Pizza Steel - Round Number Successful!

I finally got GREAT pizza crust.  Done on top and bottom, in only 7 minutes, and with airy bubbles in the middle. --And this airy crust, not just at the edges, but all the way to the center of the pie.  

This latter trait is something I've been striving for more recently, having noted it as a goal in many of the pizza crust making articles I've read.  This started me looking at my crusts, which often seemed airy on the untopped and thicker edge, but more compressed and wettish on the rest.  It didn't look wonderful, just studying it, but, frankly, it didn't really have a noticeably negative effect on the taste or eating experience.  But still, I wanted it all, and maybe I was missing something in the experience I just didn't know about yet!

The best photo I have of the compressed crust.   I
hadn't taken many profile shots of the crust.  It just wasn't pretty.

Sooo...what was different this last time?  

It's funny to realize that impatience uncovered that, probably, patience is the key.

I actually had a little time on my hands at mid-afternoon.  I meant only to set the bucket of dough out of the fridge, as I've come to think that it being closer to room temperature may lead to a better rise.  But I was impatient, and wanted something to do, so started in on making the pizzas early.

I placed balls of dough on parchment, and let them rest, while I placed the steel in the oven (on the rack, 2nd position from the top, as instructed).  I turned the oven to its hottest setting (550 degrees), and used the mode with full bottom and full top heat.  On the Gaggenau oven's display, this is shown with a black line in 3 sections across the top and bottom.

Last week's Chicken Garlic with White Sauce

I then set in spreading the dough, making the sauce, and preparing the toppings.  I assembled the pizzas.

The oven was still coming to temperature, and the pizzas were ready to go... The oven would take a bit longer to heat the stone, and the family would be even longer in arriving home to eat after sports practices and such.  So I went away and busied myself otherwise for well over an hour.


When ready to bake, I switched the oven to

500 degrees, and full bottom heat, partial top heat.  





Right away, I saw a good 'pop.'  There was an immediate rise and bubbles formed in the crust.  I could see active bubbling inside the translucent crust bubbles!  It's hard to describe and impossible to get photos of to share with you.

I found that the oven loses heat pretty quickly... I got a significant drop (like 50 - 75 degrees) when I put in pizzas or took them out.  This meant I had to wait between each pizza for the oven to regain heat.  This would be a big problem during a sports team pizza feed.  But for every-Friday pizza night, it's a small annoyance.

My impatience at starting the pizzas taught me that patience, in letting them rest and rise, is the key.  Funny that I needed to do this, when pizzerias, and most pizza crust recipes, don't have a long rise time.  As for the difference in experience, the taste is the same, but the light crunch over the lighter interior is nice.  

Not that I'm fully done experimenting, but I'm pretty happy, for the second week in a row, with this kind of result:

 Tonight's Sausage-Mushroom-Onion with Classic Red Sauce

Still Sad about Wolf Breaking Up with Me

For those of you not familiar with my oven saga, previous posts are here, and news of the path to my newest oven here.  I will try to make a long story short, by saying that I had 7 ovens in 5 years in our new house.  It might sound fun to try out new brands and models, but it was so frustrating.

My favorites were the Wolf E-Series ovens, which were amazing performers, but, like the Fisher & Paykel models that also baked pretty well, the porcelain coating kept coming loose, crazing, then splintering, and chipping, in the front corners of the interior.  Wolf claimed mine was an unusual situation, and after replacing my oven twice (quickly, without question, and with as little hassle as possible to me), they decided we should go our separate ways.  

That last time, there was supposedly a lot of conversation and thinking going on about my experiences

between the customer service and engineering departments to come up with an answer for me.  But they decided I baked more often and at higher heats (for pizzas) than 'the norm' who the oven was designed for (even though they agreed and assured me I was doing nothing wrong), and they could not promise an answer that would work for me, so offered a refund.  

We discussed that one of the Wolf convection-steam ovens (stainless interior) might do well on pizzas, while I used a single E-series for everything else.  The customer service person was still not sure the oven would 'stand up to my use,' but said they'd back it up if I chose to go that route.  The 2-oven combo, though, would cost almost $3000 more than the refund for my double oven, and they didn't offer to help with the difference, which, of course, wasn't required, but might've been nice.

After this, many Wolf oven owners who baked less often and at more 'normal' temperatures contacted me to say they had the same, exact problem. Additionally, very soon after I got my refund, I found out that Wolf's new line of ovens (due out in 2014) has replaceable bottoms in the oven cavities.  The engineering department had to have been working on this plan while they were 'discussing' my issues.  Does this mean they probably also knew this was a wider-spread problem, but wouldn't admit it?
  

The replaceable bottom seems like a great answer to me.  The seam between the bottom and the rest of the cavity will, perhaps, allow the metal to expand and contract without stressing the porcelain, and if there is a problem, the bottom will be much easier to replace than a whole oven.  -Less expensive for Wolf, since they won't pay as much for service and won't be junking ovens, and it's less hassle and risk to home and cabinets for the homeowner.  Win-win... except for me.

Now enter my German-engineered beast, the Gaggenau oven.  --The BMW or Mercedes of ovens, I guess you could say.  It's fit and finish is great, as was Wolf's, and it's a beaut with its big windows.

I have disappointments, though.  It is much shallower (back to front) than any of my other ovens. I can't bake as many loaves of bread at once, and can't put things like rectangular cake or lasagna pans in end-first to fit 2, side-by-side, on a rack.

The racks aren't full extension like my most-often-used racks in the Wolf. Someone on the Gardenweb Kitchen Forum said that wasn't too much of an issue with the side-opening doors, but when it comes time to flip or baste chicken pieces, for example, it means a struggle, or pulling the pans out of the oven onto the counter.  The new Gaggenau models have extension racks, but it'd cost me $800 per rack, including retrofit bracket, so I won't be adding them. 

The display screen is small, so the numbers are TINY.  The background light for it also goes out if the oven gets really hot or both ovens are on.  I'm supposed to get that looked at, but if/when fixed, the numbers for the timer will still only be 1/8" high.  On my other ovens, I could read the clock or timer from across the room.

There are still people (a majority) in our household who don't know how to operate the oven, because the controls are not at all intuitive, or similar to other ovens, so if they're not the frequent bakers, they forget from one time to the next.  There are a lot of symbols without words, unless you hit the "i" to get an explanation with each change.

I do like, that with each mode, the graphic shows which elements are on and to what extent, so it makes it easier to fine-tune a baking result.  But, like anything with lots of modes, cycles, or whatever, we have our favorites, and really don't use others at all.

These pictures show how 4 different modes utilize the top and bottom
elements...whether they use one, both, or a combination in differing amounts.
The black lines indicated use of that element at full or partial power.
For example, the top left shows the bottom element on full with
partial use of the top element, and the bottom right shows the top
element on full while the bottom element isn't used at all.  For a
convection mode, there is a small fan symbol that alights.

As the blog title says, we make pizza every Friday night, sometimes for a crowd as large as a whole school sports team.  In the Wolf, I could do 2, 15" pizzas, one in each oven, in about 8 minutes, and it took lots of pizzas in a row before the oven seemed to bake a little cooler.  Even then, it wasn't bad, just took a couple minutes more to bake a pizza.  With all the in and out, it really held its temp.

In the Gagg, first of all, we can only make 11" pizzas.  It has an expensive stone and element set up, designed to be used with a special stone baking mode, all especially for pizza and artisan bread. I expected this would be amazing, and worth buying when my old pizza stones wouldn't fit in the new oven.  

But, the fan runs during that mode, so my pizzas get done on top while the crusts are still white on the bottoms.  I finally played with times and temps enough so that I can get a (barely) acceptably done pizza, but it takes 13 minutes.  That might not sound bad, but using one cavity of the Wolf, I cooked our family 4 pizzas in 32 minutes.  With the Gagg, I cook 6 smaller pizzas in 78 minutes...so it takes approximately 2 1/2 times as long to get the same amount of food on the table. This would mean a crazy decrease in the amount of pizza I could get done for a houseful of hungry athletes, compared to what I did in an hour with the Wolf...even if I could use 2 ovens, like I did with the Wolf.

The oven and stone don't seem to retain their temp as well as I'd like after a couple of pizzas, which I find odd, since the element is constantly heating the stone. 

Of course, we bake more than pizza! I'd say it does an adequate job for most of the other tasks we do... baking breads, pies, cakes, and roasting meats.   I don't find the Gagg to be quite as even in baking as the Wolf, but it's not bad. 

It has its specialty rack-pans that slide into the oven without sitting on a rack.  Kind of cool, but odd, and there so many pieces of equipment (broiler pan, pans, racks, rotisserie unit, stone and element) to keep rotating in and out of the oven, as I don't really have room to store it all.




It has a probe, which I had in my other ovens and deem a necessity.  :-)  But with such high end oven at such a price, I was surprised that it only works in the bottom cavity. 

Whine, whine, whine.  I know this is a luxurious problem to have. The salesman (Michael Hoag, also a great help with the transition from Monogram to Wolf), the store (Albert Lee Appliance), and Gagg distributor (Echelon Home Products) were wonderful to me in finding this oven and getting parts and pieces that were missing from the clearance-priced floor model, even though they didn't have to.  I really appreciate all of their work on my behalf. -And the porcelain is till nearly pristine, so Gagg seems to have that part right.  It cleans up well after self-clean.

With every change in oven brand (3 times), I shelled out approximately $1000 more to 'do better.'  (It honestly makes me feel nauseous to think of that total.) Even though I paid significantly less than the usual selling price of approximately $8500 for my particular Gaggenau, I just don't feel it's as extraordinarily amazing as that price indicates.  

I think I wish I'd gone for an Electrolux (that infamous 2nd-guessing), and then if I liked it less, I'd at least have the satisfaction of some money back in my pocket.  What I really wish, though, is that Wolf had stuck with me, and let me know they had a probably answer to the porcelain issue in the works... :-(

I so quickly bonded to my Wolf oven(s), and we seemed to understand each other.  I got the results I wanted without hassle, and so consistently.  I have to include some caveats, but still recommend them because of their performance.  The Gagg just isn't quite the same. --Maybe it's the language barrier -   LOL.  I haven't been able to find a demo or lessons that might help us communicate better. I might not understand all it can do for me.  I'll have to keep trying.

If it Ain't Broke...

There is something to be said for sticking with what you know works.  But I was hoping for something that was extra special for the expense and "hype!"

I'm talking about pizza in my new Gaggenau oven again.  (2 sad pizza baking attempts are discussed in Gagg Pizza! and in Gagg Pizza, Strike 2.)

For this past weekend's pizza, I used a method closest to what we considered "tried and true" in previous ovens (described here), but using the Gaggenau stone.  



I preheated the oven, with the stone in place at the lowest oven rack position, to 550 degrees.  I used top and bottom heat for this part.


When I put in pizzas, I switched to bottom heat only.  No fans to blow hot air and hurry the tops.

In 8 to 10 minutes, we had the results to which we'd become accustomed and that we like... Brown, bubbly tops, and crispy crust, also a bit brown.



But this method left the Gaggenau element sitting in the drawer.  After I'd preheated too long to change things, I thought that I could've preheated the oven and stone using the element and the pizza stone oven mode that runs the fan.  Then I could've switched the oven to just bottom heat when I put in the pizzas, as I did this time.  I could've turned the stone mode back on if the stone started to cool, then back to no-fan for the pizzas.  

I'll try that next time.

Gagg Pizza, Strike 2

A couple of weeks ago, I shared about our first use of the special Gaggenau pizza stone and element.  We weren't overly thrilled with the result... Nicely to overly brown tops, but underdone crust.  

I thought that using a 550 degree setting was too high, so planned to try a lower setting next time.  I thought would require longer baking time, and maybe give the bottoms long enough to cook through before the tops got too brown.

So this week, I tried heating the stone to 550 degrees, but when I put in the pizzas, I turned the oven down to 450.

I apologize for the less-than-stellar phone photos!
One of the kids had my camera elsewhere that evening.

At 9 minutes, the top on the first one looked nice, but I checked the underside and it was still white.  I cooked that one for 3 more minutes, and it was doughy.

The next ones I cooked for 15 minutes.  The tops got VERY brown, but the crusts never got golden brown.



























I am disappointed.  I'm not sure where to go from here.

I wish I could turn the fan off in this mode, and only bake the pizzas with the use of the element under the stone.  I could do as I've done before and use the mode that uses only the lower oven element and no fan.  But that defeats the purpose of having the special element that tucks in just under the stone, so I want to look into this further.  

I think I'll contact the distributor and see if they have further advice, and I'll update you as there is more news.

I Didn't Start Bread

Yesterday I said that I was getting off the computer, and among other plans, I might start a batch of bread.  I didn't.  We weren't in dire need of bread, so instead, I decided to self-clean the oven.

I've never run self-clean on the Gagg before.  I barely needed to once or twice a year in the Wolf, so I'm not sure why this one is so dirty after such a short time.  But the distributor's rep made it a point to tell me to run it as often as needed without letting it get too bad.  I was approaching the 'bad' point, I thought, so clean it, I did.

These is the 'before' shot (Stating the obvious):

The manual said to clean the door gasket, and also the door and window, as the self-clean wouldn't target those areas.  This was in contradiction to what the showroom rep told me.  She said Gaggenau puts a special element around the doorway of each cavity, so that the door and front edges of the oven DO get clean in the process.  

I tried scrub off the burned on spatters on the door and glass, but didn't get very far.  
The instructions didn't say whether or not the black, shiny rack supports need to come out, so I removed them, just in case.  They were greasy-sticky, so I sprayed them with oven cleaner and tucked them into a garbage bag while the oven cleaned itself. --A trick I learned for cleaning my porcelain-coated rangetop drip pans.


The oven cleans at 905 degrees, and takes 3 hours.




The display shows a brush to signify the cleaning mode, also known as Pyrolysis in my manual.  You can see that I started the process at 10:55, and it was going to time for 3 hours.  The symbol in the lower left corner of the rectangle shows that the door is locked.


I guess I don't have the choice to shorten the cleaning time like I did in previous ovens.  Not a big loss.  I don't know if it's a difference in oven odor control, or maybe just the difference in the specific oven mess, but this one didn't smell as bad as when we cleaned other ovens.  The kitchen got toasty warm, and there was a smell of cooking, but not the choking, smoky smell that some ovens have put out during self-clean.

At 1:55, the timer beeped, and I turned off the oven.  The door remained locked, and I still couldn't turn on the interiors lights until it cooled awhile.

I don't know at what point it was cool enough to unlock.  But I do know that by 4:00 it was unlocked and not too warm to open and wipe out.

This is what I saw first... All the black, brown, and spills transformed into fine, white ash.  Pretty much what I was used to in other ovens.

I was additionally impressed by the door and glass.  Very clean!









So, here is the result... Ta-dah!  All clean and ready for me to dirty again...

Gagg Pizza!

...Not to be confused, of course, with "Gag, pizza!"  ;-)

You may have guessed... My Gaggenau pizza stone and element arrived!

I received 4 parts... The exposed element, the rack that slides into the oven, the stone that sits on the rack, and a pizza peel, or "wooden pusher," as the included literature call it.  (Does 'pizza peel' not translate well in German?)

This is the new one compared to the one I already use.
Since it's just 1/4 or 3/8" plywood, the handle is less than comfy.
But I didn't expect it at all, so for 'free,' I guess it's OK

The instructions had words that got me started, but with translation like pizza peel = wooden pusher, I found the illustrations more helpful.  When the shapes of the parts in my hands didn't match the shapes of those in the drawing, however, I had to play until it worked.

You might barely be able to see that the wire rack is
shaped differently at the front corner than the back,
which is not the case in the diagram.  This took roughly
2 tries and 10 seconds to figure out by trial and error.  ;-)

You can see here how the stone kind of wraps
over the element

I turned to the instructions again when it was time to turn on the oven and heat the stone for use.  

Again a little unhelpful, as it said only to "preheat the oven to the temperature stated in the recipe."  And that it would require more preheating time than usual, which I'd expected.  Although, the rep told me I wouldn't have to preheat as long as I had with the Wolf, in which I heated the stone for an hour after preheating the oven.

I checked the manual and, also, the recipe book I'd been given at the showroom.  No pizza recipes or pizza baking guidelines in the baking charts.  The only clue was included in the chart of heating modes, their symbols and uses.  I think the graphic was only supposed to be an example, but as it was the only hint I had, I went with it, and set the oven to 550 degrees.

As it heated, I set the 'count-up' timer, so I would know in the future how long I needed to plan for preheating.  I'm sure I'm saving a few minutes, but it was still near an hour to reach temperature.

The count-up timer is at the top left.  This was a couple
minutes after I noticed it'd reached temperature.
The clock is next to the timer.  Did I ever tell you how
tiny it is?  1/8 of an inch.  How helpful, especially from a distance!

I had to make the pizzas much smaller than I usually do, since the stone is only 12" deep.  No more 15" pizzas!  But I could fit 2 on, side-by-side, so that helped.  

Hubby swooped in for the first try... Still hot!

Again, I set the count-up timer, so I could watch the first set and see how long to set the timer for the rest.  In an impressive 5 1/2 minutes, the pizza was beautifully browned on the top and golden brown on the bottom....









Beautiful, yes, but, not too impressive, as it was still too doughy on the inside.  I cooked the next ones a bit longer, but even though the top was getting to the maximum browning I could stand, the crust wasn't done enough inside for us.  

That's when I paid more attention and noticed that with this mode, the convection fan is on.  I have no way to adjust that or turn it off while still using the stone element.  I will have to try a lower temperature next time.