How to Make Pizza, Essay Example

There is hardly anyone who has never tried a pizza. Representing Italy’s cultural heritage, pizza has already become a universally recognized dish that may match anyone’s culinary tastes. In the classical performance, it is a kind of flat bread baked in an oven and covered with a tomato sauce with various toppings – cheese, sausages, bacon, or vegetables.

There is a specific kind of pizza to everyone’s taste, from meat lovers to vegans. Moreover, it is a dish that one can easily cook at home to indulge in a delicious evening meal with family or friends. This essay describes the process of cooking pizza in detail to guide the aspiring cook through all the vital stages.

Making Dough

The process of making the pizza dough is not overly complicated. However, one needs to follow specific instructions to make the dough of the required texture so that it is not too porous and not too tough. The first stage of making such dough is adding yeast to a bowl with warm water and sugar so that the yeast is activated. It is important to add yeast gradually by allowing it to dissolve in the warm water. By adding all yeast at once, the cook may interrupt the natural process of yeast activation and fail to get the required texture of the dough.

After the sugar and yeast are mixed in a bowl of warm water, it is important to give the mixture around ten minutes for activation. Yeast needs that time to start acting, which is an essential contributor to the dough’s further preparation. It is fine to leave the water with sugar and yeast even for a longer period, but one should monitor the water’s temperature. It is counter-productive to let it cool down substantially, as yeast may again deactivate; therefore, the optimal timing is 10-15 minutes for the full yeast activation with the help of the warm temperature and the addition of sugar that yeast eats.

The next stage of dough preparation involves adding more yeast and oil as soon as the cook sees that the surface of the warm water with sugar and yeast becomes foamy and cloudy. These are the signs of activation, which need to be supported with additional yeast and a small amount of oil (preferably olive oil).

Once the yeast activation process is over, the cook needs to add around two cups of flour to the mix and stir the substance. It is important to continue stirring until the moment when the flour gets fully dissolved in the warm water with yeast, and the dough obtains an even texture. The dough should look smooth and be the same by touch; it is easy to test the texture by combining the dough with one’s hands.

Kneading

Next comes the kneading stage for the dough. The cook should take the dough from the bowl and place it onto an even surface covered with a thin layer of flour to prevent its sticking. After that, the thorough process of kneading starts, with the cooker applying the force of their hands to knead it to the required end state. The average time required for sufficient kneading is 10-15 minutes; the process of kneading involves repeated folding of the dough by half and squeezing it thoroughly on the surface. The result of kneading should be a piece of dough that looks silky and textured on the outside and is easily rolled into a ball.

Coating

After the dough obtains the required texture, the cook should again give it some rest so that all ingredients activate and combine well. The stage involves dough coating with a thin layer of olive oil and its further placement into a mixing bowl, where it waits for the next stage of panning. The latter refers to spreading the dough on the pan so that the shape of the cooked dough is perfectly round.

Techniques for Dough Spreading

As the classical pizza recipes suggest, a pizza should be round in shape (though some rural methods also allow using oval or rectangular shapes). One should test several methods and find the one that works the best for them. It is possible to choose from pizza tossing, dough pressing, and pin rolling. Any of the techniques are compliant with the traditional Italian methods of pizza preparation, but some of them may seem more challenging than others.

Making a Pizza Sauce

As soon as the dough layer is ready, it is time to make the pizza sauce to cover the dough before baking. The recommended traditional sauce should contain tomatoes, basil, and oregano, while some people who do not like tomato sauces experiment with white (cheese or cream) sauces as well. The classical sauce recipe includes butter, basil, minced yellow onions, canned tomatoes, and some spices of the cook’s preference (usually garlic, black pepper, and salt). Olive oil is also a must-include ingredient of most Italian dishes, pizza included.

No matter how simple the sauce looks, its preparation process is pretty sophisticated. The cook should melt butter and olive oil in a pan first, then add the sauteed onions and garlic and further spice the mixture with salt, basil, oregano, and pepper. The tomato puree is also added at that stage, with the mixture stirred in the pan until it starts bubbling. Afterwards, it is necessary to give it time to cool down. One should cover the pizza dough only with a cool sauce; otherwise, the dough may melt and spoil the dish.

Once the pizza is covered with a thick layer of sauce, with small margins left on the outer border to avoid sauce spilling and simplify the eating process, one should bake the pizza at 450 degrees Fahrenheit for 15-20 minutes. Once the pizza is cooked, it should spend some more time in the oven with proper air circulation.

As one can see, the process of cooking pizza is not overly complicated. With the most intricate and challenging part referring to dough creation, one should take extra care of all the steps discussed above. This way, it is possible to create a classical Italian pizza and enjoy the meal.