Nancy Silverton's Dough that had dried peppers in the dough and crust 12/16/2011

I had planned on putting "peppers" in a dough for the monthly challenge on pizzamaking.com at this "pepper" challenge, posted by Bill, the one moderator on pizzamaking.com. http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,16617.0.html

I decided since this dough was giving me problems before, to give myself another challenge besides just trying to add dried peppers in something like the Lehmann dough.  I needed two challenges at once I guess.  It would be that either I failed altogether, or maybe I am understanding the Nancy Silverton dough better.  For this dough, I think you need to make it in about a day and a half from beginning to or a little longer.  I also gave myself another challenge and that was to use fresh yeast.  When using fresh yeast it is hard to be able to decide what amount to use in the preferment and final dough.  My fresh yeast was also frozen, so I didn't know how many of the yeast cells had died.

I submitted this pizza in this months challenge, because I had added dried peppers to the dough. I posted this same thing at this months challenge, but I will post it here again. The dressings for this Nancy Silverton’s “pepper dough” pizza were roasted butternut squash that was roasted with olive oil, pepper, and sea salt. The regular peppers were roasted with olive oil and a little bit of sea salt. Fresh smoked mozzarella grated was blended into the butternut squash with a stick blender. I sliced strips of smoked mozzarella and grated Fontina cheese. A few dried peppers were rehydrated to be added as an extra dressing, to go with the peppers in the dough.


I don’t know if it was the combination of peppers in the dough with the other peppers, or the butternut squash with smoked mozzarella, or the room temperature dough fermented with fresh yeast, but I thought this pizza really tasted great. This pizza was baked in my home oven on the stone. At least I am getting somewhere with the preferment Nancy Silverton’s recipe, not like my last few failures. This pizza isn’t exactly like I wanted it, but was an improvement. The dough was still manageable with the dried peppers in the dough and it was easy to stretch out the skin. The dough was punched down one time today, because I thought it was fermenting to fast, and then balled again to ferment more.

Thanks Peter for figuring out the formulation for a preferment and final dough for a 12” pizza!

Norma