Pizza Mastery: Part 1

Intermittent fasting (IF) has numerous benefits, but one of my favourite is the flexibility to down large meals.

Today, I show you the wonderful world of IF Leangains style, with the help of Pizza.

Flexibility

When I say flexibility, I mean psychology flexibility. I can basically satisfy whatever cravings I have whenever I please. Having a kind of ‘all-or-nothing’ personality, I find that a single massive meal of X food will kill that craving for months to come.

The Pizza

I love pizza (who doesn’t), and I’ve had my fair share of great pizzas.

However, pizza was always treated as an “unhealthy” food to be enjoyed only on rare occasions. While I think it wise to keep that mentality [1], I wanted to see if I could make great-tasting pizza that still fit within my macronutritional boundaries (and hence possible to consume regularly if I so pleased).

I wanted to make it with fresh ingredients as far as possible, and wanted to do everything from scratch. I also wanted it had to have adequate protein.

Since this was also the first time attempting real pizza from scratch, I turned to my favourite food writer, J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, for some great tips and recipes.

**Recipes used (all from J. Kenji Lopez-Alt):
- Cold Fermented Pizza Dough
- New York Style Pizza Sauce
- The Broiler-Skillet Method

The Procedure

First, I had to make the dough. I followed the recipe to a T, halving the recipe above and then letting it sit in the fridge fermenting for 6 days.

While I was waiting for that, I made the pizza sauce. Again, trusting the wisdom of Kenji, I decided on his New York Style Pizza Sauce.

The recipe called for fresh oregano and basil. I didn’t have any of that fancy stuff (don’t forget, I’m a computer science guy, not a cook), so I settled for my good old 2-year-old Mixed Herbs.

Even with the insult of generic dried herbs, the recipe still produced a wonderful result with a level of simplicity that ensures I’ll never buy bottled pizza sauce ever again.

Here it is cooking:

And here is the final product:

That would chill in the fridge while the dough took its time to grow.

I also chopped up 400g of chicken, and marinated it in a bag with some paprika, barbecue seasoning, and some garlic salt, for about 24 hours.

When it came time to retrive my dough. It looked like this:

Already it emitted a sort of alcohol-y fragrance that’s hard to describe. However, the main goal of going through that trouble was to create a wonderful pizza texture. I was more than eager to discover the results.

I divided it into 2, and set it into 2 bowls for a final 2-hour rise at room temperature:

I went for a workout, came back, and then shaped them to size. I then started pre-frying the chicken:

Finally, it was time to finish off the process. To achieve the desired result (great texture especially) I would employ Kenji’s skillet-broiler method.

For me, this involved slightly browning the pizza dough on a skillet, while topping it with the ingredients. The dough then went into my grill, which allowed the ingredients on top to char and cook. Finally, it would return to the skillet to blacken and rise.

Here are the results (click on image to enlarge):

The Macronutritional Breakdown

Cold Ferment Dough (as per recipe): 1000kcal, 20g protein
400g Chicken Breast: 400kcal, 80g protein
Pizza Sauce: 300kcal
200g Full-Fat Mozzarella: 700kcal, 50g protein
Misc additions (dusting flour, oil spray, etc): 100kcal

Total Calories ≈ 2,500kcal, 150g protein

Obviously, protein could easily be bumped up by adding more meat. But the current protein content of 150g protein is respectable enough.

Commentary

The dough was excellent. Despite it being wafer thin in the centre, it was crunchy on the (charred) base, and not soggy at all. The surrounding crust was crunch and a little airy, but not as fluffy as I wanted it.

The ingredients were top notch. The marinated chicken paired wonderfully with the fatty mozerella, and the pizza sauce provided a hint of sweetness. More salt in the chicken would have complemented the sweetness of the sauce beautifully, and I’m thinking of some combination of either salami, ham or prociutto to go with another attempt. Alternatively, I may go for a mega seafood extravaganza.

The hardest part was working with the dough. Being an inexperience hand, I was very clumsy with the dough, and had to use copious amounts of extra flour to prevent it from sticking while I worked with it. That also explains the mis-shapenness of the dough.

Still, this shows how the chef is beholden to his recipe, and how a good recipe can allow even the most mediocre of chefs to produce a high quality meal.

It was a great learning (and eating) experience, and I’ll soon be ready for another whack at this.

The next round:
- Ferment for 4 instead of 6 days.
- Study the ary of shaping pizza dough
- Try some different ingredients
- Try to push down the fat while maintaining the protein

To be continued…

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[1] – Just a phisolophy of mine that if one can draw pleasure from “regular” foods, then all the more sweeter the taste of “special” foods when they do come.

It’s also my philosophy to avoid wheat products as best I can, for potential reasons of heart health.

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Tagged as: food, health, pizza