Memory Pizza

If you, Memory Pizza, decide to re-open rather than just take the gofundme money and enjoy a nice retirement or at least a nice relaxed time for awhile, then I bet $100.00 I can improve your pizza in two easy steps and three more less easy steps improvement beyond that. You can just go ahead and use these ideas and I'll trust your Christian ethics about them improving your pizza immediately. I know they will.

1) Dough aging. Whatever it is you are doing aging your dough at least overnight will improve it noticeably, and in a contest with all other things equal, your aged dough will win. It makes regular dough into country dough. It adds character. It begins fermentation as there is enough time to incorporate cell generations and cell death. The yeast cells begin to consume the dough, but slowly. They actually begin to mess their own quarters and that translates to flavorful bread with character. Two or three days fermentation and the effect is more pronounced and the dough takes on characteristics of sourdough. That improves the flavor greatly but also alters the texture negatively. The more like sourdough then the more like cardboard when baked into pizza because more is consumed by the organisms. In that case then, mix fermented old and worn out dough with brand new fresh dough for spectacular pizza dough with the best properties of both.

2) Dough composition. 20% semolina flour with 80% high protein (bread) flour. Bread flour becomes stringy with just a few turns. It's the sturdy stuff that bagels are made of. Semolina is larger granules without the husks almost like cornmeal except wheat. The wheat is cracked open and smashed to tiny diameter but not pulverized to dust as flour. It's yellow.

Those two things right there will win the bet.

3) Oven and baking surface, preferably stone, should be hot as can be. Wood fire oven best of all but usually not practical. Hot as your oven will go. Experiments were conducted by a team of cooking geeks for the book Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks, Good Food where the lock was disabled on a self-cleaning oven to get the temperature high as possible. They also found that an upside down cast iron pan works very well for pizza baking surface but limits the size to individual pizzas.

You don't need an official pizza-peel to slide the prepared pizza onto the dangerously hot stone, a cookie sheet works as well as a peel. You can get the pizza to slide with cornmeal ball bearings or semolina flour ball bearings, or else parchment paper, just let the paper toast between stone and pizza then use the paper to help retrieve the cooked pizza.

4) For really top end pizza, buffalo mozzarella and maybe this isn't a great idea for a small town shop due to expense, on the other hand, why shortchange yourself? So, certainly for your own personal pizza, try it at least once. This is the mozzarella that pizza is made for. It kicks up the effort to a whole new level.

5) Fresh herbs. The whole idea is brilliantly toasted bread with olive oil and fresh herbs. Everything else is extra, like sauce and protein and cheese, that brings pizza from focaccia closer to toasted sandwiches like croque Monsieur or tortilla piled with these similar elements and either roasted or toasted. Fresh herbs are important for their breathy element.

Notice I didn't mention real garlic nor authentic tomato sauce. They're important but they don't affect every pizza and they don't guarantee you win. Some pizza won't have them. But all pizza will be improved with my suggestions. So just go ahead and give me $100.00 because I already know all this wins.