hotsawce, on pizzamaking.com started a thread about making an attempt at a thin crust pizza, something like Mark Bittman, so I decided to give it a try. If anyone is interested in seeing the whole, thread it is here.
http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,10703.0.html
These are a few of the posts, that went back and forth on pizzamaking.com.
I was watching an episode of "The Minimalist" with Mark Bittman, when I stumbled across something that might be perfect for a cracker style crust.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQ9zrKQJ27k What if one were to make this as a base for dough, and cook it on a tray under the broiler quickly? I'd be interested in seeing someone try it....you should get a ridiculously thin, crispy pizza...probably closer to a cracker crust than anything else.
hotsawce,
Your idea sounds great to me. I had something like this last year at the New York Restaurant Food Show and Pizza Expo. The pizza was so thin and crackery and the rest of the pizza was delicious. It was a frozen dough you could buy by the sheets and then but your own toppings on. The crust was 1/16" thin. I tried to find a distributor in my area, but couldn’t find one. They were a New York based food manufacturer. www.ultrathinpizza.com I would also like to try and recreate this type of pizza.
Peter, (Pete-zza) set-forth a formula for me to try using no yeast.
Norma,
When I first saw the recipe, my first impression was that the crusts were super thin, small (6"-8") and baked quickly (within about 3 minutes). That did not fit with my thinking of a cracker style pizza, so I did not dwell any further on the recipe. However, since you inquired about how the recipe might be used to make a cracker style pizza, I used the expanded dough calculating tool at http://www.pizzamaking.com/expanded_calculator.html, along with some math on my part, to convert the recipe to baker's percent format. Using King Arthur all-purpose flour as a proxy for the flour in the recipe, and using a "Medium" flour measurement method, I got the following for a 6" matzo:
King Arthur All-Purpose Flour (100%):
Water (44.3017%):
Salt (1.04516%):
Olive Oil (26.9652%):
Total (172.31206%):
Single Ball:
267.01 g | 9.42 oz | 0.59 lbs
118.29 g | 4.17 oz | 0.26 lbs
2.79 g | 0.1 oz | 0.01 lbs | 0.5 tsp | 0.17 tbsp
72 g | 2.54 oz | 0.16 lbs | 5.33 tbsp | 0.33 cups
460.09 g | 16.23 oz | 1.01 lbs | TF = 0.047832
38.34 g | 1.35 oz | 0.08 lbs
Note: Thickness factor = 0.0478318; for 12 dough balls for 6" matzos; no bowl residue compensation
For an 8" matzo, I got the following dough formulation is:
King Arthur All-Purpose Flour (100%):
Water (44.3017%):
Salt (1.04516%):
Olive Oil (26.9652%):
Total (172.31206%):
Single Ball:
267.01 g | 9.42 oz | 0.59 lbs
118.29 g | 4.17 oz | 0.26 lbs
2.79 g | 0.1 oz | 0.01 lbs | 0.5 tsp | 0.17 tbsp
72 g | 2.54 oz | 0.16 lbs | 5.33 tbsp | 0.33 cups
460.08 g | 16.23 oz | 1.01 lbs | TF = 0.026905
38.34 g | 1.35 oz | 0.08 lbs
Note: Thickness factor = 0.0269054; for 12 dough balls for 8" matzos; no bowl residue compensation
As you can see, with thickness factors of 0.0478318 and 0.0269054 for the two matzo sizes, I think you will be hard pressed to bake the skins with cheese and toppings on them such that the tops of the matzos are baked before the matzos start to burn on the bottoms. You would perhaps have to increase the dough ball weights to make much larger matzos and increase the thickness of the matzos. For example, for a 12" cracker style pizza using a thickness factor of say, 0.08, the amount of dough would be 3.14159 x 6 x 6 x 0.08 = 9.05 ounces, or about 256.5 grams. If you go too thick, then the crust starts to look like a Chicago deep-dish crust but without yeast. In fact, if you look at just the baker's percents for the recipes posted above, but for the absence of yeast and maybe a bit of sugar, the recipes look a lot like deep-dish dough recipes.
There are cracker-style pizza crusts without yeast but my instinct would be to use yeast, for fermentation byproducts that contribute to final crust flavors and also for the natural flavor of yeast. As with other pizza types, you would have to decide whether you want a room temperature fermentation or a cold fermentation. Once that decision is made, then you have to decide on how much yeast to use for the window of usability you would like to have for the dough. Volume expansion is less of an issue with the cracker style because the dough will be rolled with a rolling pin or its equivalent, which will crush the dough and force the gases out of the dough.
I think you would have to proceed along the above lines, along with some experimentation, to determine if a cracker style pizza is doable. However, that effort will take you a long way away from the recipe as intended to be used. Arguably, it would no longer be the same recipe.
Peter
April 9, 2010, I tried the Matzo formula for the dough that Peter set forth. The food processor was used to mix the dough. I first whisked the olive oil and water together. I had heated the water. The dough was pulsed. I couldn’t figure out about how to go about making this Matzo Pizza, but I tried to think of a way it might work. When mixing the dough in the food processor it seemed like it was too wet, and I was sure I couldn’t roll out that wet of a dough, so I added some more flour and pulsed, again. The dough was left out at room temperature covered for about an hour. The oven was heated to 492 degrees F. The dough was very soft. I spit the one dough ball into two pieces. I then rolled out the dough until it was thin. I decided to roll in a rectangular instead of a circle pizza, because I wanted to use the sheet pan. I first rolled the one ball and then coated it with unsalted butter that I brushed on. Then I rolled the other dough ball out and placed it on top. I did use a fork and pricked the dough. I then put the rolled out dough on the middle rack of the oven and thought I would bake it until one side was starting to get golden brown. I then took the pie out of the oven and flipped it over and then put the toppings on.
The Matzo Pizza was then dressed with Hummus that had chunky calamata olives added, Feta cheese with basil & tomatoes, mozzarella that I had cut up into chunks, and then put back into the oven. When the pie was baked, I finished dressing it with some small arugula that I had started from seed a few weeks ago.
This crust of this pie was good, but I thought it needed more salt for my taste. It reminded me more of a pie crust, than a pizza crust. It was crunchy, but not crackery, if that makes any sense.
If I would make this pie again, I would bake the crust more before turning it over. I had to move the pizza from the middle rack to the stone to get the bottom brown.
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