You may recall that at the start of the pandemic fracas I realized that if worst came to worst, I'd regret not having eaten more Papa Murphy's pizzas. I know, I know, shallow! But rectification was in order. Though the local Papa Murphy's has curbside pickup, I decided to make my own. I've baked our daily bread for decades, so crusts would be a snap. A bit of looking on the WWW revealed some actual Copy-Cat recipes, but the whole of the Papa Murphy's menu is on-line, with ingredients listed. Easy peasy!
There are 15 different pizzas on the PM menu, and as of last week, we've tried them all at ~one per week. Oh, what a delicious delight it's been! Lots of meat combos, lots of chicken combos, and a couple of veggie choices. PM has several style of crusts, but our preference has long been for a thin crust, so that's how I made them.
In the effort to more closely match the thin crust, research revealed that PM uses bread flour. Wha..? I'd never heard of such a thing! My Mom baked all her life, and there was never anything but all-purpose white flour in her kitchen. Though I am unquestionably my Mother's Daughter, I have added whole wheat flour to my kitchen. Having found out about bread flour at the beginning of the pandemic, and with Ron doing our grocery shopping, it was not a time to start a hunt for bread flour. In fact, though I never completely ran out of flour, there was a run on it similar to the TP run. Baking became a stay-at-home thing and flour disappeared from the shelves across the nation. Yeah, I took what I could get. In the course of that, though, Ron came home with a flour called white whole wheat flour. Wha....? I'd never heard of such a thing! In fact, as far as I was concerned, it was a contradiction in terms! More research was necessary. Here's a short summary of my new and improved flour knowledge, mostly from www.kingarthur.com:
Bread flour: milled from "hard spring wheat", it has a higher protein content, more gluten, and gives a higher rise and an airier, chewier texture. Can be white or whole wheat.
Whole wheat flour: milled from "hard RED wheat", it's what you get if the bag says just "whole wheat".
White whole wheat flour: milled from "hard WHITE spring wheat", it has less color, and I've found it results in a much finer texture. It's whole wheat flour.
All-purpose flour: milled from "hard red winter and spring wheat", with the brown covering of the wheat removed, then refined and bleached. Also available unbleached. My Mom's flour.
I didn't choose to delve into the spring/winter/red/white/hard/soft part any further, but when "things" settle down, I'll do some more research, hie myself to the store in person for a look-see, and start trying things out.
Our Fry's supermarket regularly has the white whole wheat flour, so I've used it quite a bit. After some experimenting, I found that a mix of all purpose and white whole wheat flours allowed me to replicate a PM pizza close enough to perfection.
I recently decided to try what I perceived to be another contradiction in terms: grilled pizza. What could possibly keep the dough from falling through the grill??? Ron's our grill master, so I gave him the instructions I found on the internet: high heat, short time. We enjoyed beginner's luck and the crust turned out PERFECT! The toppings are loaded on the first grilled side, then put back in to grill the second side and heat the toppings.
Our beginner's luck crust. Love those grill marks!
Back on the grill, headed to deliciousness!
The second time we tried it, what I imagined to be a problem happened: the dough fell through the grill! Ron was able to rescue it adequately enough that it was edible though not pretty, and the toppings were fine.
I thought about the fix, and realized the white whole wheat flour I'd been using for oven baked pizza was too fine for the grill. Next time, I'll use regular whole wheat. I'm not sure why the first crust worked, but I've been mixing flours based on their availability, and probably had more whole wheat in the mix to begin with.
The "Well, sort of!" part in the title means this: Nope, we're not close to being done with pizza. I've already started my second go-through of the menu. Life could be too short to deprive myself of pizza ever again!
You can't buy happiness, but you can buy pizza.
It's kind of the same thing.
-----Various
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