Roundtable Pizza Guide - The Importance Of A Good Base

Here at the Roundtable Pizza Guide we believe that a good pizza starts with the base. A good pizza base can make or break a quality pizza. Too dry and it breaks up, too oily and it affects the taste, too fluffy and it ruins the pizza experience. It is a shame then that very few people appear to know how to make a quality pizza base.

It is important to remember that as with anything, cooking methods, and indeed even mixture ingredients can vary from person to person. With a pizza base, how it is made is not the important aspect, it's how the base turns out after it's prepared and cooked.

In fact Steve Zinski (member of the Food News Group) suggests...

"that two baking stones be used rather than one. The first to be placed on the lowest rack, and the second on the rack just below the broiler element or flame. Having positioned them thus, preheat the oven at 500° - 550° for at least 30 minutes, preferably an hour. Cook the pizza for about 4 minutes on the lower stone, then turn the broiler on and move the pizza to the upper stone, directly under the broiler. Allow it to cook there for a couple of minutes or until the crust is bubbled and crisp, even a bit blackened."
Source: theartisan

As to the making of the base, there are 3 key things to take note of:

• The Ingredients
• The Mixture
• The Kneading

The ingredients will naturally vary from person to person. Generally speaking, most recipes will call for yeast, unbleached plain flour, warm water, salt and regular water (i use room temperature myself). Although it may be tempting to skip the salt, it has been said that doing so can affect the outcome of the base.

The mixture is all about measurements, and more importantly, personal preference. The best way to be a master of the mixture, is to practice and learn from your own work.

Kneading the base is where it all comes together. Never cut a corner on the kneading or you will find your base comes out far less than perfect.

The following video gives an example of how to knead your dough.

The perfect base should of course always be topped off with perfect fresh toppings. The Roundtable Pizza Guide wishes you the best in your pizza making endeavors. Until next time, have a slice on us!

Roundtable Pizza Guide - Making A Vegan Pizza

Have you ever sat down to think about what's for dinner and decided that you want pizza but you don't want the high fat, low quality pizza from your local pizza joint? It's moments like these that the idea of making your own pizza start to sound really appealing. Luckily, there are plenty of great tutorials to help you lean to make a good pizza. Today, the Roundtable Pizza Guide is going to show you one such example for making a Vegan Pizza.

Vegan Pizza, or Vegetarian Pizza may sound unappealing to the average person, but let me tell you, if made properly, a good quality Vegan Pizza can be far tastier than it's meaty alternatives. Another advantage of the Vegan Pizza is that they're quite a bit healthier, with much lower saturated fat contents, much lower in calories and much higher in nutrition.

This video shows you how to make a Vegan Pizza. Keep a close eye, and prepare to hit the pause button because the video goes from start to finish in just 3 minutes and 16 seconds.

This video shows us 2 things. First of all, making a good, healthy pizza is not hard at all. It also shows the power of a basic webcam / video camera. Here is what i want to challenge all of you reading this. Do you have your own pizza recipe? If so, get out your camera and video you making it, put it on youtube (or similar) and let us here at the Roundtable Pizza Guide know about it and we will share your pizza with our readers.

The Birth Of The Roundtable Pizza Guide

It was 9:30pm on a Friday night and my wife and I had just got home from seeing a sports event and were hungry. Doing what most people do late on a Friday night when the hunger pains hit, I called up our local Pizza joint and ordered a couple of large pizzas on classic crusts with a side of garlic bread and coke. Now, over here we have this lovely thing called a delivery surcharge that the pizza joints like to hit you with on public holidays. It just so happened that this particular Friday, it was one such night. Not wanting to be ripped off by the Kids of the Roundtable Pizza people, i opted to drive in and pick it up myself...

And so began the horror story.

Up until this time I had never had a problem with this particular pizza place. They had always been courteous, kind and welcoming. At least, until this night. I get there in the "15 minutes" they said the Pizza would be ready in, pull up, walk in and politely announce my presence. The response i got was something along the lines of a grunt, followed by "yeah we're delayed you'll have to wait".

I'm quite OK waiting, so i sit down and patiently count away the minutes. After 15 minutes I ask the person on the counter if my pizzas are ready, and are answered with another grunt and something that sounded a bit like "no, i said you need to wait". At this point, I'm getting a little frustrated with the customer service, or lack there of, so I tell the guy not to worry about it, I'll go somewhere else.

That seemed to wake them up, because within a matter of seconds he announces that they are ready, drops them on the counter and snatches the money out of my hand. After getting the change i get out of the store as fast as I can, get in the car and drive home. If you've ever been hungry and stuck in a car with hot pizza you'll understand what I mean when i say the drive was torture!

Getting home, I open the boxes, break off a slice and take a bite...

Now, I'm not a fussy eater when it comes to pizza, but this was the most disgusting pizza I had ever eaten. The base was oily, the toppings were all placed wrong, and i don't know what sauce they used but it sure wasn't BBQ! So I call the people people, who by this time I'm referring to as the Kids of the Pizza Roundtable due to their arrogance and young ages and make a complaint. To make a very long story short, and to avoid having to repeat some rather horrible things said to me, I'll simply say that in the end they got my money, and I had bad pizza and burnt toast.

Pizza... my journey for quality pizza was born. Never again would the roundtable pizza people ruin dinners if I have something to say about it.