today was to establish a bench mark.  To do this I made sure to do things in a very precise manner.  My thought is that by doing this small tweaks could be made in later attempts that might have a significant impact on the overall pizza.  That being said, today when I made the pizza I only did one thing different from what I normally do – I used a different dough recipe.  Why?  Well because last month was bread month and I feel like I learned a lot about how bread is made.  That and all of the recipes usually talked about using the dough for pizza as well as bread so I though why not.  The results were more than I could have hoped for…

Now keep in mind I’ve been baking pizzas for a long time.  They are usually in the area I refer to as ‘so-so’.  That is – I loved them them, but there were restaurants that had much better pizzas then what I was making.  Today that all changed.  This pizza was incredible and it was all in the dough.  Typically when I make dough I make it an hour or two before I make the pizza and I find that its rather hard to work with.  This dough was a joy to work with, I couldn’t tear it if I wanted to and it stretched into large crusts that filled my pizza peel.  The dough really expanded when cooked, here’s a side shot…

The crust got done perfectly on the bottom and had just the right amount of chew.  So I don’t know what it is.  Beginners luck maybe again?  Im anxious to repeat this and see ifI get similar results.  Next time around I’ll document things step by step so you can see what Im doing.