Giorgio Locatelli

Pizza

1/18/2010 08:44:00 PM

Mushroom Pizza

Pizza is fun to make! I love making yeasty doughs, and you also get to choose any flavour combo you like. It's hard to get them just as crispy as the professionals do, but if you've got an oven that can get really really hot you'll still have something delicious on your hands.

We had one of my friends over for dinner on New Years Eve, and we made it a pizza night! The dough recipe is from Giorgio Locatelli's Made in Italy, a huge tome that I've had for years, but never actually used - it's almost too big and intimidating to be picked up and read regularly.

His recipe for pizza is actually for small pizette, but it's not too hard to just use the dough to make grown-up sized pizza.

The dough is a pretty standard yeast dough, with a good lot of olive oil in it. However, what is interesting is the way in which you knead the dough. It is referred to as la colomba, (dove), because you fold the dough over like a dove's wings!

To start, you press it out with your fingers, both stretching the dough and leaving lots of indentations in it.

Then, much like the turns in puff pastry, you fold the dough into thirds...
... and stretch it out again. You do that a couple of times (no need to rest in between), and then let it rest for 20 minutes. According to the recipe, the indenting and folding creates pockets of air that get trapped in the dough.

You can already see the trapped air bubble when you roll out the dough...

I divided the dough into 3 pieces, and we all choose our own toppings for them.

Onions, salami, red peppers, provolone cheese, mushrooms and tomato sauce (homemade!!!) - all of my favourites.

They took about 20 minutes in a super-hot oven (240C).

The pizza you see at the top of this post was pure mushroom - mushrooms and cheese, with a little porcini powder for extra mushroomy oomph.

This one had mushrooms, tomato, cheese and salami!

And finally, we have our pizza with the lot - a bit of everything!

The dough was really yummy and super elastic... and thanks to the colomba, I got some of those funky stretchy dough bubbles that fancy pizzerias do!

Dough Bubble 1
Dough Bubble 2

What are your favourite pizza toppings???


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5 comments

  1. These looks like the real deal! I must try and make pizza using this method. Absolutely gorgeous.
    I love cheese, cheese and more cheese on pizza. Just 2 or 3 ingredients max.

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  2. OMG that looks amazing! I adore homemade pizza & your base looks brilliant! Would u b willing to share your base recipe pls?
    I'd have to say my fav pizza topping is huge prawns with fresh basil or buffalo mozarell with fresh basil & baby tomato haves :)

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  3. Wow, impressive! And seriously, porcini powder? Yum.

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  4. I love making home made pizza too, just did a huge batch recently which saw me through out latest heatwave without having to cook for 3 days!

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  5. Penny - Mmm... cheese. I could really go a quattro formaggio right now!

    Suzi - thank-you so much! I don't normally post recipes because I'm worried about copyright infringement (plus this recipe is 2 pages long, plus another page to explain the colomba!!!). I think any standard pizza dough recipe would work well - the secret is in the dimpling and folding!

    Hannah - Hehe, yeah I used to work at a gourmet food shop where they'd sell crazy stuff like that. I bought heaps of stuff with my staff discount before I left! The porcini powder is really easy to use and very delicious.

    Ange - Good work! I can't believe how cold it is now compared to last week!!!

    xox Sarah

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