My Pizza Experiment

I'm bored, so I might as well just blog about some random stuff that most people would find nonsensical. Oh well, bare with me here.

Let me first start off by saying that this long entry is a random story of how I made a pizza, and it is a review of how my newly purchased Calphalon Pizza Pan worked out.

Okay, so I had decided to make a pizza at home last week (also decided to do it because my mom and sister were asking when I would do it again. Yes, again. I had tried making one before, and I would rather not think about that first experience ever again...yes). Well, anyway, I was thinking that since I had some extra marinara sauce frozen in the freezer from my first attempt I should try using it up.

First step was to get the tools. My last fiasco relied on a few cookie sheets, and I didn't wanna do go through that ordeal again. I therefore did some research on what I should buy for the baking tool. I was considering getting a baking stone, but in the end thought it might be a little excessive and, subsequently, settled on getting a pizza pan/pizza crisper. I visited a lot of websites to read consumer review s and product descriptions and eventually decided to get the Kitchen Essentials Gold Touch 16" Pizza Pas by Calphalon. I bought mine at Target for a pretty good price.

Okay, at this point I have my pan and it just so happened that I had all the ingredients in my fridge already, all that was left was for me to make the pizza dough. For the dough I followed a 2006 Cooking Light pizza dough recipe I had looked up online. I used the recipe before and the finished product's texture was pretty decent, but it did kinda lack strong flavor on its own. So I added some dried oregano into the dough this time and next time I might add a little olive oil into the mix too because, in retrospect, it was a tad dry...ish... Oh, and another thing about the dough, it was kinda difficult to work with. It was very sticky and tacky and I had to use a lot of extra flour to dust my work surface and hand ever time I had to knead it. But it worked out in the end~

When everything was ready to be assembled, I looked at the Calphalon pan product instructions on the back and washed it in warm soapy water before use like it had instructed. For some reason though, the product didn't have a max heat described anywhere on it (I also looked at the website and couldn't find anything about it for the product). So, I just went with their provided pizza recipe that was stamped on the back of the product label cardboard and preheated my oven to 425F. I readied my pizza, assembled and all, on the pan and stuck it in my oven on the lowest rack.

To my surprise, when I checked up on it a few minutes later, I noticed that the pan had warped a little, the noticable kind of little, which made me a little irritated. The pan of course went back to normal when it cooled down a bit, but I did contact Calphalon about it.

Anyway, in the end, I must say that it turned out pretty good, considering I had to keep pulling at the edges and pinching in the thin parts in the center. The base was a good thickness and the crust was nice and crisp with a pleasant chewy texture on the inside. The pan's nonstick surface worked well too and the pizza slide right off. Cleaning the pan afterwards wasn't a bid problem either, since no dough got stuck in the holes (some people had complained about washing pizza pan's in general because of this). MY problem, however, was that after resting a while off the pizza pan, it started to get a bit soft on the bottom since I don't have an appropriate place to put the pizza on for cutting/resting.

All in all the pizza pan did it's job. I was quite happy with the result, minus the whole minor warping thing of course (which I had contacted Calphalon about and am in the middle of getting it resolved). I don't know it if was just a little defective, but Calphalon Consumer Relations had e-mailed me back saying that this is definitely not normal (obviously). I would probably say that this thing works pretty well in baking a pizza if you don't want to get a baking stone...and I would use it again; however, first things first, I'm going to see how this customer help is going to turn out.