"pizza stone" news and stories

Fougasse is a bread traditionally associated with the Provence region of France, and it's a cousin to the Italian focaccia. Both breads are descended from a Roman bread that was baked directly on the hearth, which in Latin is called 'focus.' The Roman bread was called panis focacius, so it's easy to see the relationships, etymologically speaking. Apparently, fougasse was traditionally used to gauge the hearth temperature, which was determined based on how long it took to bake. Leave it to the French to make a very tasty bread out of a tester loaf.

This is definitely a bread that benefits from a baking or pizza stone in your oven. It needs that immediate heat from the hearth/stone to get proper oven spring. It's also a pretty wet dough, so you can expect it to be very sticky and it'll require a fold halfway through the fermentation. The only thing I changed from the original recipe was that I used kalamata olives rather than the niçoise olives, which would be the more Provencal of the two. You could also add some herbes de Provence or some anchovies, as well as goat cheese and dried fruit.

If you really want to impress your friends and family, make some fougasse. I made this last week and the first loaf was gone within ten minutes of it being cool enough to eat. Check out the gallery below, and the recipe is after the jump.

This picture of a Deep Dish Sausage and Tomato Pizza was taken by the Vicarious Foodie and represents something of a victory for her. She's been trying to make pizzeria-quality pizza at home for some time, but without a pizza stone, she couldn't get the crust quite right. However, a recipe from Sara Moulton in which the pizza is cooked in a cast iron pan. Looks pretty darn tasty to me!

Thanks Stacy, for adding your picture to the Slashfood Flickr pool.

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This pizza was made with a crust recipe that I got out of the most recent issue of Cooks Illustrated. As soon as I read the article saying that they had come up with a way to replicate the light, crisp crust of pizzeria pizza in a home oven, I knew I needed to try it.

Let me just say that I was not disappointed at all. This was definitely the best pizza crust I have ever made - and better than many that I have had in restaurants. It was light, crisp and delicious - not to mention that the outside edge was full of delightfully airy holes. I may never use another crust recipe.

If you read Jeffrey Steingarten's It must have been something I ate, you'll not only know that the best way to make a pizza is in a very, very hot wood-burning (or coal-burning) oven, but that it is likely to be nearly impossible to find one to use, let alone one to use on a regular basis. Jeffrey spent months trying to achieve the perfect pizza, getting grills up to temperatures in excess of 650F - at which point he decided that, with the addition of wood chips and extra coals, he could make a reasonably good pizza.

Instead of going to all that trouble, you can use VillaWare's Grill-Top Pizza Stone. It was created to take advantage of the high heat a gas grill can generate to produce a great crust. The stone itself is set on a rack above the grates of the grill, because it gets better heat exposure there. Personally, I'm a fan of grilled pizza, but this sounds like a fantastic idea. Maybe your grill won't get up as high as Jeffrey's modified one, but this sounds (to put it mildly) significantly safer. I know Mother's Day isn't past us (in the US) yet, but I think I'm getting a good idea of a Father's Day gift already....

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