Pizza Fest: Playing with My New Baking Steel

After all the buzz on the interwebs, I couldn't resist spending some Christmas-present money on a new toy: the baking steel... It turns out all the hype is correct.  

(As you can see, I got the 1/2-inch version.) I tried three different crusts on my new steel, and every one of them blew me away with how amazing it turned out... 

Yum...

Let's start with the more classic before moving on to the weird...  I grabbed a copy of Jim Lahey's awesome My Pizza back when I was still crashing with my parents, but with all the chaos of the last few months I never got around to playing with it... until my new toy inspired me to finally give it a go.  I wasn't clear on the purpose of no-knead dough, since the pizza dough I usually make doesn't exactly take a ton of time... but then I made Lahey's dough and it was all clear to me.  In less time than it took to listen to one song in the kitchen, all of the work (including finding ingredients in my pantry) was done.  

After combining the ingredients you're supposed to let the dough rise for 18 hours at "room temperature," which is 72 degrees...  Since I keep my house at closer to 58 degrees, I started the dough sitting above the fire (Jax makes an appearance in this picture)...

... then gave it a full 24 hours before making my first crust... (the first pizza pictured above was my first-ever baking steel pizza and my first-ever Jim Lahey crust...)  The first pizza I made was Lahey's "Pepperoni Pie." The flavor is definitely pepperoni-esque, with the flavor coming from a homemade merguez-style sausage.  The sausage is made by sautéing celery and onion, then adding mint, rosemary, and a bunch of spices like sumac, paprika, and fennel seed... (I also added cayenne, because that's how I roll...)

 

The only (non-cayenne) tweak I made to the recipe was to add the spices while the pan was still hot so that they could toast a little with the onion mixture...  Once this cooled, it was combined with some ground lamb, and the sausage was good to go...

After trying this pizza on Lahey's crust, I moved on to the other style of crust: one using encapsulated leavener instead of yeast.  While the no-knead dough takes minimal hands-on time, it still requires enough forethought to start it the afternoon before... Even my old standard yeast-raised dough required at least an hour to rise (more if you wanted it to have the best air bubbles).  Encapsulated Leavener allows you to start your dough about a half hour before you make your pizza and still get a beautiful crust.  I basically followed the Seattle Food Geek recipe, and I'll let you refer to that post for all the awesome geeking-out about this product...  

I made versions of the crust using both champagne (for a shrimp pizza with Béchamel, oven-dried tomatoes, prosciutto, and mozzarella, topped with cilantro after baking... as well as for the asparagus, prosciutto, and egg pizza at the top of the post...)

and beer (shown here as a pesto pizza with mozzarella, oven-dried tomatoes, prosciutto, and chicken, topped with arugula after baking...).

 

I didn't see a noticeable difference in nuanced flavor, so I would probably go with beer most often in the future, since I always have it around and it comes in smaller bottles...)  While the dough works really well after resting for 30 minutes, it can hang out in the fridge for a few days and just be brought up closer to room temperature when you're ready to make your next crust...  I'm trying out a gluten-free dough tomorrow, and I'll update the post with info on that if it's not a total disaster...  We shall see...