Pizza maison

Tom in Illinois asked for more details about the pizza I showed a picture of a couple of days ago. I took pictures of it because Walt was too busy making it to worry with his camera.

Tom, BTW, is a fantastic cook, and one of the great things he makes is pizza. He has a wood-fired pizza oven in his house. He made pizzas for dinner one evening when we were in Illinois last November. His pizza oven reaches a temperature of something like 900ºF (about 500ºC), so pizzas cook in a flash.

And Tom's bread skills are not limited to pizza crust — he made a batch of southern-style biscuits for breakfast one morning that were the best I'd had in many years.

Back to Saint-Aignan: Walt also makes his own dough for pizza crust. He's been making it for years. The only thing I know about the dough he made this time is that it has a little bit of honey in it, in addition to flour, water, yeast, and salt. He made it Saturday morning early, and we had pizza for lunch at 1:00 the same day.

In the refrigerator we had some sliced ham (called jambon de Paris or jambon blanc in French), some Comté cheese (made in eastern France in the area called Franche-Comté), and some mushrooms (champignons de Paris) from the supermarket. All of it was from the supermarket, actually, though the Comté cheese is AOC — appellation d'origine contrôlée — which means it's the real thing and very good stuff. I think I like Comté better than Gruyère or Emmental, at least in the versions of these Alpine (so-called Swiss) cheeses that we get here in the Loire Valley.

To cook the pizza after letting the dough rise, rolling it out, and adding the toppings, Walt put two pizza stones in the oven, one to cook the pizza on and the other on a rack above it to radiate heat down on the top of the pizza. This was Tom's idea; we had asked him last November how he would turn a home electric oven into a good pizza oven.

Walt turned our oven up to 300ºC (approximately 575ºF) and let the oven and the two stones heat up for 30 minutes or more before cooking the first pizza (he made two plate-sized pizzas, one for each of us, for lunch).

Cooking time was pretty short at that high temperature, though not as short as in Tom's pizza oven. The crust got nice and brown around the edges and was crunchy but not burned. I thought it was excellent. We had a green salad (oak-leaf lettuce with vinaigrette) after the pizza. The other indispensible component of the meal: a bottle of good Gamay red wine from the co-op up the road in Saint-Romain-sur-Cher.