Next Papa Gino's Attempt

Steve and I thought the PG clone pizza turned out well. There was a minor hitch, but all in all, the whole experiment went well.




The first two pictures of the dough balls, with the spacing of the poppy seeds, show the dough ball at around 9:00 AM in the morning and at about 3:00 PM in the afternoon. The PG clone dough ball then was taken out of the deli case and left to temper at room temperature until about 4:45 PM. The ambient room temperature was about 75 degrees F where the PG clone dough ball tempered. The PG clone dough ball did have some of the dark speckles, but not a lot.



The pizza mold was used again to form the skin, then it was stretched by hand. The skin stretched easily. Where the hitch was is that I grabbed two screens and had forgot I have 15” and 16” screens. I didn’t notice I grabbed two different size screens and placed the skin on top of the 15” screen. I then noticed I had two different size screens and didn’t want to disturb the skin, so I just left it that way. It seemed like the pizza mold did let me have a smaller pronounced rim after stretching the skin. I think, but am not sure, if I would have used the same size screens, the bottom crust would have browned more evenly, but don’t know. The skin was stretched to 15 ½ “.

The same sauce that Steve prepared from last week was used for the PG clone pizza for this week. From freezing the sauce it did become a little watery, but I didn’t want to drain the water off, or I wouldn’t have had enough sauce (6 oz.) for this pizza. The same cheese blend was used and this time we just sprinkled a little Greek oregano on top of the cheese blend. The pizza was taken off of the 2 screens when the skin was set. As can be seen the bottom crust didn’t brown evenly. Steve and I thought the rim size was better in this weeks attempt, in that it wasn’t really open and airy from the use of the screens. The cheese blend melted well and tasted really good. The crust also had a very good taste. The baked PG clone pizza right out of the oven weighed 1 lb. 11oz. When eating this PG clone, the crust was very tender.

Norma

Norma bakes on Steve's 1/2" steel plate in the deck oven

Steve was kind enough to bring his ½” steel plate for me to try out in the top of my deck oven. My top deck runs cooler than the bottom deck, but has a lower head space than my bottom deck. The bottom deck was about 548 degrees F. Steve and left the steel plate on the top deck for about 4 hours before we tried to make two pizzas. The steel plate did take a long time to get to the same temperature as the deck, but surely not the 4 hrs. The temperature on the steel plate was 500 degrees F when the first pie was made. The dough used is my regular Lehmann dough made with Kyrol flour. The first pie baked in about 6 minutes, or a little longer. The bottom crust didn’t burn at all. The second pizza tried went okay too with the steel plate, but the temperature of the steel plate then had fallen to about 438 degrees F. I don’t know why it fell so fast. The bake time for the second pie was a little over 7 minutes.


The 1/2" steel plate sure is heavy. When I lifted the ½” steel plate, I can now understand why people say it is so heavy.

Norma

Next Papa Gino's clone attempt 10/16/2012

These are my explanations of what happened with the Papa Gino’s attempt yesterday.


The PG clone dough ball didn’t ferment a lot more until I arrived at market on Tuesday morning. I decided to take it out of the deli case at 1:45 pm to warm-up at room temperature. There were a few speckles on the PG clone dough ball. The PG clone dough ball sat out at 75 degrees F until 3:45 pm, when I took the measurement of the final spacing’s of the poppy seeds. I used the pizza mold to form the skin. Using the pizza mold is fairly easy. The PG clone dough ball opened easily and even wanted to stick a little to the pizza mold with the cornmeal added. This PG clone attempt was opened to 15-15.5” depending on where the skin was measured.

Steve and I used the same cheese blend with Greek oregano. We used the can of Classico peeled ground tomatoes, because I had seen before there looked like there were little chunks of tomatoes in them. Steve added ¼ teaspoon kosher salt, 1/8 teaspoon pepper and ¼ teaspoon powdered garlic to the Classico peeled ground tomatoes. The sauce then tasted good to both of us. 6 ounces of the sauce was applied in this attempt.

I sure don’t know why, but the rim crust did get somewhat airy again. I don’t know if it my opening techniques or what that causes that.

The baked PG clone attempt was very good. Steve did like it very much, but doesn’t like the grittiness of the cornmeal on the bottom crust. I really don’t know how a real slice of PG pizza is, but the slice wanted to have some droop when a slice was held up.

The final weight of the baked PG clone attempt was 1.794 lbs right out of the oven. In about two minutes the weight went down to 1.788 lbs.

Norma