WOOD FIRED PIZZA COOKING - GARLIC BREAD

Glorious Garlic Flat Bread Pizza

This is one of those great appetisers and time buying (ie: stress free crowd cooking) for anticipation of the greatest wood fired pizza’s to come when cooking for your family or a crowd with your wood fired oven, I say oven because I cook every thing in our wood oven, slow braised dishes to scrambled eggs to wood fired roasts, tandoori chicken, Yorkshire puddings and of course THE best wood fired pizzas and breads !

I have a great dough recipe I learned in the trade that allows you to prove the dough for 24 hours in the fridge, yes proving in the fridge.  This gives the dough a better texture and flavour as the slow prove in 3-6 degrees improves the flavour.  This in my world also gives me more freedom of time, as when we through a pizza or wood fired dinner party it really can be quite involved when offering all your guest 20 or so choices of ingredients, this we gave navigated with a great pizza bar of ingredients, all we do is roll out the dough, place them on semolina dusted wood paddles (lots of them) and say Wahoo Go For It, Build Your Own.  The only disadvantage is when a pizza dough base is overloaded with fillings it is not so easy to place in the oven or turn!  Hence my Dad’s overloaded pizza creations 🤣

Best Dough Recipe

(six portions)

500g 00 caputo flour (Italian)

15g yeast

10g Himalayan sea salt 

50g Olive oil

320g room temperature water

Place the flour, yeast, salt, olive oil and water in a large bowl or mixer with a dough hook and combine together, at this point I like to turn out and knead manually for the next 10 minutes, but you can leave this mix with a dough hook in the mixer for 7 minutes.  I love working with dough I find kneading very satisfying how the sticky dough becomes smooth and elasticised.

You can divide the dough in to six or leave whole and place in a tray or bowl covered in the fridge to slow prove for 24 hours, even up to 48 hours!  When ready to use bring the dough out and leave for one hour to come up to room temperature before rolling out.  

Garlic Butter

250g butter room temperature 

1 whole blue garlic chopped

1 small bunch fresh parsley chopped

Mix together and generously spread over the pizza dough cook and enjoy.