DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

My plan for not being in the middle of frantic cooking when dinner guests arrive requires that I be more than typically organized. This dinner will be different from most because we will make five recipes we’ve never tried before.

To get organized, I read through all five pizza recipes and made checklists for each. The first checklist is the order of assembly: what ingredients, in what order, go onto the crust. This will prevent me from forgetting any toppings (this happens much more frequently than you might imagine) and will save me the trouble of keeping five cookbooks open on the counter.

The second checklist is the set of tasks required to prepare all ingredients for that pizza — everything from “pick sage from garden” to “shred and blend cheeses” to “sautee mushrooms.” These items are all assigned times, so that I can add up the times, subtract the total from 7:00 PM, and know when I have to begin the prep.

All five sheets are hanging on the door of the refrigerator.

The other task for today is to make pizza dough. I’ve made two batches, which differ only slightly.

The first batch is my standby. It’s simple, and the results are beautiful. It is an invention of Peter Reinhart, documented in The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. If you ever make pizza, this recipe alone is worth the price of the book.

The second batch is a variation on the first. I omitted the olive oil from the dough, and I didn’t fully knead it. I am testing a suggestion noted in this column previously, that crunch and gluten are at cross-purposes. The theory says that doughs with fully-developed gluten become bready, and therefore go limp under the weight of toppings. To achieve a crunchy crust (says this theory), the dough should be only briefly kneaded.

Both doughs went into the cooler to retard overnight, immediately after mixing.

Did all the prep pay off? Find out.