| Texture: |  (2.5 / 5) |
| Presentation: | (2.5 / 5) |
| Taste: | (2.5 / 5) |
They say practise makes perfect, and as I don’t believe I’m anywhere near perfecting the best pizza dough, I might have quite a lot of practising to go. So, onto attempt 3 and I opted for a recipe by my favourite celebrity chef, Jamie Oliver. His recipes so rarely go wrong and generally always taste scrummy so I had total faith in his pizza dough recipe.
- 1 kg white bread flour or Tipo ’00’ flour, or 800g strong white bread flour or Tipo ’00’ flour, plus 200g finely ground semolina flour
- 1 teaspoon fine sea salt
- 2 x 7 g dried yeast sachets
- 1 tablespoon golden caster sugar
- 4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
- 650 ml lukewarm water
His too, called for 00 flour but with sugar and no milk this time. His whole mixing and kneading approach was different too. But I did as Jamie instructed and after leaving the dough to prove, I was excited to see it had risen more than any of the other recipes so far. Good start Mr Oliver, so after ‘knocking it back’ – a term Jamie taught me for kneading the dough again just before use (no need for more proving apparently) we stretched it out.
I say we because Matt had bought me some semolina and being such a great, I thought he’d do a better job at stretching. He coated it in a thin layer of semolina and stretched away but the dough just didn’t seem strong enough. It was really fragile and kept breaking, causing little holes in the centre. There was only one thing for it – the rolling pin. “NOO!!” Mr Napoli would cry, but I’m sorry there wasn’t anything else for it, unless you wanted the emmenthal cheese of the pizza dough world.
I heated the commercial oven up to its hottest setting of 290C and topped the pizza with ragu, mozzarella, plum tomatoes and onion. I popped it in, minus the pizza stone and waited six minutes before taking it out. Despite not going that perfect golden brown colour around the edges, it looked pretty good so I cut it into six and forced everyone to do the ‘taste test’.
Result? Possibly the worst pizza I’ve made! Even worse than the pizza I took to my Granny’s. I blame the fragility of it and the lack of kneading Jamie instructed me to do. And maybe the lack of pizza stone. Oh Jamie, perhaps for the first time, you let me down L
Verdict?
