Last weekend, we had run out of bread, and I wanted to make an easy lunch, so I baked pizza and bread at the same time. I thought this was such a useful little trick to know, so I decided to write it down on Hive Blog.
When I had just moved to Germany more than ten years ago, I had the chance to help out at a canteen with a rather Italian-leaning team: an Italian chef, a Spanish assistant, and an Italian lady whose family had a pizza shop.
Every Friday was pizza day, and the lady told me, “You can use the same dough for pizza, ciabatta, and focaccia.” What a revelation!
Since then, this has been my basic Italian-style bread dough at home:
- 400 g flour
- 300 g water
- 7 g salt
- 1 tbsp olive oil
- 3 g fresh yeast (or about 1.5 g dry yeast, adjusted depending on how quickly you want the dough to rise)
This version is for a slow, 3–4 hour rise at room temperature.
If you use only a small amount of yeast, the dough won’t rise so quickly, so you can easily make a larger batch — say with 600 g of flour — and use part of it for pizza and part for ciabatta. Here is my ciabatta as a by-product of pizza-making.
My partner eats quite a lot, so when I make pizza for the three of us, I usually make it with 400 g of flour 😅 For a family of three with more average appetites, 300 g can be enough.
The workflow looks something like this:
- Make one large batch of dough.
- Divide off the pizza portion, stretch it out, and start preheating the oven. Leave the ciabatta portion to rest.
- Once the oven is hot, add the pizza toppings and bake the pizza.
- As soon as the pizza goes into the oven, shape the ciabatta and leave it for its final proof.
- Take the pizza out, and bake the ciabatta while you’re having lunch.
Making bread dough might sound like a lot of work, but the method from Emmanuel Hadjiandreou’s How to Make Bread, which is one of my favorite bread baking books, is genuinely very simple and requires almost no special equipment. Once you learn the technique, you can use it for life. I’ve been relying on it for more than ten years now.
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/14501406-how-to-make-bread
Germany is still reasonably warm during the day, but the mornings and evenings are already getting chilly. I suppose I’ll gradually bake fewer of these light, white Italian breads as autumn and winter approach. As someone born in summer, that makes me a little sentimental. But then again, there are also those dense, hearty breads that taste especially good in the colder months 😉
Happy bread baking!
週末にピザとチャバタを一気焼して、これって結構お役立ちテクニックでは！？と日本語版はnoteに書きました。よかったらのぞいてみてください。
