This started with a youtube video where Joanne Chang of Flour bakery was giving a talk to the Harvard students on the culinary Art of Bakery.
Joanne Chang at Harvard
While watching this, my fascination instantly peaked at leavening or causing the dough or bread to rise by adding a leavening agent like yeast or other ingredients such as emulsifiers, etc. Yeast is a single cellular organism that absorbs or eats the sugar in the mixer and releases c02 as a result. So the air holes you find in bread, for example, is just your bread farting while its baking...
At the end of her talk a student asked how the recopies could be modified to make a vegan version....and from this my latent culinary powers awoke.
I started a pizza experiment to test it out and see what I can learn from this - of baking and see if I could not learn something from the experience..
This pizza had too much yeast, flour and quantity. The dough turned out too thick. Too much cheese and dough. The dough rose too fast and spilled - or over- leavened. I read somewhere that Italian pizza have 00 flour so I tracked that down.
Exhibit 2 - second try
This version came with a better vegetable spread. I noticed the daiya cheese spread didn't exactly work out well, it creates these thin strips of cheese that don't exactly melt.
Exhibit 3 - Mangos and Pineapples
I made this fruity version to sort of change ingredients and to see what a "sweet one" would taste like. It was horrible...tasted sour and like acidic...As you can see, I don't relish using tomato sauce..Also, I haven't yet bought this '00' flour from Italy which i am told is an important ingredient.
Exhibit 4 - Veggies
Tadaaah!...This one speaks for itself.
Exhibit 5 - Tomato
Tasted kind of Dough-ey....Didn't bake long enough. But I made thinner pizza doughs.
