The Perfect Pizza By Heston Blumenthal - Recipe Needed

Thanks very much for the site and especially the Blumenthal recipes, however do you / does anyone have the full recipe i.e. ingredient and method, of the Perfect Pizza?

Cheers if you do! Would love to try this out at home.

Hi James, here is a rough recipe, transcribed from the programme, but as this is not from the horses mouth as it were I suggest we keep trying to find it . . .

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Part 1: The Base:

Start with flour designed for pizza making, or one with a high protein content, e.g. 12grams/12%

350g Pizza Flour
195g cold water with:
1/2 tsp malt syrup

Add the water mixture to the flower in a mixing bowl.
After 4mins, should be a quite dry lump.
Leave to rest for 15mins. It should then become more tacky and elastic

Place it back into the mixer with:
1tsp salt
7g fast action bread yeast

For another 4mins of mixing

-------- The Previous Day! - Now, add "pre fermented dough" made from about 1/3rd of the above ingredients, but 24hrs before.
(1/3rd = 117g Pizza Flour - 65g cold water with - 1/6 tsp malt syrup - 1/3 tsp salt - 2 1/3g fast action bread yeast) --------

Add these 2 lumps of dough into the mixer, and mix together on low speed for another 4mins

Take the pizza, and form into dough balls with hands, approx 150g per ball (which i make to be enough for 4 balls/pizzas)

Leave the formed balls to rest on an oiled tray, with enough space left for them to double in size
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Part 2: The Sauce:

45 large cherry tomatoes on the vine (hot/cold water dip to remove skin)
Take half, and scoop out the seeds into halves. Lay on a backing tray cut side up, with a drizzle of olive oil
2 large cloves of garlic
2 fresh bay leaves
20 fresh thyme sprigs
1tsp unrefined caster sugar

Place a slice of garlic and bay leaf in each tomato half
Scatter over the thyme
Season with salt, crushed black pepper and caster sugar

Put in the Oven, on at 110 °C, for 4hours. Turn over half way through
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Part 3: Tomato Toping:

Take the other half of the tomatoes, and cut into 1/8ths
place in a sieve, and sprinkle with salt and leave for 1/2 an hour. This will draw out the juice.

Place the tomatoes and their juice in a pressure cook, brought up to pressure for 12 mins
After 12 mins, remove from the heat and allow to cool a little before the lid is removed.

Reduce this liquid for 5mins on medium heat, so that it wont make the base soggy
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Part 4: Finishing And Adding The Toppings:

Stretch out the pizza dough balls, but no bigger than the size of the pan base (see later)

Work quickly, so that the base does not become soggy.
Leave at least a 1 inch gap around the edge.

Spread the tomato sauce on the base.

Add the oven baked tomato halves (remove the herbs and garlic first)

125g buffalo mozzarella

Tear this into pices - add generously

4 fresh basil leaves (per pizza) at its best if cooked quickly

Drizzle extra virgin olive oil generously

Sprinkle on smoked sea salt (noidea where to get this)

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Part 5: How To Bake:

Have a metal handled heavy cast iron pan ready, place the pan onto a hot plate to preheat it, then when ready, place it upside down, near to the grill, with the base of the pizza matching the size of the pan base. Let this get as hot as it possibly can

Slide the pizza onto the hot pan base

Cook for approx 2 mins, watching carefully. A grill/pan and the heat/nearness to grill will all vary, and effecting cooking time.
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Hope this helps

Cookie

wow! thanks Cookie! this is exactly what I am looking for! Well you can gues what I am going to be doing Thursday (haha with a little prep Wednesday) . . . I love Pizza, and this Neopolitan style is my favourite, now I just need a heavy iron pan that can go in the oven . . . .

Thanks A Lot!

Thanks Cookie! It seems just about right . . .good enough to go on the web site recipe under the video to help other people out, thanks for finding this!

Admin

Thanks Cookie . . . I guess I might be having Pizza this week as well!!

I got off to a slow start this morning. Temperatures in the Dallas area dropped from about 80 degrees yesterday to 30 degrees this morning and I had to bring in my potted basil and thyme plants to salvage them. It also took me multiple viewings of the video to see exactly what Blumenthal was doing with the dough.

I believe you made an error in the amount of flour. Also, you did not account for the preferment in the total formula. The preferment represents about 1/3 of the basic dough as made in the video. If my math was correct, I get the following total formula after adding in the preferment and doing the conversions of volumes to grams:

100%, Flour (350 g. + 116.7 g. = 466.67 g.)
55.7%, Water (195 g. + 65 g. = 260 g.)
1%, Malt (1/2 t. + 0.17 t. = 0.67 t. = 4.69 g.)
1.59%, Salt (1 t. + 1/3 t. = 1.33 t. = 7.42 g.)
2%, Yeast (7 g. + 2.33 g. = 9.33 g.)
Total dough weight = 748.11 g.
Dough ball weight = 150 g.
Number of dough balls = 748.11/150 = 5

I assumed that the malt syrup is non-diastatic (because of the short fermentation times), that the salt used is regular table salt (not Kosher), and that the yeast is instant dry yeast (because it was not re-hydrated in water).

Actually, I think Blumenthal did a creditable job with the dough preparation. I am talking here onlly about his technique, not whether his dough captures the authentic Neapolitan experience. He uses a preferment that is similar to the dough into which it is to be incorporated, which ensures the same hydration in the final dough, and he uses an autolyse-like process by adding the salt and yeast after the rest period. What Blumenthal does not say is whether the preferment was allowed to sit at room temperature for about a day or whether it was kept in the refrigerator. At 2% yeast, which is very high and more characteristic of so-called "emergency" types of doughs, the preferment would be extremely active and rise very quickly at room temperature. In breadmaking circles, such a preferment would normally be kept in the refrigerator, either immediately after making or after a short room temperature rise.

I agree with you that 2 minutes total bake time is most likely too little if a standard home-type oven was used.