While I hardly ever cook (I usually leave that to Tom, who is so much better at it than I am), I do occasionally bake a savory dish or two. Last night I decided to try a recipe from the most recent Culinary SOS column in the LA Times, the thin-crust Romano pizza from Orso restaurant in Los Angeles. I actually do make pizza on a pretty regular basis; a few years ago my aunt gave me a bread machine and I had no idea what to do with it until I figured out that I could use it for making pizza crust dough. Yeasted doughs have always been one of my weaknesses, so it's a relief to be able to just throw all of the ingredients in the machine, walk away, and come back 90 minutes later to have finished dough. However, I have never made a very thin-crust pizza and I was interested to see how it would turn out.I have a FibraMent pizza stone that lives on the bottom rack of my oven all the time. If you have any interest in making pizza, I highly recommend that you get a baking stone; it makes all of the difference in the world for a crisp and even crust. The recipe calls for all purpose flour, coarse semolina flour, and fine semolina flour. I used King Arthur all-purpose flour (which is good for yeasted breads) and fine semolina flour only. My Whole Foods only sells fine semolina and since I never use semolina flour for anything else, I figured it wasn't worth it to try and track down the coarse variety. I mixed and kneaded the dough in my Kitchenaid stand mixer.
After the dough had rested and risen, I rolled it out into three thin 12-inch pizzas as directed. The dough was very easy to work with and rolled out without much resistance. The pizzas were topped with chopped garlic, mozzarella, provolone, parmesan, and crushed red pepper (no tomato sauce!). The recipe directs you to bake the pizzas on a stone in a preheated 500 degree oven for 2-3 minutes, or until the cheese is melted and the crust is crunchy and brown. The hottest my apartment oven will get is 475. I had to bake my pizzas for 5 minutes until they were done. After I took them out and Tom sprinkled them with some chopped parsley, they looked quite lovely.
We ate the pizza with sides of sweet corn and watermelon with feta cheese. (A couple of years ago, Tom and I enjoyed a delicious appetizer at Komi restaurant that mainly consisted of watermelon and feta cheese. The strong saltiness of the cheese is an amazing contrast to the sweetness of the fruit.) The pizza was quite tasty and full of garlic goodness, and the edges were delightfully cracker crisp (I realize that this is a matter of taste, but I happen to like my pizza crust like a crunchy cracker). The middle of the pizza was not as crisp. Next time I think I will use the same amount of dough to make four pizzas -- it could have been rolled even thinner and I think this would help achieve a good crunch throughout each pizza. Still, it was the perfect dinner for a hot summer's night.
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