Vegetable Shortening for Baking Cooking Pizza and Focaccia
Vegetable Shortening for Baking Cooking – Pizza and Focaccia Making
Shortening has unique properties and applications in baking and cooking. You can also improve your home-made Pizza and Focaccia making by using Vegetable shortening, taking advantage of its unique characteristics.
Vegetable Shortening for Baked Goods
Shortenings are solid at room temperature. They help keep the structure of various frostings. They are also translucent to white in color, just what is needed when making an all-white cake recipe, as the shortening will not impart much, if any, color to the cake batter or off flavors. Shortening inhibits gluten formation; therefore, it "shortens" the dough. It gives a crumbly texture like a pie crust versus an intense structure from a developed gluten network like in bread. Shortening is helpful in a variety of baked goods.
Vegetable Shortening for Pizza Dough Recipes
You can use shortening in pizza dough, which sounds counterintuitive, as you want to develop gluten. After kneading it sufficiently (3-6 minutes) to create the gluten, add the shortening to the pizza dough mix, followed by more kneading. Shortening in pizza dough leads to a less oily crust and a dough that can be easier for the home cook to work with. It also allows pizza dough to expand when cooking. Shortening is neutral in flavor; therefore, it will enable the flavors from yeast fermentation to be the predominant flavor. The neutral flavor of shortening works well with cold fermented dough. You can try out my Pizza Dough With Malt Syrup Recipe which uses vegetable shortening.
Vegetable Shortening for Pizza and Focaccia Pans
If you have ever had the problem of your deep Sicilian or Detroit-style pizza sticking into the deeper pan used for these, the solution is shortening. Shortenings contain emulsifiers, which greatly help its ability as a nonstick coating. The nonstick coating ability of Shortening is handy for coating pans that may be deep, when your dough is higher in hydration like many Focaccia breads, or when your pizza has a lot of edge cheese like a Detroit-style pizza.
How to Apply Shortening to Your Pan
When making a deep Detroit-style pizza, I will rinse the pan with hot water for about 30 seconds to raise the metal temperature enough to help evenly spread a layer of shortening inside it. Heating the pan with hot water brings the pan temperature into the range at which the shortening becomes softened. After applying a thin layer, I then let the pan sit while I prepare the dough.
