午夜福利1000集合

PIZZA is the ultimate fast food, and the speed of cooking is vital to achieving perfection: brown and crispy on the bottom, but still tender and chewy on the inside, with a light, airy crust. This is easy to attain in a traditional pizza oven, which can reach temperatures of around 500掳C and cook a pizza in under 2 minutes. At home, it is more challenging, but there are some tricks to making satisfying pizzas.

Paradoxically, it helps to think of pizza as slow food and start the process a few days early 鈥� difficult, I know, if you just can鈥檛 wait for a slice. Extending the fermentation time of your dough is helpful in several ways, starting with gluten development. When hydrated, proteins in flour join together into long strands of gluten. A strong gluten network is essential for the dough to trap gas bubbles and rise in the oven.

Italian 鈥�00鈥� flour, which is very finely milled, is said to be the best for pizza, but any flour with a reasonably high protein content should work well. Kneading dough helps develop gluten by stretching the strands, but with a long fermentation, this happens by itself, so there is almost no need to knead. More time also allows protease enzymes in the flour to work on the gluten, controlling the length of the strands. This makes the dough more extensible, so it is easier to stretch.

Another enzyme, amylase, breaks down starch into sugars, providing food for the yeast but also supplying fuel for the Maillard reaction. This gives us a nicely browned crust when the pizza goes in the oven.

To allow time for all this chemistry to happen, we need to keep the dough in the fridge to slow the yeast down so it doesn鈥檛 burn through the sugar too quickly. As well as yeast, the dough will contain lactic acid-producing bacteria from the environment. These bacteria are less affected by the cold and their metabolism contributes tasty flavour compounds to the dough.

After mixing the ingredients, knead the dough briefly and then divide it in two and shape into balls, before refrigerating in an oiled container for three to five days. Take it out of the fridge 2 hours before baking.

One way to compensate for the weakness of a home oven is to use a baking stone. The stone is heated up in the oven first, storing energy so that it can conduct it into the pizza placed on top of it. A baking steel, which is denser and more conductive, is even better.

is to assemble the pizza in a preheated cast-iron frying pan, put it under a grill 鈥� called a broiler in North America 鈥� to cook the top of the pizza quickly through radiation, then put the pan on the stove top to conduct heat into the pizza from below.Home appliances vary, so it might take experimentation to work out the ideal timings for your kitchen.

For similar projects visit newscientist.com/maker.