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by pfooti 312 days ago
I make pizza at home in an outdoor pizza oven (gozney dome). My recipe cooks at about 850F. All forms (skim or otherwise) of cow mozzarella scorch fiercely at that temperature before the crust is done. Buffalo mozzarella does not. Some of my local markets carry Buf brand buffalo mozz, which is not from italy but is from the same animal (I think).

The buf mozz is the thing that takes my homemade pizza from "meh" to "actually, this is pretty good". I'm working on getting it to "wow, this is great" but that will require further refinement of my crust technique, I think.

4 comments

Wow I didn't realise pizza ovens were so hot! A little web searching led me to this, for anyone else who's interested: https://www.crustkingdom.com/pizza-oven-temperature-guidelin...
By fortunate happenstance it's much the same as the annealing temperature of glass

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annealing_(glass)

which means you can throw in a pizza when you've finished at the kiln for a day and pull it out ready a minute or so later (depending on when you start the temp. step down cycle, current annealing oven temp. etc.)

There’s an infamous HN post of a guy who like broke his cleaning cycle on his oven to get it hot enough to do it “right”.
It depends on the style. The super-hot (~900°F) brick ovens are primarily used for Neapolitan-style pizzas (thin crust, light toppings), which cook in as little as a minute. A denser pizza like a Chicago-style deep dish couldn't be cooked in that sort of oven.
I cook in a Gozney as well and the things that have made the biggest difference for me are a slow-rise dough (I've found that the really high-hydration recipes didn't make a huge difference for me and made the dough way more difficult to handle, so I haven't been doing that) and putting the sauce on hot (I keep it at a low simmer on the stove and dress directly from there). Shaving some parm over the whole thing with a microplane and adding a quick drizzle of olive oil right before popping it in also makes a big difference (I crank the oven to around 900F and my pizzas usually cook in ~75 seconds).

Ken Forkish's _The Elements of Pizza_ is a great resource though it's more focused on standard home oven cooking. His slow-rise recipe is roughly: 350g water (at ~95F), 13g salt, 1.5g instant dry yeast, 500g white flour (I use Caputo 00), mix the first three and let the yeast hydrate, then mix in the flour, rest 20 minutes, knead briefly until smooth, two hour room-temp rise in an oiled tub, shape into balls, then fridge rise (until either the next day or the day after, but best the next day). I do it with 310g of water to get a 60% hydration dough which is my preference.

The way I do it is buffalo mozzarella goes well for fresh stuff: salads, sandwiches, popping some cheese in your mouth like a degenerate

Anything you’re going to cook at high temperatures, use cow mozzarella. Pizzas, casseroles, sauces etc.

(Also I’m amazed that buffalo mozzarella isn’t that known, I thought that’s what mozzarella was supposed to be).

I had a salad with buffalo mozzarella once and it was awful. Made me think the restaurant had an anti-vegetarian agenda (which probably is true, considering I'm in Belgium).
poolish Pizza dough I thought was the thing that brought my pizza from that's pretty good to one of the better pizzas I've eaten.
I'll give that a try, thanks! I'm currently doing a 10h room temp ferment (from 1/4t of yeast) and a 48h fridge rest. I think I got that from kenji alt. I'm satisfied with some of it, but I wish the crust was a bit more chewy and able to stand up to the sauce. The slices all flop over, but that may also be from over-saucing.