Pizza patate

As I've said once or twice, I love the pizza patate at Sullivan Street Bakery. A few years ago, I read about a recipe for it on Smitten Kitchen. But there was a lot of uncertainty -- Deb concluded that there must've been an error in the recipe because the dough would've been way too wet. Reading around about pizza bianca, though, I decided that I wanted to try the original version of the recipe -- it really is supposed to be a very wet dough.

I think the main problem is that the recipe doesn't talk you through the parts that go against your normal baking instincts. The dough really is more of a batter. (After about 10 minutes in the stand mixer, it did sort of pull away from the sides, but when the mixer stopped it slumped right back again.) And the 30 minute baking time just seems much too long for a pizza, but it turned out to be just right.

I let the dough rise for 2 hours. The directions call for you to split the dough in two, and spread it on two baking sheets, but I just used one large baking sheet, so it was slightly thicker than intended. To spread the dough out, I had to rub my hands with oil because it was incredibly sticky.

Overall, this was very very close to that delicious pizza bianca from Sullivan Street. The crust was excellent, like a thin, chewy foccacia.