Well, the first thing is that all the groceries here are in Italian. We found some pizza flour (with a nice set of Italian cooking instructions on the side) and eventually found some Yeast Butter (why no yeast? apparently it's sold in butter here) and of course a good stock of wine and beer, and set to it.
First step - making the dough.
I don't usually make dough unless I've got some kind of stress in my life (punching down a lump of dough is very therapeutic!) however for the sake of a pizza I made an exception.
Step 2 starting the fire.
To bring the stone pizza oven up to temperature (400 degrees C) you basically build a big fire in it. It took us a couple of tries but eventually we got it going.
Step 3 - when the dough has risen, spin it into perfectly round pizza shells.
How is my technique? The pizzas did not turn out exactly "round", but it gives them more of an artisan look, no?
Step 5 - cook the pizzas!
The first one came out looking pretty much like a pizza. The dough was a bit too thick, because we didn't find the rolling pin until we rolled out the second dough. However we had some adventures getting the second pizza in and out of the oven.
This is before it went in. It came out looking kind of like a train wreck, however with the thinner crust it was much more delicious so our next adventure will be trying to figure out how to properly enter and exit the pizzas to/from the pizza oven.
Overall the hardest part of the whole exercise is getting the oven up to temperature, and then keeping it there. So I can understand why the pizzerias here don't want to serve pizzas at lunchtime, when there isn't the amount of clientelle to justify the effort. (Dinner is a big social meal here. At lunchtime most just sty home and nap. Very civilized!)
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