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Perfecting your Pizza Crust with Michael Kalanty
August 25, 2023 @ 12:00 pm - 4:30 pm
What makes the best pizza dough? Is it the thickness? The texture? The flavor?
You decide–and here are the tools to help you do it!
Join me for this hand-in-dough sensory experience. You’ll make pizza doughs using different flour types and different protein contents.
You’ll work with a variety of dough aging techniques: overnight cold fermentation plus using preferments like Poolish and sourdough starter.
You’ll shape and bake these different pizza samples using simple sauces so we can focus on the flavor and texture of the crusts more easily. Then you’ll practice professional sensory protocol for evaluating the profiles of each of these crusts. By the end of the class, you’ll know which dough techniques deliver the specific attributes you want in your perfect pizza crust. And you’ll have the confidence to recreate or invent your own signature dough style in your home.
Our Menu includes:
East Coast Pizza Dough
“00” Artisan Pizza Dough
Pizza Boulanger (in the style of the bread baker) with sourdough starter
What You’ll Practice
- Dough-making techniques by hand vs. by machine
- Bench skills for dough handling and rounding
- Pizza crust shaping techniques
- Working with pizza loading tools to bake directly on our professional hearth ovens.
Plus general principles to improve all your baking:
- Dough temperature control
- Adjusting the amount of yeast to fit your timetable and schedule
- Short- and long-term storage procedures for your dough
Instructor Bio
Michael Kalanty is a professional bread baking instructor. He’s written baking curriculums for culinary schools across the country, in Italy and in Brasil. His textbooks have won awards like “Best Bread Book in the World”® at the Gourmand Cookbook Awards in Paris and have been translated into Portuguese. When he was the Director of Boulangerie for the Le Cordon Bleu schools in North America, he was awarded “Best Instructor of the Year”.
His breads won TWO first place awards at the Tiptree World Bread Awards at the International Bakery Expo in Las Vegas recently. You can find him teaching online at The Great Courses.com and Craftsy.com.
“I’m just back from a hands-on pizza trek through Rome. You can read all about my experiences in the article “From Rome with Love” featured in Pizza Magazine Quarterly.
Categories: Baking Class, Beginner, Bread, Cooking Class, Demonstration, No Experience Necessary, Pizza