Soaker Dough Pizza made with Bova 00 flour and Ischia starter, had so many problems..lol..modified BBQ grill and also modified pizza peel 6/17/2012

What an adventure in trying to make the soaker dough pizza with the Bova 00 flour and leavened with the Ischia starter. There were a lot of problems. First I forgot to bring my IR thermometer home from market. I then couldn’t get the firebricks placed in the top of the pan the same way I did before, so I just slanted some at the back top in the metal pan. I didn’t have my top metal plate either. The BBQ grill was heated up for an hour. I had started getting equipment together and somehow hit my small wooden peel on a post going outside. Well, that darn thing spit in two, and my other two wooden peels at home are too big to go into the small opening on my BBQ grill set-up. I then scouted around in my two sheds and did have thin pieces of wood that I could have cut into a peel, but I sure didn’t want to get saws and other stuff out to do that. I couldn’t find any pieces of wood that might have fit into the small opening. I found a shipping box in my one shed and decided to use that for the peel. I got a straight piece of wood and placed duct tape around the wood and part of the shipping box I cut out. What a heck of a looking peel. I did do a few practice shots into the BBQ grill without the pizza and thought maybe this will work, as long as I didn’t hit the underneath piece of wood that was sticking out on the firebricks. Then for some reason the dough wanted to be too sticky when coming out of the plastic container so the pie wasn’t exactly round and wanted to stick to the surface of my bigger wooden peel I was opening it on. Finally I got that straightened out. I had put some apple chips on the back of the firebricks to simulate a real WFO. I had left a little space between the firebricks and the back firebrick so the chips would ignite. The pizza did launch off of the makeshift peel okay. The bottom started to want to get too brown a little before the pizza was finished and I just put the pizza on a cake pan and finished baking. I turned the pizza with a BBQ metal spatula. It can be seen in the first picture how big the other smallest peel I had at home was. At least the final pizza did taste very good in the crust and had oven spring. What a way to make pizza. Now time for a glass of wine...lol!


Norma