Making pizza with what you find in the kitchen (not your own).

I'm staying with my parents this week. My mum told me she had a pizza oven so I thought I'd put my skills to the test and see what we could do. However this is the 'oven.'

Challenge on.

The local Asda doesn't have any 00 flour so I have Allison's strong white bread flour and some all purpose plain flour to work with. I need to make the dough fairly quickly, we need to eat tonight, so here is what I came up with.

First we need a straight-forward recipe:

490g of Strong White Bread flour (because that is all I had left)
185g of plain all purpose flour
405g of tap water
1/3 tsp IDY (I didn't have scales so guessed at about 1g)
18g of sea salt

10:00 am

Room temperature was around 20 degrees, but no thermometer. My dough temperature was somewhere between 19 and 22 degrees at a guess.

I did a straight mix, everything in together and a vigorous knead for 5 to 10 mins or so. I did a couple of stretch and folds on the hour just for fun.

The dough was fermenting well and I took another guess that by 6pm (dinner time) it might have gone too far, so I put the bulk dough in the fridge for an hour to cool it down a little.

1:30pm

Shaped into 4 220g dough balls (aiming for 10 inch pizzas)

Checked on them at 3pm

OK, making some good progress, might be on target for well fermented pizza balls by about 6pm so leaving them alone for now.

Here they are at 6:30, time to cook.

I reckon these look pretty decent and ready to go.

Stretching out easily and plenty of air

No problems shaping these, I reckon they are at about peak, starting to get some larger air-bubbles, but all good. Now let's try that oven.

I don't have a pizza peel so I decided to put the dough into the oven and top it in place, quickly.

Here is the result, Took quite a while to cook a max temperature, might have been 15 mins. Doesn't look the best but it was perfectly edible.

For the next pizza, I ditched the oven and relied on a frying pan and grill to cook it at a higher temperature. This time the results were pretty decent. By this time the dough was starting to be a bit over-prooffed, I had to pop a few large bubbles.

What have I learnt? It is hard to make a bad pizza. I am now wondering if all my effort to weigh and meassure and over-analyse is really worth the effort. This turned out pretty good.