Like me, you might be thinking, "How good can Baking Steel's 72-hour pizza dough mix be, coming out of a package and not requiring the use of a Poolish, BIGA, or sourdough starter?" Answer? FREAKIN' AMAZING! For 5 previous pizzas, I used Marc Vetri's excellent 72-hour Neapolitan Pizza with 70% hydration pizza dough recipe from Vetri's terrific book, Mastering Pizza, which is tailored for the home oven AND produced a wonderful pizza dough. But I had to create a Poolish, measure separate ingredients carefully, use water at various cold temperatures ranging from 45 to 55 degrees, and work with VERY VERY sticky dough that loved to cling to my fingers and wooden cutting board where I initially divided the dough and later formed pizza dough balls. Baking Steel's 72-hour pizza dough mix, in contrast, produced 3 lovely pizza dough balls (two 11.8 ounces, one 11.3 ounces) that were INCREDIBLY EASY TO WORK WITH at ever stage of dough preparation. Attached are images of my pizza dough journey from Day 1 (after mixing the room temperature water into the all-in-one pizza dough mix), Day 2 (when the risen dough was ready to cold ferment inside the fridge), Day 3 (when I formed the dough balls), and Day 4 (eating day). This Day 4 photo is of the finished pizza, which I baked using ConvecBake for 5.5 minutes on the bottom rack on my Modernist Cuisine Special [Limited] Edition Baking Steel that I had preheated, also using ConvecBake, to 545 degrees though my oven only goes up to 500, before I transferred the pizza to the topmost oven rack onto my Original Baking Steel (which had preheated to 520 degrees) and switched the oven from ConvecBake to "Broil" to brown/finish the pizza from the top. Despite the perfect crust this 72-hour pizza dough mix created, I must admit to TWO (2) fundamental baking mistakes I wish to share for you to avoid: one error was fixable, the other mistake was not. Bad news first -- the unfixable mistake: I added 1 teaspoon salt to the pizza sauce I created based on Amazon's AI's recipe recommendation that instructed me to add salt to the tomatoes. This is actually 2 mistakes in one: first, I trusted Amazon's Rufus/Alexa AI, out of laziness, instead of taking the time to look up & use a better sauce recipe from my terrific small, but terrific pizza cookbook library; secondly, I should never have added salt anyway to any pizza sauce recipe (and some good books instruct to add salt as well, not just AI) because one gets plenty of salt from the different cheeses and, in my case, pepperoni slices that I added onto the pizza (see photo of pizza). Now for the American "happy ending" fixable mistake: In launching the pizza, a small, but meaningful, part of my newly-launched pizza accidentally landed on the front part of the Modernist Cuisine baking steel, like a sagging lip that lay partially at the edge of the baking steel and lay partially on the edge of the bottom oven rack. Now pay close attention: I almost made the mistake of trying to fix the problem right away by using my pizza peel to IMMEDIATELY scoop up/slide back the pizza dough -- NO, DON'T DO THIS -- but I remembered a YouTube I saw that said -- NO, DON'T DO THIS -- so I closed the oven, let the pizza bake for 2 minutes only, THEN I used my wonderful iLfornino 14" perforated 304-grade stainless steel pizza peel to gently lift the front lip off the bottom oven rack, and slid the pizza backwards fully onto the Modernist Cuisine Special Edition baking steel. As you can see from the photo, the almost perfectly round shape I had created & launched using Baking Steel's wonderful 14" Cherry Wood pizza peel, remained intact. So remember this next time you partially mislaunch part of your pizza dough off the baking steel: let the dough cook a bit and AFTER it is partially-cooked-but-still-pliable (2 minutes at most), gently lift and push back the dough onto the baking steel. What I also discovered is that I don't care as much for Mutti's whole peeled tomatoes as I do for Cento Organic "San Marzano" whole peeled tomatoes, that remain my favorite Italian tomatoes thus far. In terms of flavor, for ME, Mutti was a little less good than Biana DiNapoli, though it's hard to say because of my mistake of adding salt to the pizza sauce. I will give Mutti tomatoes another shot in a week or two. Bottom line: the crust earned an A++ and far exceeded my expectation for what a pizza dough mix can do without requiring a Poolish, BIGA, sourdough starter, etc. etc. etc. Simply outstanding....
