Good morning! I'm Enzo Coccia, we're in Naples
and we're precisely at 'O Sfizio D'a Notizia. Today we're not talking
about oven pizza, but fried pizza. To make a good fried pizza, we must
avoid mistakes. I gathered the most common mistakes
in six points. The first mistake: never absolutely fry on a oil temperature
that is too low. It means that fried pizza cooks
on the surface. It needs a temperature of 190°C, up to 205°C. So, use a thermometer,
check the oil temperature. You can see that the fried pizza doesn't tend
to rise up, the cooking is very slow. It doesn't cook and doesn't brown. We can see that it is white, hard, full of oil.
Second mistake: in the phase of kneading the dough disc,
be careful not to make it thin in the center. What does it mean? A pizza that
is thin in the center risks to make a hole. In the boiling oil, all of the ingredients
come out and the whole oil gets ruined. As we add the ingredients,
it breaks in the fryer as it is too thin. Can you see? Thin
in the middle. It's thin in the centre. Third mistake: you should work
the dough disc with a very little flour for a very simple reason: flour
is composed by starches, starches are sugars, that when get reduced,
combine with a molecule of the oil. While combining, the oil, speaking
in jargon, gets dirty and the pizza takes a dark tone. This whole part is full of flour. What happens is that the oil
molecule gets concentrated with the flour starches and the pizza gets black.
Fourth mistake: unleavened dough. It means that if we don't have a
leavened dough and we fry it, we'll get a white coloured pizza, hardly digestible
and chewy. We can see that it's very resistant, elastic, rubbery. Take a look: when in the oil, it doesn't cook
and it's undigestible. Can you see? There's a difference from before with the oil.
What happens? It becomes chewy, gets a series of bubbles on top and
the dough is not leavened. We can notice all of these bubbles. It's crisp:
if we open it, it's unleavened, it flakes. Fifth mistake: as everyone knows,
the dough has its own growth phase, with a maturation and stability. If we're using a dough
to make a fried pizza that is decreased or collapsed, we have a reaction in the pan. Fried pizza is white, not browned
and the dough lost all of its sugars. It's not tasty, so it's something
terrible and horrible, there's nothing to it. You can cook it in a deep fryer all
the time you want at the right temperature, but it doesn't cook as it lost the sugars
inside the starch. It lost the features, as it should be browned,
it should be crisp, soft and light. Sixth and last mistake
is when you have the dough disc and you have to fold it on itself
and pay attention that the two parts are bind together uniformly.
In this way as we're frying it, we have a pizza that is
hermetically closed, perfect. If we leave the bind among the two parts
not perfectly joined, the oil goes in, a part of liquid
goes off and a part of the ingredients tends to come out. Last but
not least, we're not making the perfect pizza, but a pizza without mistakes! So, the oil temperature is adequate, the dough raised for 16 hours, the two parts
are hermetically closed, it's not thin in the middle, nor full of flour,
it's browned, it's perfect. One last thing, I wanted to say that you should use a
sunflower seeds oil, with a smoke point that is much higher, that goes to
a smoke point at 225°C. We said before that fried pizza cooks at 195°C.
These are the most common mistakes. If you have any doubts and you
are interested in some other information,take a look at my book,
"La Pizza Fritta", published by Guido Tommasi. Have a good fried pizza,
everybody! I hope the magic will happen in your pans, as well!
