Making “Mozza” Pizza at Home on the grill

Last weekend, I decided it would be fun to try to make pizza at home with the family. It turned out to be a really fun, but exhausting two day long process that included shopping for all the necessary tools and ingredients, the process of making the dough, and final topping and baking the pizzas. I was determined to replicate one of my favorite pizzas, Pizzeria Mozza’s dough. If you aren’t familiar, Pizzeria Mozza is owned by Maria Batali, Nancy Silverton, and Joseph Bastianich. The recipe is actually called “Nancy’s Pizza Dough” and from what I can gather, it is different from your typical pizza dough, because the process is closer to that of baking bread. This is not the actual restaurant recipe, it has been adapted for oven use at home because our ovens can’t get as hot as their specialized pizza ovens. This really meant nothing to me, as I’ve never made bread and I’ve never made pizza dough before. My only hope was to try to follow instructions as carefully as possible. I wanted to share the process, the outcome, and what I learned. And of course, there are pictures – but please remember – this is no foodie blog so the pictures aren’t step by step instruction, just the fun we had and the fruits of our labor. I will, however, include my trials and tribulations for anyone out there that wants to try this for the first time too. (and it helps me remember for next time!)Here goes…

What You’ll Need:

-Pizza Stone. I bought mine at Sur La Table. There were two brands, Sur La Table and Emile Henry and both were $49.95. I thought the Sur La table one looked more like what I’ve seen before than the red glazed Emile Henry so I went with that. I’m sort of wishing I went with the Emile Henry now since I read a blog somewhere that someone loved theirs, and I saw a little bit of cracking on my stone since I’ve washed it. side note: is this normal?

-Pizza Peel. I didn’t actually buy this because I thought it might just be for looks. (And where the heck was I going to put it?) I think I’ll be picking one up for next time. We had a hell of a time trying to figure out how to get the pizza on and off the grill. We ended up using a baking sheet that has no lip on it, but if we forgot to put more flour or let it sit too long, it wouldn’t move and the pizza would get misshapen as we tried to nudge it with various spatulas. The handle would have been nice too – both my husband and I slightly burned ourselves. Not to worry though, it’s just a flesh wound. I think the handle is also good for getting a better jerking motion so that the pizza slides better. My husband doesn’t think it’s necessary, but I’m a big believer in having the right tools to make my life easier.

-Kitchen Scale. This recipe calls for the ingredients to be weighed in ounces. I’m not a great baker, but I do know baking is all about exact measurements – so I followed this recipe closely.

-A standing mixer with the dough hook. Yes, you’re going to have to go through all your cupboards to find that weird attachment that looks like Captain Hook’s hook.

-About 8 hours of prep and cooking time. Maybe you should add in 2-4 hours of driving around town going to different grocery stores and kitchen stores to that too. It takes about 5 hours to work with the dough properly, and the recipe makes 6 pizzas, so if you’re going one pizza at a time, it takes some time to make your pizza circles and get your toppings on. And if you want great pizza, you have to have quality toppings – so for me, that meant the softest mozzarella I could find (I really wanted burrata, but couldn’t find it), and I picked up some excellent sausage in both mild and spicy at a local Italian Pizzeria and restaurant called Sabatinos.

-Enough counter space to make a huge mess. Be prepared for flour all over the place. Maybe you should add nice bottle of wine here…it will help with clean up time. Also I would invest in one of those silpat baking mats to cover the counter or whatever work space you’re using. I used a bamboo cutting board and put flour all over it, and there’s still flour and dough stuck to it. Parchment paper may also be a good idea.

-While you’re getting parchment paper, be sure to get some plastic wrap and kitchen twine if you’ve run out. You’ll need it to cover your dough.

-Some clean linen kitchen towels to cover your dough at times.

-An oven or a grill. In our case, we wanted to use the grill because it gets too hot in the house with the oven on, plus it seemed like more fun doing it outside. With the grill, my husband read that most people who put the stone directly on the grill got a cracked stone or completely burnt pizza on the bottom. Our solution was to use a chafing dish pan to elevate the stone off the grill and allow air to circulate beneath it like an oven. I would be curious to see how the pizzas turn out without doing that.

-Ingredients for the dough

22 ounces of warm tap water. Apparently your yeast won’t activate unless the water is warm, like a baby’s bath. You don’t want it too hot or the yeast goes bad.
1⁄2 ounce (1 Tbsp) compressed yeast or 1 tsp active dry yeast. I bought “Platinum Superior Baking Yeast by Red Star” because honestly it had the nicest packaging and it said “a premium instant yeast with dough enhancers.” Sold. Nothing but the best for my Mozza pizza.
26 ounces unbleached bread flour, plus more as needed. I went with “King Arthur Bread Flour.” It looked fancier.
1 1/2 tsp wheat germ. This ingredient drove me insane. I could not find it at my local Ralph’s and had to go to Mother’s Market because I knew I had purchased it there before way back when I was trying to feed my first child healthy food. I now have two children…that just doesn’t happen as much. After going through every aisle twice, I finally found it over by the oatmeal and cereals. Incidentally, they also sold King Arthur Bread Flour which made me feel good.
1 1⁄2 tsp barley malt or mild-flavored honey, such as clover or wildflower. I used clover honey because I don’t even know where you begin to look for barley malt.
1⁄2 ounce (1 Tbsp) kosher salt. If you can’t find this, you shouldn’t even attempt this.
Olive oil, grapeseed oil, or another neutral flavored oil, such as canola oil, for greasing the bowl. I used good old EVOO, as Rachael Ray calls it…

-Ingredients for the tomato sauce. It seemed like some of the mozza pizza recipes I found online didn’t use a sauce. I found one site that said if there was sauce, the Mozza chefs used a can of crushed tomatoes, two cloves of garlic, dried basil, some olive oil, and salt and pepper. I bought San Marzano crushed tomatoes and threw everything I just listed into my food processor, except I used fresh torn basil. It turned out great and smelled so fresh.

-Toppings. Use whatever your heart desires, or whatever you’ve got on hand. We tried a basic Margherita, Pineapple and Prosciutto, Mild Sausage, and Spicy Sausage with fresh tomatoes.

So once you’ve assembled everything you need, now you’ve got to psych yourself up to start the dough. Be prepared to have to do a little bit, let it sit, come back, do some more, let it sit, do some more, come back, let it sit, and on and on…You can’t just set it out and let it go. It needs to be handled a lot for the bread to rise. I won’t re-list the instructions, but I will go over some things that I was just unsure about in the process. Get the directions HERE and print them out if you haven’t already.

Now for my notes and tips:

-I had no idea what pizza dough was supposed to look like or feel like, but I think it came out pretty good. This dough was very “runny” when I handled it at first, but the more it sat and rose, the more it became like dough. I was afraid that I hadn’t added enough flour for it to “pull away from the bowl” at first. I just added enough flour so that it started to almost created large bands that were pulling towards the center and let my mixer go for ten minutes. It was probably 1/4 cup more. The first time I spilled the dough out, it was like the blob, spreading out all over my cutting board. It was sticking to all of my fingers and going everywhere. I tried to work as quickly as possible and get as much dough as I could back into the bowl.

-When its time to separate your dough into six parts for each pizza, the instructions say to make a “taut” ball. Again, I was trying to carefully follow instructions and squeezed the dough balls tightly, so that I heard and felt air coming out of the ball. This didn’t seem good to me. Our pizza dough came out chewy and crispy, but did not rise very well and get those big puffy bubbles like at Mozza. I’m thinking it’s because I squeezed all the air out!

-Reading different recipes around the internet, it seems like you want your grill to be as hot as possible. We have a viking grill that can get up to 700 degrees. I think most ovens and grills get up to 500 degrees, which is what this recipe was made for. Our pizzas cooked at about 600-650 degrees in four minutes, but seemed to be flatter. We found that at about 500-550, with the pizza cooking at about 8-10 minutes, the pizza had more time to rise and was a little thicker.

-Put your pizza stone in the grill before you turn on your grill/oven and let it heat up with your grill for an hour. If you put the stone in after the grill is already hot and let it sit, it’s more likely to crack.

-At a friend’s suggestion, I’m going to try semolina flour and/or cornmeal on my prep area next time to see if that helps the pizza slide off easier onto the stone, and also I think it changes up the flavor up a bit.

-Cook your sausage or any toppings that need to be cooked first and have everything ready to go on the pizza to just be melted into the cheese. We did some sausage grilled and then sliced, and also some sausage taken out of its’ casing and rolled into meatballs and baked in the oven. I felt the oven method was much less dry and tasted better.

-While this was a great family activity and everyone loved putting on their own toppings, I don’t think I’ll be using this particular recipe for a pizza party. I just wouldn’t have any energy left to clean up in time to entertain non family guests. Also, I’m not sure at which point in the process of making the dough you would want to freeze it if you were preparing ahead of time. And I’m not sure once you thawed it out if you need to re-work it and let it rise again or get to a certain temperature before you start. If anyone knows, let me know! In summary, the pizzas turned out awesome; I just want to aim for airier, fluffier crust next time. I also think I’ll be buying a few more cheeses to experiment with, and I’ll start the dough WAY earlier than I did last time. Everyone was starving waiting around for the dough the last hour. If you try this out at home, let me know how it goes!!! OR if you’ve done this and know how to get those amazing bubbles like at the restaurant, please leave your tips in the comments! THANKS!