Perfecting the Pizza

Something interesting occurred making the deep dish pizza crust (link to the right) Friday evening. By upping the proportion of corn meal I found I didn’t need quite as much oil to lubricate the dough. This is certainly a factor of surface area. A few drops of water in your palm is all it takes to wet a rock the size of a cup measure, but quite a bit more than that to wet a cup measure full of sand. Corn meal granules being so much bigger than flour granules, it takes a good deal less oil to coat them. This was a nice surprise, since I’d been thinking the dough was a little rich. It’s also still a bit tough, which I’ll compensate for this Friday by upping the percentage of corn meal still further. Most good corn bread recipes call for at least a 50-50 mix, corn meal to AP flour, why shouldn’t my corn meal pizza crust be something similar? Right now my proportion is about 33-66. Beefing up the corn meal should accomplish my twin goals of increased tenderness and further reduced fat. I’ll let you know how it goes.