Lately I’ve been experimenting with pizza bianca recipes. This crunchy, tasty pizza crust with a topping of dribbled oil, salt, and fresh rosemary makes a delicious bread accompaniment to any meal. Baked at the last minute and served piping hot, its appetizing allure will disappear fast from the bread basket, so be sure to prepare plenty of dough. Some of your guests will enjoy helping you stretch the dough, and some might ruin it, but the baked results of their botched stretching won’t be inedible. The nice thing about making pizza bianca for your family or friends is the communal cooking opportunity it creates. People like stretching the dough and then sampling their efforts.

My own trials have shown me just how hard it is to make pizza bianca. Too often the baked dough tastes tough or chewy. It’s fine if you stretch it unevenly with some spots baking cracker-thin and others rising to a slight bread consistency. But often I wonder how it’s possible for the same four ingredients—yeast, water, salt, and flour—in more or less the same proportions—to produce such varied results, some not worth serving.

The following aspects of preparing pizza dough may make a difference:

•    Good flour for bread making

•    Kneading time: stick to it even after the dough smooths out. It actually is still hard and needs to be worked over to a softer state. Try ten extra minutes of kneading after the dough has finished absorbing the flour.

•    Patient stretching of the dough; it takes time to fill the cookie sheet; chat, play music, don’t hurry the dough.

•    Bake at a hot temperature till some areas begin to brown: 450º to 475º.

Proportions that work for me:

1 cake of Fleischmann’s yeast (0.6 oz; 17 g) dissolved in 1.5 c warm water (@ 350 ml)
3-4 c all-purpose bread flour with a pinch of salt added

Dissolve the cake or packet of yeast in warm water, then add flour slowly until sticky and clinging to the spoon. Add in the rest of the flour on the work surface until the dough is smooth. Continue kneading it “vigorously” until softer. Rise until double in bulk—three hours is ideal. Push down the dough, divide into two portions and stretch for two cookie sheets. Dribble with extra virgin olive oil, sprinkle with salt of your choice and fresh rosemary leaves. Bake, cut with scissors, serve immediately.

Buon appetito!

Gail Spilsbury, Mangiare Bene