Some great looking food as usual!
Coincidentally, I cooked up some pizza in the wood oven over the weekend.
Here is the oven
First pizza was a white pizza (no tomato) with potato, French shallot and rosemary.
Second one was a Margarita, pictured before I put on some prosciutto just before serving.
Third one was a seafood pizza, with prawns, scallops and calamari and pesto, but that got scarfed before I took a pic.
Next came my wife's favorite - pumpkin, fetta, pine nuts, little tomatoes and some chilli.
Then a meatlover's, because number 2 daughter and her boyfriend requested it!
and lastly my favorite, white anchovy, pepperoni, chilli and olives.
The oven does a great job, as you can get it pretty hot. I like to roll out the dough, put it into the tin, and let it rise for an hour or so. Then I put the tin on the top of the stove to set the base before putting the toppings on. That way you can get a thin base with the big bubbles in the dough, which you can see on pizza number 2.
I've been making pizza bases for many years now, and my current method is to make a wettish dough using 50% bread flour and 50% semolina. I know the dough is right when it barely stops sticking to the bottom of the stand mixer after 10 minutes of kneading.
I always make a starter, ideally overnight, which is simply flour, water and a little yeast. This makes the dough very tasty.
For crispiness add a tablespoon of olive oil before mixing, along with the starter, flour and semolina, salt and sufficient warm water, and mix with a dough hook till the gluten is developed and the dough is barely sticking to the bottom of the mixer bowl. Let rise till doubled, and don't do a second rise, just make balls of dough about 200g for a standard pizza tin. Roll them out and place on a lightly greased tin and let rest for an hour or so before cooking.
I never measure anything, except to weigh out the dough before rolling.
