Usually more ‘D’oh!’ than dough in the Yorkshire Life test kitchen, Jo Haywood attempts perfect pizza.
Dough is my kitchen nemesis. I have about as much patience as a tired toddler in an all-you-can-eat sweet shop, so you can imagine how much I love the seemingly never-ending process of kneading, rising, knocking back, shaping and rising again before the bread even gets near the oven. Frankly, I can’t be faffed with it.
The nearest I ever get is knocking up a quick soda bread to have with cheese and a few pickles for Saturday lunch. As this takes about 40 minutes from start to finish (using buttermilk instead of yeast means you don’t have to knead, prove or fiddle with it), I can just about curb my impatience, but any longer than that and I start to gibber.
It’s the same story with pizza dough (another no-no). It takes my family approximately three-and-a-half minutes to demolish a pizza the size of the dining room table, so there’s no way on god’s green stuff that I’m spending much more time than that making one.
Which is where West Yorkshire-based Delivita comes in. Set up by uncle and niece team Joe Formisano and Olivia Robinson, the company recently launched Dough To Go, a range of fresh organic pizza dough delivered direct to your door.
Well, I just had to give it a go, didn’t I? And not just because my pizza-deprived family threatened to banish me to the guinea pig hutch if I didn’t.
So, I ordered the family pack (enough to make a dozen 12-inch pizzas) and, after they were delivered safe and sound to my door, put ten in the freezer for later and set to work with the other two.
To be honest, ‘set to work’ is overstating it slightly. Because Delivita has done all the proper graft – bringing together the organic wheat flour, live yeast, purified water and Himalayan pink salt into a perfect ball of dough – there is very little for the home cook to actually do once you’ve defrosted the balls overnight.
The next day, I removed the dough balls from their protective bags, dipped them in flour and left them at room temperature, covered with a damp tea towel, until I needed them. Then it was simply a matter of stretching and shaping the dough (fun, and less than five minutes), adding my toppings (passata, pancetta, mushrooms and mozzarella) and chucking them in the oven for 15 minutes or so on a high heat.
The end result was, frankly, the most delicious pizza that’s ever come out of my kitchen. The base was crisp with a great chew and a moreish sourdough-like flavour.
Three-and-a-half minutes after I’d called my clan to the table, not a single crumb of crust was left and everyone was already planning their next pizza. Perfezionare! w
For more information about Dough To Go and Delivita’s range of handcrafted wood-fired pizza ovens, visit delivita.co.uk
