In my years-long quest to become a weeknight pizza maker, there should have been no setbacks. There are quick pizza recipes (here's one now), as it does perfect flour. AND means necessary? I have them all. What I lacked was foresight. The urge to make pizza for dinner never hit me until 3pm, at which point I realized it was too late: in a house as cold as mine, the pizza dough was never going to rise in time for dinner . Maybe you will maybeget ready for a midnight snack.
Like me, buttercups thrive in warm, comfortable conditions (about 72°F to 78°F); and like me, they become sluggish when they have to sit in rooms that are cooler. In my perpetually frozen (somehow always cold, no matter the season) house, bread doughs rise at a snail's pace, making listed proofing times in recipes meaningless. This is not just inappropriate; Poorly proofed doughs will have a denser crumb, an average shape, and just won't be as light and fluffy..
The solution (for my doughs, anyway) has always been obvious: I needed to create the warm and hopefully steamy conditions in which the dough rises best. I tried methods like proofing my dough in an oven with the pilot light on, or in bowls I wrapped in wool sweaters, but those tricks never worked for me. What I needed was a dough tester. Long a fixture in professional bakeries, proofers—which create the warm, steamy conditions I was after—have been available to home bakers for a while now; this one from Broad & Taylor is loved by many of my colleagues. I have never bought it, because apart from being cold, my apartment is also small and I didn't know where I would store such a thing. But when King Arthur brought out another dough tester, this one thinner than a cookie sheet, my excuses were quashed and my interest piqued. I bought one right away.
Photography by Rick Holbrook; food styling by Kaitlin Wayne
of Raisenne dough proofer is a paper-thin, 14″ by 10″ pad that heats to 85°F. Any bowl or pan can be placed on top of it to benefit from the steady flow of gentle heat. If your dough is covered (NO with a towel!) that the heat is eventually trapped in the bowl, creating optimal conditions for the dough to rise quickly. That's what they told me anyway. To find out if it worked, I put it to the pizza test.
I chose a relatively quick recipe: Pick-Your-Tan Pizza, which takes four hours from start to finish. I started at 3pm In my previous life, this would have been a laughable time – the dough would have taken roughly double the time listed to complete its various rises. But as I put the bowl of dough in the Raisenne, I held onto hope that maybe, this time, my pizza would be ready before I went to bed.
Raisenne can be placed on any surface, so I was able to place my dough on my desk. I took meetings and wrote emails as the Raisenne, which heated up quickly, heated my dough from the bottom up. Several times I reached out to touch Raisenne; as advertised, it was warm and steady, never progressing into anything you'd call hot. (In this way it is different from a warming lid, which provides less consistent heat and, besides, would be difficult to support a bowl of dough.) The warmth was very pleasant, and more than once I wanted to be able to put Raisenne on my lap and it warms me like an electric blanket.
And that's not such a crazy thought: Raisenne is basically an electric blanket for dry doughs. It held my pizza dough very comfortably, and in turn the dough rose strongly. I've made Pick-Your-Pan-Pizza many times and I can safely say that it has never risen as quickly or powerfully as the Raisenne's.
In fact, the dough was fully resisted for 15 minutes earlier than the recipe suggested. This is an outcome that the creators of Raisenne admit can happen (on their site they mention that debugging time can be cut in half), and while it's hardly a flaw, it's something to watch out for. Doughs that are tested with the help of a Raisenne should be evaluated frequently. And while there's absolutely no concern when it comes to doughs like pizza dough and your typical sandwich loaves, breads that rely on a long, slow rise for flavor (see: Village breadetc.) may be better corrected without help.
Photography by Rick Holbrook; food styling by Kaitlin Wayne
But my pizza? I took it out of the oven at 7pm – just in time for dinner – and it was longer, airier and had a crisper crust than I'd ever managed before. So I'm keeping my Raisenne. I'll store it with my pans, where it's so thin I'll barely notice it, and wait for pizza inspiration to strike again at 3pm. When it does, I won't hesitate. owing to Set upI will never say no to pizza again.
Cover photo by Rick Holbrook; food styling by Kaitlin Wayne.
