Saturday, June 15, 2002


Capital Letters Are Important. . .

making my usual saturday night pizza on auto-pilot, when for some reason, i glanced over at my grungy, dog-eared recipe and saw the salt. . .not thinking, i added 1-1/2 T. (tablespoon) instead of 1-1/2 t. (teaspoon). oooops! the pizza was edible, but barely. . .

proof once again that no matter how experienced you are with a recipe, you should pay attention and have your mise en place. if i had pre-measured everything, and laid it all out nicely, then this would have been much less likely to occur. as opposed to tossing everything together in a rush. mise en place! mise en place! my lesson for the day.

funny talking about salt. as you know i have been reading dr. raymond clavel's book on bread. he discusses the role of salt in yeast doughs at some length. not only does salt retard the rising of yeast, which i knew, it also plays a small role in helping achieve a brown crust. he also says that the amount of salt in yeast doughs should generally be 1.8 percent of the weight of the flour. period!

considering that my pizza recipe used 15 oz. flour (about 425 grams), you can see readily that this "capital error" was waaay too much! (figure 1 teaspoon salt equals 6 grams or .2 oz!) i wanted about 8 grams of salt, or 1-1/3 teaspoons. yikes -- i'll leave it to you, gentle readers, to figure out how much salt that 1-1/2 tablespoons actually was (at 3 teaspoons to the tablespoon) percentage-wise. . .

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