When hosting a relaxed gathering, few things go down better than homemade pizza. In her bestselling cook book ‘The Kitchen Book’, Ella Risbridger shares her crowd-pleasing pizza recipe for a quick-rising dough made with beer
IMAGE: YUKI SUGIURA
Here’s the vibe of this one: a party where the true centre, as at all good parties, is the kitchen. An afternoon-to-evening party, a day-to-night kind of vibe. Saturday, late afternoon, maybe?
A bunch of people – maybe four? six? – will come over! You can eat pizza and listen to records! You can make a jug of rosemary palomas, the perfect pizza-day cocktail! You will dance in the kitchen with your best friends and eat unbelievable hot, crispy, complex-dough-simple-topping, oh-my-god- did-you-actually-make-this-yourself pizza with your hands! And instead of dessert you can get a block of good chocolate, and break it up with your hands onto a nice wooden chopping board, and you can eat the good chocolate with the last people at the party – your very best friends – while you play Mario Kart!
(And listen: if Mario Kart has long ago left your wheelhouse, may I recommend getting back in the swing of it? It is, quite literally, fun for all the family.)
People will drift in and out; you will sling pizza about like a pizzaiolo, you will feed between four and, say, twelve people in this way. Maybe sixteen with sides, but I think that’s your limit: more than that and you will start to feel like a drudge. If pizza ever starts to feel like a burden, you’ve gone wrong somewhere: pizza should only, and always, be a joy. Pizza party! Even the phrase sparks a kind of pre-teen pre-snark gladness. You can make some big salads in advance; you can make the rosemary palomas in advance; you can have a bunch of kitchen paper about. And this dough is very fun to make, and easy to play with.
People who like to talk about pizza dough will tell you that the best kind of pizza dough is slow-fermented, at least overnight, and often in the fridge. Some of these people even make a kind of pre-ferment – hideously known as the ‘poolish’ – to, like, double down on the flavour. The worst thing about this is not even the name: the worst part about this is that they are right. The slowness of the rise does give a better flavour. But come on. I am still not a slow-rise person! If I want to make pizza now, I want pizza now, not in three days. If I think I might want pizza in three days, and I have to serve my future self like a serf at this time, I will be annoyed; and in direct consequence of that annoyance I know I will not even want the beautiful slow-fermented pizza in three days. It will sit in the fridge for perhaps one week, becoming feral, and when it edges alarmingly close to sentience I will have to put it in the bin and be cloaked in shame.
So how to get the big fermenty flavours without three days? How to do it in three hours?
The answer, obviously, is beer. I am not a big beer drinker, so I’m probably not being fair when I say that this is the best possible thing to do with a can of beer. Even for beer fans, though, it’s pretty great. I use a low-ABV, super-hoppy thing, and the flavour is never boozy: it just kickstarts everything, brings out all the dark maltiness you might expect in a slower-rise crust, balances the sugar and the rich good umami of proper sourdough bread. Just…quicker.
I borrowed the two-flours trick from the pizza chef Nicola Jackson-Jones and master baker Dan Lepard. It is hard to innovate in the pizza space (as the entrepreneurs say) without knowing that you are sitting in the palm of giants: people for whom pizza is their life. Pizza, for me, is a Saturday afternoon, and I am extremely grateful to the real pizza people for the groundwork they do for us, the merely extremely hungry. And I am hungry just writing about this. Make it! Make it now, for tonight, and call your friends.
NB I make my dough in a stand mixer, and I truly recommend you do the same. It makes it extremely painless.
Frying-Pan Beer-Can Pizza
Ingredients
- 400 g strong white bread flour
- 150 g plain flour, plus extra for rolling out
- 1 tsp instant yeast
- 330 g room-temperature hoppy lager
- 20 g olive oil
- 2 tsp fine salt
- 400 g tin chopped tomatoes
- 200 ml red wine
- 4 anchovies
- 2 garlic cloves
- 3 sprigs rosemary
- 2-3 balls mozzarella
- 20 g basil, leaves picked
- other toppings as desired: cured meat, roasted squash, blackberries, pesto, mushrooms, olives, extra olive oil to drizzle, etc.
Instructions
- Mix the flours and yeast together in the bowl of a stand mixer. With the motor running, and the dough hook on, slowly add the beer and oil. (I mix them together in a jug and weigh them for accuracy.) (On a wet day you may need 2-3 tablespoons more strong white bread flour.)
- Sprinkle in the salt as the dough comes together. Don't be tempted to add it earlier, as it will kill the yeast. Knead on a medium setting for about 10 minutes. It should be supple and lovely: if you press a finger in, it should spring back.
- Rest the dough for about an hour somewhere warm. I have inexplicably – get a life! – spent some time discovering that the perfect warming temperature is about 26°C. I do not need you to be this specific! Nobody needs to be this specific! Just normal warm is fine. On top of a radiator with a tea towel over; in the airing cupboard; on the back of an AGA (imagine); in the oven turned on low; in a sunny spot on a hot day.
- After about an hour, the dough should have doubled in size. Pull the dough out of the bowl and punch it flat. Pick it up and fold it over itself: stretch it a little bit, then fold it in half. Turn the dough by 90 degrees, and stretch and fold again. Repeat until you have stretched and folded every side. Back to the warm place! Leave it for…1 hour? 4 hours? How long is really up to you.
- After the second rest, cut the dough into 8 equal-sized balls. Using your hand like a claw-cage around each one (as if your hand is one of those claws in the grabber machines on a pier), roll the balls on the kitchen counter: this increases their surface tension and makes them tighter. Back to the warm place, this time as 12 balls of dough, for 1 hour.
- In this hour, you can either make the palomas and the salads, or you can make the pizza sauce. I like to do half my pizzas with pesto from a fancy shop and half with tomato sauce.
- Pre-heat the oven as hot as it will go: this is 240°C on mine, but your mileage may vary.
- Tear the mozzarella. I would recommend, also, cooking any toppings that might leak water: mushrooms, squash, courgettes, etc. I just roast them in the pre-heating oven with a bit of salt and oil.
- Take a pizza ball, and make it into a pizza base. Roll it in flour, then play with it until it's round and the same size as your skillet base. You can do this with a rolling pin, but it's easiest in my opinion to simply stretch it out with your hands. To keep the shape and keep it really thin, I actually stretch the dough ball out over a Pyrex bowl. I sort of tug and pull it until it's circular, then use the bowl to help.
- While you're stretching the dough, heat a splash of olive oil in an ovenproof skillet. High heat. Slip the dough into the hot oil, still over the heat. It will sizzle! This is good. This gets the crispy base that is so often missing from oven pizza. Quickly spoon on some of the tomato sauce and sprinkle over a light scattering of mozzarella. You will add more mozzarella when it comes out of the oven: this is simply the initial cheesing.
- Into the oven with both the pan and the pizza. People will have come into the kitchen now, lured by the scent of frying things and cheese. They can have the first one. Ten minutes? (In this time, I stretch another base, so it's ready to go.)
- When the cheese is melted and the edges crispy, take the pan out of the oven. Slip the pizza onto a serving board; add more mozzarella, which will melt in the heat, and a handful of fresh basil leaves.
- Hand to someone immediately, tell them to slice it into quarters and hand it round, while you repeat for every ball of dough. Do not forget to save some quarters for yourself in the kitchen. Do not neglect to feel as amazed by your own pizza skill as everyone else.
Notes
The Kitchen Book by Ella Risbridger, 4th Estate, £26, photography by Yuki Sugiura
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