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Pre-baking your Pizza Crusts

The pizza dough resting.

Quite a delight, when you have ready made pizzas at your disposal whenever you are ready to change the menu, dig in to a hot and crispy pizza, entertain friends and just bum out on your sofa when you are so dead tired to cook dinner. What else can be better than that.

Ready made pizza crusts may not be gourmet, i worked in a Fine dining italian restaurant where the oven is lined with Italian stones, 5 minutes is all it takes to bake the foccacias, the pizza crusts, and calzones. Well, that maybe the best way to savor your slow rise pizza dough, this thing you have been guarding and saving ( precariously fermenting in the farthest part of your freezer or chiller because everyone else is dying to throw them but you). If you have a very good pizza crust, you will not wait too long to bake them, neither will you dream ever to pre-bake them!!!!

The best way to savor that fermented flavor is to bake them fresh, but i have not a minute of luxury to always start from scratch when my taste buds are begging for a pizza, so never mind. So here it is, once again, if you have read my previous posts here, (i suggest that you do start at the oldest if you really want to learn baking breads that seriously), i use a sponge, biga, poolish, levain whatever you want to call it, they are all the same to me.
I prebaked the crusts to a pale off white color, not wanting to brown them just yet. This process enables me to freeze the crusts in bulk, stop the fermentation at the same time, and voila, always have a pretty good vehicle for the fresh green peppers and tomatoes i am harvesting from our garden. Yup! My very first tomatoes and peppers. goodbye white flies!

I used 350F, baked them for only 5 minutes, cooled on racks and then wrapped in foil and plastic for freezing.


You can bake it like a foccacia, light golden brown and serve with soups and pasta dishes.

Start with the dough, i like resting the rounded doughs inside the chiller.



Roll and relax, then pre-bake on a pizza stone.











STACK THEM UP ON A COOLING RACK.

baking the foccacia on a pizza stone, make sure the stone is very hot!!!











Enjoy!!! Topping is olive oil, garlic, and dried rosemary leaves.
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