Pro Chef Reacts... To Adam Ragusea BETTER NY Pizza?

Comments · 890

• CH

  @ChefJamesMakinson · 3 years ago · pinned

  I hope you enjoy this video guys! It is one that you have been asking for! :)

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• KA

  @Kazaki000 · 3 years ago

  What I like about Adam Ragusea is that he challenges many paradigms of cooking, tests many methods that have lasted for years, and explains why those methods that have been preserved are unnecessary due to how technology has advanced, and are only still being used because of "tradition".🙂

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• KA

  @kassemir · 3 years ago

  I think Adam&apos;s approach has always been teaching a method, rather than a strict recipe. Which when it comes to baking will always vary based on the flour you&apos;re using, so I actually think this was a pretty good video.<br>I also think he wanted to target the widest number of people, and from my understanding, and looking up American recipes, measuring by volume is just how they do it, a lot of people, I think don&apos;t even own a kitchen scale.<br>Which can actually make American recipes kind of a pain to use, because in Europe where I&apos;m based, pretty much all recipes use scaled measurements for stuff like flour and liquids.

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• TI

  @tildessmoo · 3 years ago (edited)

  The reason for adding flour before he&apos;s done kneading is that he&apos;s going by feel; it&apos;s best not to rely on measurements for flour; it&apos;s an agricultural product, which means that, while manufacturers <i>try</i> to keep their product fairly consistent, it will end up with different moisture, starch, and protein levels at different times, from different manufacturers (especially that for the home cook, who will often get whatever&apos;s on sale), from different harvests or storage times. I know a lot of bakers like to be precise (YouTube bread making channels are very into precise times, weights, and temperatures), and it&apos;s less of a problem when you&apos;re working in the large batches a professional baker will deal with, but it&apos;s actually a very good idea for a home baker to learn to work by feel. Home bread recipes (at least the good ones) aren&apos;t really recipes so much as guidelines.<br><br>My basic guideline is that pastry is a science but bread is an art. Definitely weigh your flour (and your sugar!) for pastry, but there&apos;s a lot of feel and &quot;by eye&quot; in bread, at least in the home kitchen with consumer ingredients and home equipment.<br><br>&quot;Thermal interface&quot; describes any surface that is involved in heat exchange. It&apos;s used a lot in the tech industry, because it&apos;s a very important concept there; Adam is using it the correct way, even if it&apos;s not something you usually hear in relation to cooking.<br><br>You don&apos;t need a separate first rise if you&apos;re doing a slow cold rise; chilling the dough slows the yeast far more than it slows the gluten formation, meaning that, so long as you leave it at least 24 hours as Adam suggests, you&apos;ll have a good texture. A long slow rise also gives you more yeast flavor for slower CO2 production and more thorough yeast spread, meaning you get a finer crumb like if you&apos;d risen two or three times punching down in between, with a yeasty flavor like from an extra rise.

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• TR

  @triniececummins2015 · 3 years ago (edited)

  This second pizza feels and looks much more like the traditional NY Pizza which is a completely different beast than Chicago pizzas (there are two), your Italian pizza, etc

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• IL

  @Ilovepastatoo · 3 years ago

  Thermal interface material can be used for heating an object as well, not just for cooling it. In computer hardware it is indeed used to transfer heat away from the chip.<br><br>By the way, that was a great picture you used, because it showed that a thermal interface material is not just about thermal conductivity, but also about filling all the gaps in the uneven surface so there will be full contact. In food, even though water is a much better thermal conductor than oil, the oil is going to be a better thermal interface material for this application because it won’t boil at 100° and you will not lose the heat.

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• RE

  @reikoshea · 3 years ago

  As an IT nerd by trade, I liked using the term &quot;thermal interface&quot;. I think it accurately describes what&apos;s going on. If im browning some polish sausage rounds in a pan without oil, they don&apos;t brown as evenly as if i put in a touch of veggie oil, which, to my home cook brain, says that the oil is acting the same way a TIM would in electronics.

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• KE

  @keefahh · 3 years ago

  Thermal paste on CPUs helps with thermal TRANSFER, so in the Adam&apos;s example it helps the heat from the steel transfer to the pizza.<br><br>cool vid btw!

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• BR

  @brownsugar0000 · 3 years ago (edited)

  I work at a Neapolitan pizza restaurant and re: the flour what Adam is doing is to my knowledge relatively normal if inexact. Where I work we mix it with a specific weight of flour, but after the first rise we flip it and give it a little flour until it&apos;s the right consistency. The amount of flour you have to add can vary enormously from day to day (especially here in DC where the weather is unpredictable as hell) based on temperature and humidity, and getting it right is very important, especially at scale; if you add too little it will just be a puddle, if you add too much it will tighten up and won&apos;t retain its shape when rolled and will be much more likely to tear when stretching. There is no way that I know of to determine how much flour to add here other than by feel as well so overall I think what he does there is okay. Also he gives away in the stretching portion why he doesn&apos;t think rolling properly is important: if you don&apos;t care about the shape having a perfectly spherical dough ball is a waste of energy. In a professional kitchen it&apos;s obv important to roll the dough into a sphere otherwise the stretcher is going to be very mad at you for having to fix your mistake. Also the amount of oil he uses is fine but there is going to be a very very strong olive oil flavor in his dough. Also he&apos;s making his life unnecessarily harder by using white flower instead of semolina to stretch.

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• DA

  @danestrenton · 3 years ago (edited)

  I worked in a German bakery for 4 years, everything pretty much made entirely from scratch. It was the bakery equivalent of an extremely busy restaurant, even on slow nights we were doing in total around 600 loaves of bread total.<br><br>Scraping down the bowl is important, for both keeping down on waste and also lessening cleanup afterwards. Dough that&apos;s dried, especially on a metal bowl, is almost exactly like concrete and it&apos;s absolute hell to try to remove lol. Fresh yeast is always superior to dry yeast, especially if you&apos;re making very rich breads like ones that use rye flour and need long periods of time to prove. Also almost a necessity if you want to make a sourdough culture, which by the way will pretty much last forever as long as you maintain it. Also, Adam had to keep adding flour to the dough when he was first kneading it because it was a bit too wet. Plus he was using regular store bread flour which doesn&apos;t absorb as much water as high gluten flour does, which was something we exclusively used for our breads. Lethal for anyone with a gluten allergy but the gold standard to use for making any white breads lol, not to mention the consistency is far better with much more defined and longer gluten chains from the kneading. For anyone looking to make doughs and don&apos;t have much experience I highly recommend getting a mixer, doing it by hand is extremely tedious and time consuming, typically 20-30 minutes is how long it takes depending on the size of the dough and what the dough is supposed to be used for. Smaller doughs of course take less time to knead and larger ones take much longer and are also even more physically taxing to knead. For anyone making dough and don&apos;t have any appropriate/usable scales the golden rule is less is better. Start low then work your way up. If you need more flour or water you can always add more. If you add too much you just screwed yourself and now you have to try to balance the ratios, when you get used to making doughs it&apos;s a minor inconvenience and if you don&apos;t really know what you&apos;re doing you pretty much just screwed yourself. Yeast you don&apos;t need to stress too too much unless you&apos;re completely off the mark and added way too much. Even a little bit less of yeast will stay prove the dough it&apos;ll just take longer. A little bit more and it&apos;ll just prove a bit faster. Way too much you can either stick the dough in the fridge/freezer or add more salt to the dough if it wasn&apos;t a significant amount extra you added. Bread doughs are far more forgiving than pastry doughs, which are a whole other ordeal. If you have scales then cool, you just need to calculate your ratios and then you&apos;re set. Just pay attention to the dough while mixing and forming to see if anything needs to be corrected. If you don&apos;t have scales then just start with less and add as needed. You can always add more, but can&apos;t take out if too much.<br><br>Also a trick we had to help contain the temperature of the dough during mixing, especially if you live somewhere hot, is to replace a portion of your water with ice. Some doughs like pretzel dough you&apos;re really gonna want to have a bit chilled anyway when you&apos;re rolling and forming the shape of it unless you wanna have a rough time

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• ME

  @melenatorr · 3 years ago

  When I first had to start cooking for my parents, and knew nothing about the art, I asked my very intelligent brother. &nbsp;The first bit of advice he gave was &quot;Clean as you go&quot;. &nbsp;Absolutely correct!

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• AA

  @aaronlopez492 · 3 years ago

  Alright Chef James, my stomach is ready---- I mean I&apos;m ready for the Pizza tutorial review 2.0.🍕😋

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