Pizza Dough Balls

what did you love eating as a kid?

In Julia Turshen’s podcast Keep Calm and Cook On, she ends her interviews with the question: “when you were a little kid, what was your favourite thing to eat?”

I listened to Julia ask this question to writer Angela Garbes, a first generation American Filipina woman, as I drove home from Wentworth last weekend. Garbes answered emphatically: she loved Scrapple, a dish made from scraps of pork, cornmeal and spices, traditional to rural Pennsylvania where she grew up. It was a natural end to their conversation which centered on Garbes’s latest book, Essential Labor -Mothering As Social Change. Garbes says she has always had a robust appetite, but as she grew older, her appetite expanded to include a hunger for understanding her place in the world. Writing a book on caregiving allowed her to make peace with the people she’s come from, the person she is, how she mothers her children, and mothers herself. She said she feels sated.

During the episode my youngest son Rex was in the seat beside me sipping Bubly, ski gear piled high all around, and Dottie was riding in her crate in the back. As the car whizzed past evergreens and wild blueberry fields dusted with snow, I thought of my tennis lesson last week when our instructor, a man from Mumbai, told us to always listen with our eyes. “I could hold this ball and say it looks like a green apple,” he said, “then you’d be staring off in the distance, thinking about the last time you ate a crispy green apple. Stay with me. Watch and listen.”

But there are times when the intention is to slip away while listening. How could I not drift to the birthday parties of my childhood, when we’d go roller skating or bowling or play games on plush living room carpets then gather around a dining room table as the doorbell rang and big white boxes of pizza were marched through the front door? Like Angela Garbes’s, my childhood appetite was robust. Friday night was pizza night at my house, but we never ordered take-out. My mom made two balls of dough and stretched them across the circular baking sheets that came with our Panasonic convection microwave oven. She’d slice the hot pizzas into triangles with her massive scissors - one snip could cover the diameter - and divide the slices between the six of us. Take-out pizza would have taken up a lot of her weekly food budget. We didn’t mind; this Friday night homemade pizza rhythm only made those birthday parties more exciting. 

I was the first to the table when the pizza boxes arrived. They were always extra-large pepperoni with cheese, each pizza sliced into twelve pieces. The best part was the middle of the pizza where a small ball of scrap pizza dough sat, baked and blackened by the hot pizza oven. It was a practical addition, meant to protect the thin cardboard lid from touching the top of the pizza. But for me, it was a delicacy. I would quickly do the calculations: number of kids at the party / pizza slices in the boxes / number of eyes staring down the dough balls. The birthday girl’s mother would usually notice me rubbing my sweaty palms on my cords and offer me a dough ball. Perhaps my desperation was the sense of scarcity that comes with many sisters. Or maybe it was the sheer thrill of take-out in a time when most mothers were homemakers and food came from their kitchens. Maybe it was a foreshadowing into life with an insatiably hungry labrador. Either way, I loved that dough ball, softened by a kiss of tomato sauce on the bottom and crisped by heat on top. It was my favourite thing to eat when I was a kid. 

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The dough ball as a lid protector was replaced in most pizza shops by a small plastic table. There are forums online discussing these little tables and the void they’ve left behind. “My kids use the plastic thing as a table for their Barbies,” one person posted. “I use it to divide my art supply trays,” said another. “We don’t need more plastic. Bring back the dough ball!” Facebook tells me the dough ball lives on in a few select pizzarias - one in the North End of Halifax, one in Elmsdale, and perhaps even in New Glasgow. 

The love for the dough ball, I think, spurred on garlic fingers and pizza rolls, the kind you pull apart when hot from the oven and dip into tomato sauce. I never order those things. What’s the thrill when there’s enough for everyone? 

My kids eat take out pizza all the time. I order it on my phone and twenty minutes later the doorbell rings. They like it, it’s somewhat exciting, but there aren’t any dough balls or sweaty palms. It’s just pizza, enough for everyone, in a technologically advanced cardboard box designed to never collapse onto the pizza inside. After dinner the boxes sit crushed on their sides, crumbs spilling onto the floor, ready for recycling. 

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Traditional Pizza Dough

This dough uses the ‘sponge’ method where some of the flour is added to the water and yeast, and this ‘sponge’ is allowed to rest before the rest of the flour is mixed in - a baby step towards sour dough. 

Makes 4  x 10 inch pizzas

4 tsp dried yeast 

1 1/4 cups (300 ml) lukewarm water

4 cups (500 g) all purpose flour

1 tsp salt

Dissolve the yeast in about 2 tablespoons of the lukewarm water. Add about 2 tablespoons of the flour, mix to a smooth paste, then stir in the remaining water. Cover and leave the yeast mixture for about 30 minutes or until it is bubbling and foamy. Whisk the flour and salt together in a large bowl and make a well in the centre. Pour in the yeast liquid and remaining water. Work the ingredients together using a wooden spoon by pulling the flour into the liquid mixture until it comes together. Use your hands to transfer the mixture to a lightly floured surface - it will be a shaggy mess. Knead the dough (fold in half towards you, turn a quarter turn, push away from you with the heal of your hand, repeat) for about 10 minutes or until it is smooth and elastic. Form the dough into a round loaf and cut into 4 even sized pieces. Form each piece into a ball and leave them all to rise under a clean tea towel for about 1 ½ hours, or until they have doubled in size. (This can happen in the refrigerator overnight. Let dough balls come to room temperature before baking). Use one ball of dough for one pizza. Punch down the dough and knead for a couple of minutes on a lightly floured surface. Press the dough out flat and using a rolling pin shape it into a round circle, about 10” in diameter. Using your knuckles press just inside the edges to raise them slightly. Leave the dough to rest for 10 – 15 minutes. At this point, I slide it onto a piece of parchment paper. 

Preheat the oven to 450C. If using a pizza stone, place it on the middle rack and allow it to preheat with the oven. When dough is covered with toppings, (and an optional small dough ball in the middle, for nostalgia) slide dough onto pizza stone, or onto a baking sheet and cook for 10 minutes, or until crispy and golden and the base is cooked through.