Make Awesome Homemade Pizza With a Focus on Water
Pizzerias do this for their delivery pies, but home cooks can learn it too: you can make homemade pizza especially delicious by looking at one of the more modest ingredients that also has the biggest impact on flavor: the water you use to make it. dough.
Smithsonian Magazine spoke with Tony Geminiani, author of The Pizza Bible , about why the water you use is so important:
When it comes to getting a big crust, Geminyani stresses that water should not be underestimated. Cities like New York and Chicago have done well when it comes to water quality, but places like San Diego and Jacksonville aren’t many. “If you don’t drink tap water, why would you use it to make dough?” – says Geminyani. “If it comes out of the tap with a bad taste and a cloudy appearance, why would you do that?” As Geminani points out, water is the second largest ingredient in pizza dough after flour, and it affects how the dough is processed, stretched and held. Geminyani uses a reverse osmosis system in his restaurants for consistency (literally), although he says bottled water is an easy substitute for home pizza makers.
Using bottled water every time you make your pizza is quite wasteful, but you can use filtered water or boil tap water if you want that level of purity. The point is, you have to think about the flavor your water imparts to the pizza dough and whether you should use tap water or not.
If you think you have tap water that tastes great, prepare one batch of dough with tap water and another with filtered or bottled water and see if you can tell the difference. If you don’t, there is no need to switch, but at least you will know that you are getting the best taste.
Wondering how to make great pizza? Talk To The Boy Who Wrote The Bible On It | Smithsonian magazine