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Today was my first attempt at making pizza according to Cook's Illustrated recipe and my first time using my new pizza stone. It turned out pretty good.

Up until now, I've been using my breadmaker to make dough, and baking on a round baking sheet with holes in it. That comes out OK, but not great; the dough texture wasn't as good as it could have been, and it tasted a little bland. It also refused point-blank to rise enough or to "leopard" into the dark and light spots so characteristic of good pizza.

In contrast to the 45 minutes it takes my breadmaker to make pizza dough from scratch, the CI recipe (which is behind a paywall, but reprinted at Serious Eats at the link above) calls for the dough to be made with ice water in a food processor then immediately go into the fridge for a cold fermentation -- this batch was in there for 48 hours, and although the recipe only calls for a 24 hour fermentation it continued to rise a lot during that second day so I think the extra time was a good move. This long, slow fermentation gives rise to better gluten structure which in turn makes the dough far more elastic and easier to work with.

Shaping the dough was... an experience. That pic is of the second pizza I made and the first one looked a lot worse! There's a hell of a lot of art to getting the dough thin enough without tearing it, and clearly I need more practice. If you want to come to my house and eat imperfect pizza while I get this figured out, you'd be helping me out a lot, is what I'm saying.

I don't own a pizza peel (yet...) which means I had to transfer the naked dough to the incredible hot stone and top it in-place. This didn't overcook the base that I could tell (I was worried about this) but did mean I almost burnt my fingers as I tried to place the dough down flat. I think a peel would be a good idea for the future, although by that point the amount of infrastructure in my kitchen devoted to pizza making would be becoming silly.

I also think I over-topped this a little; the centre of the pizza was wetter than I would have liked. It might not help that I didn't have any canned whole tomatoes, so rather than make the tomato sauce the recipe calls for, I used Dolmio jar stuff. It tastes alright but I think it's perhaps a little runnier than is ideal.

All in all though, I was very pleased with the result, and I'm going to be sticking with this recipe for the foreseeable future.