Roberta's Pizza is a much-heralded pizza-focused restaurant in Bushwick, Brooklyn. While the waits at Roberta's can be legendary, thankfully the two times I have had Roberta's pizzas have been relatively painless. The first experience was a Roberta's lunchtime visit (wait = 15 minutes), where we tried two different pizzas. The pizzas were good, but maybe not to the level of my other Brooklyn favorites (DiFara and Totonno's). The second Roberta's experience was getting a Roberta's frozen or maybe refrigerated pizza at the Brooklyn Whole Foods, which despite how it sounds, was actually really delicious.
When the New York Times recently posted Roberta's pizza dough recipe, adapted from the Roberta's cookbook, I knew it was a must-try. Unfortunately though, my first attempt at the pizza dough, which included some significant modifications, left a lot to be desired.
The issues were mostly with the process though, than the result which was decidedly "ok." The process was somewhat laborious because the dough was incredibly sticky and hard to work with, no matter my adding of what seemed like considerably more bread flour while working the dough. This may have been because of my substitutions of half bread flour and half all purpose flour, for the half 00 flour and half all purpose. In addition, I did not use a scale to accurately measure the weight of the flour, which could also have been critical.
The stickiness of the dough also affected my stretching of the dough after removing it from the fridge for a few days. The dough was very hard to work with, and resulted in the somewhat odd shape pictured above.
All in all, a recipe I will probably try again, but with the right flour and a scale!
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