Slight rant: Pizza dough and olive oil.

Hello everyone. I realise other hobby chefs may have had this realisation long ago or had the luck of superior recipes from the get-go, but I did not. I have become the victim of recipes that made a fantastic dish inferior.

For close to fifteen years I have made my own homemade Pizzas from scratch and avoided frozen products except for a few occasions when I was too lazy. Obviously they tasted much better than the industrial products, after some time they were on par or better than many Pizza delivery services. But whatever I tried, I could not replicate what I ate in an Italian Pizzeria or Trattoria.

During this period of time I had tried out several recipes recommended by cooking books and TV chefs and they all included olive oil as part of the formula and most also recommended to use warm water and sugar for the yeast. Who would doubt a core ingredient of Italian cuisine belongs into its most famous dish and is a faster chemical reaction not obviously better?

Turns out my assumptions were dead wrong.

Through sheer coincidence I did discover that the Neapolitan original for pizza dough not only uses no olive oil whatsoever, they also strongly recommend cold water, no sugar and a longer rest period for the dough. In my electrical oven that peaks at 275 C the results have been drastically better than anything I have ever created before. The impact of those two changes has been more drastic than any flour ever had .

Now I asked myself why would cooking book authors and TV chefs do this to me? I suspect It's your usual "Make cooking faster, more convenient and beginner friendly" school of thinking that led to this fallacy.

The warm water and sugar basically put the yeast dough on steroids which negatively affects the end result but makes it available to use more quickly. Olive oil makes the dough easier to transfer into a baking dish without risking tears, but also completely changes the consistency and texture to something much more rubber-like.

I am both glad and mad to have discovered the frivolity. Feel free to share your experiences whether it's with pizza dough or other recipes you discovered that have received a similar treatment and therefore taste worse.

Thanks for listening and good Luck on all future cooking endeavours!

bon appetit