Bonci Dough & The Modernist Baking Steel

In my seemingly endless quest to make the perfect pizza (whatever that is) I recently came across something called The Baking Steel. This is nothing more than a heavy slab of treated steel that replaces the more traditional pizza stone. It has a couple obvious advantages: 1) it will never break and 2) its enormous thermal mass means even a rather wet pizza is going to cook very quickly. The big disadvantage is cost - $99. Nevertheless...

I had made a full batch on Bonci style dough for Tomato and Black Olive Focaccia over the weekend and still had two of the dough balls in the freezer when my Baking Steel arrived. So it seemed reasonable to use one of those for my first trial.

But first, I loaded the Baking Steel into the oven on a rack at the third from the top level. This is one level lower than suggested in the guidelines the company supplies, but I was pretty sure my pizza would be quite a bit taller than is typical. Pre-heat at 550 F for an hour and then...

Bonci Dough - Full Batch

Ingredients

• 1000 gm Bread Flour
• 800 gm Tepid Water
• 7 gm Yeast
• 20 gm Salt
• 40 gm Extra Virgin Olive Oil

Those quantities result in 3 big (about 600 gram), very soft dough balls. This dough is far too soft and sticky to ever slide off a peel on its own (after all it's meant to be baked on sheet pans). So I stretched one ball onto a piece of well oiled aluminum foil.

You can see from the wrinkling around the dough that it's already grabbing the foil in spite of the oiling.

Toppings were Neapolitan style: crushed tomatoes, fresh (as in made that morning) Valley Shepherd Creamery Mozzarella, a bit of crushed oregano and sea salt. Slide it onto the Baking Steel and about 10 minutes later I turned the broiler on high. After another minute I rotated the pizza and another minute later out it came:

2 inches of crispy and delicious

Yep. The Baking Steel worked exactly as advertised. Since we make pizza or some type of bread at least once a week, its worth the $99 (there's a thinner model for $79). It makes a tremendous difference in the the quality of what comes out of my oven.

Gabriele Bonci's Broccolini And Mortadella Pizza

The long awaited English translation of Gabriele Bonci's book on pizza finally arrived last Tuesday. So I spent the rest of the week browsing through the recipes trying to decide on which to try. Broccolini And Mortadella won out.

The first step (and by far the most time consuming) is making the dough. That process is documented in detail in the book and on many other blogs, so I'll skip it here. I made a full batch of the white dough recipe: 

White Pizza Dough

Recipe by Gabriele Bonci

Ingredients

• 1 Kg. Bread Flour
• 700-800 gm. Water
• 7 gm. Instant yeast (1 packet)
• 20 gm. Sea salt
• 40 gm. Olive Oil

Cooking Directions

1. Combine the flour and yeast, mixing well.
2. Add the water and mix until a shaggy mass forms.
3. And the remaining ingredients and mix for a few minutes until well combined. The dough will be rather wet.
4. Let the dough rise, covered for 1 hour.
5. Dump the dough onto a very well floured surface and gently shape it into a rough rectangle with a short side nearest you.
6. Fold the top 1/3 of the rectangle down to the center and press it down gently.
7. Fold the bottom third up over the center and press it down.
8. Turn the dough 90 degrees, re-shape the rectangle and repeat the folding.
9. And do it again.
10. And again.
11. Put the dough back in it's bowl and let it rest for 15 minutes.
12. Repeat the folding and resting 3 more times.
13. After a final resting divide the dough into 3 or 4 equal balls and place them in the refrigerator in lightly oiled bowls and covered tightly in plastic wrap, overnight.
14. The dough balls may also be frozen or simply allowed to rise in a cool place until you're ready to bake.

Two 600 gm. dough balls

I'm already pretty familiar with Bonci style dough and knew that it would take about 600 grams to fill my small jellyroll pan. So I divided the full batch into three balls: 2 for the pizza and 1 went into the freezer for next week. Those two went into a couple large bowls for the final fermentation. Since I would be using them in just a few hours I put them out on our rather chilly porch instead of overnighting them in the refrigerator.

Broccolini And Mortadella Pizza Filling

Recipe by Adapted from Gabriele Bonci

Ingredients

• 250 gm. Broccolini or Broccoli raab, Chopped
• 125 gm. Mortadella
• Salt
• Olive Oil
• Lemon Juice

Once the dough is made the process is simple.

Stretch one ball so it fills the pan. That's an aluminum 1/4 sheet pan about 10.5 x 15.15 inches.

That's Broccoli Raab

Spread on the chopped broccolini, lightly dressed with olive oil and a little salt. I used broccoli raab, which is a lot more leafy than broccolini.

Stretch the other dough ball and place it on top. Bake at 500 degrees for about 20 minutes.

Carefully lift off the top crust and give the broccolini  spritz of lemon juice, then layer on the Mortadella.

Put the top back on and let it cool a few minutes, then slice and eat.

Pizza Bianca

It's one of the great culinary creations of Italy. Airy, crispy, salty, delicious slabs of Italian not-too-flat-bread. Delightful plain, it can be cut open and turned into a sandwich, and in the hands of contemporary masters like Gabriele Bonci in Rome it becomes a canvas for greatness. Here he is on Italian TV:



Unfortunately, you can't make it here. Wrong flour, wrong yeast, wrong water, wrong mixer, wrong, wrong wrong. Don't believe me? Check out this 50+ page discussion: Pizzarium. Fortunately, mere mortals can make a fairly reasonable substitute with a little patience.

Basic Pizza Bianca:

500 grams bread flour
400 grams water
10 grams Kosher salt
1 packet active dry yeast (purists will use about a quarter tsp.)
2 Tbs Extra Virgin Olive Oil plus more for oiling the bowl and brushing
Sea Salt for sprinkling

Day 1

Pour yourself a glass of wine. Set it in a safe place.

Weigh out the flour, water and salt. Place them with the olive oil and yeast in the bowl of a heavy duty mixer and stir them with a fork until the dough begins to come together.

Mount the dough hook on the mixer, lock the mixing bowl in place and turn it up to about 80% power. On my KitchenAid that's 8. Knead the dough for 15 minutes. Really. At this speed the mixer will tend to "walk" so keep a hand on it and sip your wine. After about 12 minutes or so the dough hook will start flinging stringy blobs of dough toward the top couple inches of the mixing bowl. If it looks like it's getting out of hand, just scrape it down and keep mixing.

Almost ready...

Lightly oil a 5 quart mixing bowl and dump your dough into it. Oil your hands and gently form the blob into a ball, turning it to coat it with oil. It will immediately turn into a puddle. Cover the bowl and put it in the refrigerator for 24 hours.

Day 2

When you take the bowl of dough out it should look like this:

Flour your work surface and hands and pull the dough out of the bowl. Gently pat it into a rectangle, then fold one end to the middle and the other over that. You'll end up with a roughly square blob one third the size of the original rectangle. Put the folded dough back in the bowl, cover and leave it for an hour. (Purists will put it back in the 'fridge for another 24 hours.)

Make a rectangle

Fold one side to the middle

Fold the other side over the top

Repeat the folding process twice more, making a quarter turn each time, for a total of 3 hours of rising.

Lightly oil a 10x15 inch jelly roll pan including the sides. Oil your hands and turn the dough out into the center of the pan. Very gently stretch the dough into a rectangle and ease it toward the edges of the pan. It's better to pick up half and stretch it than to press it down. You want to avoid crushing the bubbles you've spent the last three hours cultivating. It will just about fill the pan. Cover it and set it aside in a protected place for an hour (a large jelly roll pan will sit nicely over the medium one without touching the dough).

While the dough rises for the final time, place a rack in the middle of your oven and preheat to 500 F. for an hour.

Uncover the dough, gently brush it with a little olive oil, and sprinkle with sea salt.

Oiled, salted and ready for the oven

Pop it into the oven and bake it for 12-15 minutes until it's nicely colored.

Let the pizza bianca cool for a few minutes and then turn it out onto a rack. When it's cool enough to handle cut it into 8 more or less equal rectangles.  You can eat it plain with a little oil for dipping, split and stuffed with a little mortadella and some salad greens, tomato/basil/mozzarella, or whatever else looks good to you. Just don't overdo it - the main event is the bread.

Cut into serving pieces.