Pizzeria Practice.

We are having a pizza party on Saturday because it is my roommate Aaron's birthday. We are expecting between 40 and 80 people. I am in charge of the pizzas, or at least the dough, and am pretty excited about the first chance to make a large amount of dough at a time. It is good practice for when I one day will have my own pizzeria and need to make dough in massive quantities.

I am going to document the dough making. Usually I make enough dough for about five pizzas. This time I am making enough for thirty. So I got a large bucket with lid. Also, I still have the big sack of bread flour I got from costco. First I made a sponge:



I am unsure how important this really is because the dough ends up sitting around for a week to develop anyway, but I have my routine so I just made my sponge. I have no idea how much of anything I used. I eyeball everything when I make small amounts, but it is hard to eyeball things inside an unfamiliar large bucket. The sponge got nice and yeasty smelling and bubbly the next day. Then I added more flour, water, salt, and yeast:



As you can see, I like to use a ladle to scoop flour out of the sack.

Usually when I make dough, I make the sponge a day before, then in a new bowl I add flour and water together and let it sit (autolyze) for awhile, then add yeast and salt and put it in the mixer to knead for five minutes, and then I throw the sponge in, knead for a couple minutes, and then add water/flour until the consistency seems right to me (pretty wet). Then I separate the dough into the size I want and throw them in the fridge in individual tupperware.

This time, since I don't have a big commercial Hobart mixer, I decided that I don't really need to knead, and I'll just let the yeast do it for me. Also, I decided to just throw everything into the bucket and hope for the best since I only had one bucket and can't do things separately. So into the bucket I added yeast, salt, flour, and water, and mixed it up with my hand. Here it is:



I put the lid on and put it outside to chill and rise and do its thing. Hopefully nobody steals it. I'll check on it in the coming days and have updates...

I don't know how my pizza dough always comes out pretty good, but it does, even though I don't really know what I'm doing. I'm basically banking on the same thing this time. I used to measure everything out with great precision, but my pizzas sucked. So I don't think measuring is very important anymore. I think you just have to wish hard enough for it to be good.

If this works out, I think I'm going to start having dough in a bucket going on all the time. Then I can go pinch off a piece anytime I want pizza. Or I can make bread with it.