For four pizzas, “Margherita” style

700 gr. all-purpose flour (Erikoisvehnäjauho)
400 gr. water
3 gr. fresh yeast
Good quality tomato sauce (e.g. Passata Mutti, or Mutti crushed tomatoes)
Basil
Olive oil
Mozzarella, in thin slices or diced.

Step 1. Pre-fermentation (“Poolish”)

The night before making the pizza, mix together 400gr of flour, 400 gr of water and 3 gr of yeast in a large bowl. Cover and let rest overnight. This  mixture is called “poolish“.

Step 2. Mixing

The next morning start adding the rest of the flour to the poolish, a little at a time, mixing with a wooden spoon for as long as you can. Add three good pinches of salt while mixing. When the dough is too thick for the spoon, transfer to your working surface and let rest for 5 minutes. Start kneading, keeping some flour on the counter so that when the dough gets too sticky, you can roll it in the flour and continue mixing. Go on like this for at least ten minutes, until the dough is smooth and elastic. Before finishing, stretch the dough and fold it in half a few times.

Cover with a towel and let rise for two hours, or until the dough has doubled in volume. The volume is the key here, don’t get hung up on the time: depending on the yeast and the temperature you may reach the right spot sooner or later.

Note that the quantities of flour and water are indicative. Depending on your type of flour and environment, you may have to make a few trials and tweak them a bit. What matters is the consistency of the dough, which should be soft and wet, but not sticky.

Step 3. Rising

Divide the dough in 4 pieces, they should be 250-300 gr. each. Roll them into a ball by pushing the bottom in and rolling the top outwards with your hands. You will end up with a smooth surface on the top and a seam at the bottom. Put the ball to rest on the counter seam-side down. Let it rest covered for 4-6 hours. One thing to watch out for at this stage is that the surface of the dough ball might get dry. To avoid that, use plastic containers with a lid, or cover with plastic wrap sprinkled with a thin coat of oil to prevent it from sticking.

Step 4. Shaping

About half an hour before starting to shape your pizzas, turn the oven on, with a baking tray inside, at the maximum temperature. Season the tomato sauce with salt and oil.

Spread some flour on your working surface, take one of the dough balls and beat it with your palms to flatten it, rotating it as you do this so that it stays round. Push with your hands from the center of the disc outwards, pushing the dough and the air bubbles towards what will be the ridge of the pizza. Push down close to the edge of the disc with the tips of your fingers to mark the inside of the ridge. With one hand hold down one half of the pizza, and with the other fold the remaining half over your hand quickly, slightly pulling the first half at the same time. Keep doing this and rotating the pizza until it starts to be thin enough (almost transparent in some spots). Transfer the pizza to the pizza peel and spread two large spoonfuls of tomato sauce on the pizza, with a circular motion from the center outwards. Sprinkle a few leaves of basil on the pizza.

Note: check these videos to get a better idea of what I’m describing above

Step 5. Cooking

By now your oven and baking tray should be very hot. Without taking the tray out of the oven, transfer the pizza from the peel to the oven and  let it cook for 4-5 minutes (depending on the maximum temperature of your oven – mine goes up to 300C and 4 minutes are enough). Take out the pizza, still leaving the tray inside the oven, spread the mozzarella over the sauce and return to the oven for another 2 minutes or until the mozzarella has melted. Eat hot!

You can make some extra pizzas and freeze them for later use if you want: take each of them out of the oven after the first 3-4 minutes, let it cool down and put it in the freezer without any wrapping. When it’s frozen, wrap it in a plastic bag. To eat, cover with mozzarella and cook at 225C for 10 minutes.

Notes, explanations and tips

The three key things to make a good pizza are: long fermentation, long mixing and cooking on a very hot surface. The long fermentation gives flavor to the dough, the long mixing makes it elastic so that you can stretch it thin, and cooking on the hot surface creates the crusty bottom we all love.

Long fermentation can be achieved by using very little yeast, proofing the dough in the refrigerator (the so-called “cold rise”) and/or using a “poolish” (a mix of flour and water in equal parts, and yeast, left to rise overnight). I have had the best luck with the poolish and that’s why I’m using it in the recipe above. The cold rise works well too, but my fridge is usually full and I don’t have room to store the dough. Proofing in the fridge has the additional advantage of keeping the dough humid.

The “hot surface” is perhaps the single thing that can make the biggest difference in your home-made pizza. Pizza needs to land on a very hot surface and cook fast, so that the outside, and especially the bottom, becomes crusty while the inside stays soft and rises quickly. Putting the pizza on the cold tray and then to the oven is practical, but ends up with an evenly cooked pizza that is either too soft or overcooked. So you better invest in a pizza peel that you can use to throw the pizza in the oven and retrieve it when it’s cooked. Many people recommend using a pizza stone in the oven, I don’t have one but I imagine it can help. A normal metal baking tray has given me good results so far.

Another thing that made a big difference for me was using a wetter dough. Unfortunately a wet dough is harder to handle by hand, and the temptation is to add more flour making it easier to work with, but also resulting in a chewier pizza. The trick is to start mixing the dough when it’s very wet, and add a little coating of flour at a time as it gets too sticky to continue. My rule is to mix for at least ten minutes so that the gluten gets strong and the dough elastic. In baker’s percentage I have found about 60% hydration (water to flour ratio, in weight) to be the best for me, but it depends on the flour you use and probably even the humidity of the place where you are. Many recipes recommend 65%-75% hydration, but for me that’s just too wet.

Many people obsess about the brand and mix of flour they use, but in my experience it doesn’t make much of a difference, at least if you mix by hand. Ordinary all-purpose flour (“erikoisvehnäjauho” in Finland) has worked very well for me. I find the Italian “Farina 00″ to be a bit too weak, but it’s used in the original recipe so I assume it works better when you use a mixing machine.

Note that there is no oil, sugar, milk or whatnot in the dough, just flour, water, yeast and salt. Oil is normally suggested to make the crust crispier, but with a high hydration you don’t need it (and get a better result anyway). Sugar makes the yeast more active, but commercial yeast is already powerful enough.

Some recipes recommend  a sourdough starter (“lievito madre” or “taikinajuuri“), and you should definitely give it a try if you feel up for it. It improves the flavor of the dough, but it’s not powerful enough to give a good rise on its own, so it’s a good idea to still add a little bit of commercial yeast. It also tends to make the dough wetter, so you’ll have to use more flour. I have tried it, but in my opinion the effort to keep the starter alive is not worth the result. On the other hand every sourdough is different, so perhaps I just had the wrong one.

Home bakers sometimes sprinkle the inside of the oven with water, or put a small pot of water in the oven while the pizza is cooking, to keep the air more humid. I think this is most useful if you have a ventilated oven, that tends to be drier, but I haven’ t found much difference with my regular oven.

And finally: authentic pizza has an incredibly stretchy dough that can only be achieved with a machine, and is cooked in a super-hot fire-heated oven. Unless you can replicate these conditions, you will never end up with the perfect pizza, no matter what flour or hydration you use. Having said that, with a bit of practice you can do better than most pizzerias out there and definitely better than the mass-produced frozen stuff!

Links and references

Jeff Varasano’s NY Pizza Recipe – The equivalent of a PhD dissertation on pizza, full of useful tips and information. Most of the techniques above come from this site.

Disciplinare della pizza napoletana verace (in Italian) – The official process required to have the stamp of “Authentic Neapolitan Pizza”. Low on details and explanations, but good for reference

My pizza-related playlist on YouTube - The best way to learn the proper techniques is to see it on video

Was it worth it? Hell yeah.

P.S.: Coming next: Flexo for N9…

American magazine Newsweek published a list of the best countries in the world, and Finland ranked first (article here). If Italy would have achieved such a result, we would hear about it for the next two or three generations. What do you think the Finnish press did instead? Rather than boasting about it, they pointed out that the calculation was wrong, and Switzerland should have been first! (to which Newsweek replied that the calculation was indeed correct)

Humbleness is one of the things I like about the Finnish character, but you should really let yourself be proud for something sometimes, people!

Oh, and there was indeed an italian reaction (link in italian) to the news, a journalist recommending Newsweek to move their HQ to Helsinki if they liked it so much, and generally complaining that while we think these charts are irrelevant, we are still pissed off for not being at the top.

]]> http://www.balenet.com/2010/08/finland-best-country-in-the-world-and-ashamed-of-it/feed/ 0 http://www.balenet.com/2010/08/new-life-resolution-start-a-family/ http://www.balenet.com/2010/08/new-life-resolution-start-a-family/#comments Sun, 22 Aug 2010 21:43:50 +0000 bale http://www.balenet.com/?p=595

Well, he’s finally here: our baby boy was born on August 9th and (following Finnish tradition) is as yet unnamed!

OK, my first new year resolution didn’t go very far, and partly the reason is that for the last few months I moved my attention to “resolution #2: start an open source project”.

The project is called “Flexo” and is a time tracker application for N900 written in C++/Qt, you can read more about it here. I started it to learn something about the environment in which I work every day (and where I hardly have the chance to get anything concrete done), and also to reacquaint myself with that old passion of mine, programming. It’s been lots of fun and working on it reminded me why I got in this business in the first place.

I was also quite pleased with the tools offered by Nokia for the purpose, although still a bit rough around the edges they are very usable and well designed (and they work on Mac, although you need to jump through a few hoops to set everything up). There is plenty of links and blog posts out there in case you are interested, so I won’t get started here.

I wish I could work on it more, but “new year resolution #3″ (more like “new decade resolution”) is approaching fast and won’t leave me much time to do anything else…

I spent a rainy and grey weekend hacking a small application to help me keep track of time at work. I tend to exceed the regular office hours more often than I should, and I’m not always disciplined enough to mark down all the extra hours I do (which I’m supposed to claim as free time at some point, though that moment never seems to arrive).

The idea is simple: I want to “punch in” when I arrive to work, be aware of how much time I have spent in the day and how much overtime I have collected. I can check out and check in again multiple times during the same day, for example if I go to lunch or continue working from home in the evening (which is sadly the case sometimes)

I mainly did it to learn a bit of Qt, the cross-platform application framework owned by Nokia. It was a pleasant experience, starting from scratch and with my rusty C++ skills it took me two afternoons to put it together. The next step is, of course, getting this to run on the N900.

(note: I lost the screenshots thanks to my sloppy webmastering)

I’m not publishing the code here because it’s, ahem, rather ugly, but I’ll do it at some point.

P.S.: after I started doing this, I realized that Stefan had created a somewhat similar application for the iPhone called FlexTool. Stefan, if you are reading this: I didn’t copy your idea! Although I did add the “checked in” and “checked out” texts after seeing a screenshot of FlexTool.

Inspired by this post on Digital Photography School, I decided to start a “project 365″ this year. In short, I will be posting a photo a day on Flickr in the hope of improving my photographic skills. Let’s see how long I last!

I was drawn to computers in the early 80s, when my father introduced in our household a Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K. All of my friends had a Commodore 64, and we endlessly debated about which one was better (I can admit it now: it was the C64). Later I moved to the Commodore Amiga. Then like now, most of the attraction was the ability to play videogames.

Unlike today’s overbloated videogames industry, most games at the time were made by single individuals, two at most. Thanks to magazines like Zzap64! (known in Italy as Zzap!) I knew them by name and worshipped them like rockstars.

I think that Andrew Braybrook’s 1987 journal chronicling the development of his game “Morpheus” is what made me want to become a professional programmer (you can still read it on-line here). My cousin Massimo, aside from making his own snowboard, had his share of success writing a soccer game for Amiga and Atari ST called “Football Simulation“. It contains one of my two contributions to the videogame world, a box of balls in the options menu (top left corner in the image below).

Here is a list of my favourite game creators from back then, with some links. None of these people, in spite of their talent, seem to have made it big in the multi-billion videogame industry, which is a testament to either their anarchic genius or their inability to adapt.

• Matthew Smith, author of Manic Miner, one of the first computer games I ever played. After his early success he disappeared, apparently to live in a commune in Amsterdam.
• David Crane, co-founder of Activision and creator of the Pitfall! series, Ghostbusters and Little Computer People (inspiration for today’s The Sims!). His current company makes such iPhone games as Arcade Hoops Basketball.
• Andrew Braybrook, author of such classics as Paradroid, Uridium and the aforementioned diary. Nowadays works as a software developer for an insurance company.
• Jeff Minter, whose innovative and psychedelic shoot’em ups never failed to include references to llamas an yaks. His company, Llamasoft, is still active and just recently released a new version of the classic Gridrunner.
• The Bitmap Brothers, with mirrorshades and tons of attitude developed some of the best early Amiga games, like Gods and Speedball. After disbanding in 2003, two of them went on to found Tower Studios, but judging from the website they haven’t produced much since.
• Team 17, still active with the same name and best known for the Worms videogames series. Their Amiga games were impressive both technically and design-wise. Alien Breed was my favourite.

In retrospect, I wonder why I didn’t even try to become a game programmer. I suppose it didn’t look like a “serious enough” job, and by the time I reached employment age there were so many other interesting things to work with, the internet above all. In the end I liked playing games more than writing them.

P.S.: In case you were wondering, my other contribution to the videogame industry is the italian voice acting for Combat Mission – Afrika Korps

I found the image above while going through “The decade in news photographs” photo series on The Big Picture. I quote:

astronomers pointed Hubble at a tiny, relatively empty part of our sky (only a few stars from the Milky Way visible), and created an exposure nearly 12 days long over a four-month period. The result is this amazing image, looking back through time at thousands of galaxies that range from 1 to 13 billion light-years away from Earth. Some 10,000 galaxies were observed in this tiny patch of sky (a tenth the size of the full moon) – each galaxy a home to billions of stars

“Mind-boggling” doesn’t quite begin to describe it. To me it seems obvious that there HAS to be someone in the gazillion planets above. Of course, we may never meet them.

On a different note, I was happy not to see the iPhone pictured as representative of the decade, at least until I saw that Paris Hilton was there.