We’ve made no secret about crushing on Bellegarde bread, so we had to try their pizza dough. Unfortunately, we didn’t even know about this pizza dough until the “situation”, so the weekly pop-up they do in their own space on Thursdays made it hard to try it. You have to order by Wednesday for Thursday pickup. Whatever we wanted was long sold out.
Weeks later, I guess everyone else in town has already had their fun with Bellegarde, because when I checked there was pizza dough. But only one.
We left it on the counter for a while, and when we went to use it the heat had relaxed it enough to make it want to cling to everything. I felt guilty using even White Lilly flour on the butcher block, White Lilly is a premium mainstream flour, but Bellegarde is heirloom. Never mind - nothing helped the clinging problem.
Next, I did an absurd thing, and tried to assemble the pizza before moving it to a cookie sheet. I had to scrape in off a pizza paddle, and fold it like a calzone to move it. When it arrived in a place to rebuild it, there were holes aplenty.
Finally I fixed it enough to ladle olive oil and use the roasted garlic that has become a refrigerator staple. I shook some crushed red pepper flakes over it and covered it in mozzarella. Admittedly, a garlic white pizza should have buffalo milk slices, but I stuck with the Kraft mozzarella block, and used enough to make it a dense layer. And then I overcooked it enough that the crust was brown instead of golden brown. The stiffness of the crust caused Tom to worry about his teeth, which means crunchy good for the rest of us. We dropped a pile of fresh arugula on it, and that instantly makes a pizza gourmet.
We resolved to try more pizzas on this Bellegarde dough. This week when it was order time, I got the last three. This time they came out of the refrigerator just when I planned to use them. That made a lot of difference. I still needed considerable flour for rolling, but the colder dough held together and didn’t cling much at all. I do see why pizzas are twirled though - it is a challenge to make it bigger.
This time I had sausage and mushrooms in a red sauce, and a basil and tomato and roasted garlic. The third one had roasted garlic and spinach, crumbled feta and mozzarella and tomatoes. I added artichokes at the end, right before popping it in the oven.
Before I did any of this pizza, I roasted garlic at 220 degrees. And then I forgot to raise the temp in the oven, so the pizza dough didn’t really cook. The toppings were cooked and the crust was still mostly raw when I checked the oven temp. I tried hard to fix this problem, even flipping the pizza, topping down. (Not recommended.)
Of all the pizza we did, the best one was the feta and spinach. The tomatoes had a sun-dried flavor, and the artichokes a rich taste.
My pizza experiment is over now, and I don’t see any great difference. The Bellegarde dough was light, airy, sticky and very elastic. The last two made for an annoying project. I wondered about the chemistry that makes it behave that way. But there is no mistaking that once the pizza is baked, not only does it look different than the commercial ones, but it has a great crunchy texture that sets it apart. It seems superior, like everything else here. If only our toppings could measure up.
