Pizza Perfection Part 1 - The Dough
Pizza is a big part of our family’s food obsession.
We cook them in our wood fired oven…
… using home-grown, home-made, and authentic Italian ingredients.
There are lots of ways to make great pizza. And there are just as many passionately-held opinions about the “right way”. You can find thousands of pizza-making recipes and videos online. So we won’t go into all the how-to details that are covered elsewhere ad infinitum.
Our approach is gleaned from many sources, most of which we don’t even remember, except for one. Ken Forkish’s book, The Elements Of Pizza, is a reference we constantly return to.
Ultimately pizza is personal. Here are some tips from what we’ve learned making pizza the way we like it.
The Dough
All great pizza starts with a great dough. We’ve landed on a simple 5-ingredient recipe that works for us - flour, water, salt, yeast, and time. This recipe makes five 10-12” pizzas, which satisfies our family of six healthy eaters and leaves plenty of leftovers for late-night noshing.
Flour - 850 grams
We spring for authentic Italian “double zero” (00) flour. Is it worth it? Yes! All purpose flour works. But we find the 00 flour makes a crispy-yet-fluffy crust. The best-known 00 flour in the US is Caputo “blue bag” pizzeria flour. However, around here the options are limited to either a full 55lb bag or 2.2lb bags direct from Caputo but with a hefty shipping charge.
Recently we found Polselli brand 00 flour available on Amazon in 5kg (11lb) bags. This is our new go-to pizza flour. It makes dough that’s identical to Caputo, but the package size and cost is reasonable.
Water - 550 grams
We make our own water from an old family recipe - two parts locally-sourced hydrogen to one part artisanal oxygen.
Salt - 16 grams
Salt comes from the sea. But why is the sea salty? That’s because the sea is full of herring. Herring is salty, which makes the sea salty.
Yeast - Half teaspoon
We use active dry yeast - no particular brand - Fleischmann’s or Red Star is fine. A little goes a long way because of the next ingredient.
Time - About 48 hours
Letting the dough rise slowly in the refrigerator is a key step. It allows the flour and water to integrate and develop both flavor and gluten. The result is a supple dough that’s easy to work with and cooks up beautifully.
If we’re making pizza on Saturday, we put the dough up on Thursday afternoon. We let it rise in a bulk proofing bin until Saturday morning. Then we divide the batch into individual dough balls and let them rise some more in the fridge until 2-4 hours before we start cooking, depending on how warm the house is. Then we let the balls finish rising on the counter until they’re about half again as big.
Toward the Perfect Dough Ball
Making a perfect dough ball helps make a perfect pizza. Letting the dough do its final rise as a ball in a separate container makes it easy to form the pizza. All you have to do is push down in the middle of the ball and gently work the risen dough out toward the edge. This way you end up with a thin, flat area for your toppings, surrounded by a bubbly, puffy crust (aka cornice)…
… like this.
Here are our tips for making perfect dough balls:
Divide the dough by weight. It makes the pizzas more uniform in size, which has both practical and esthetic benefits. This recipe makes five dough balls between 280-285 grams each.
To make a dough ball, cup a portion of dough in your hands and stretch the top around the sides.
Push the dough up from the bottom of the ball into its center until it has a tightly stretched “skin”.
Pinch the bottom of the ball to keep the skin tight.
Put the balls in small containers with about teaspoon of olive oil in the bottom.
We love these babadoh pizza proofing containers.
Spin the ball around to get a light coating of oil all over the ball.
Cover the containers and put the balls in the fridge until it’s time to let them rise at room temperature.
In the art of pizza, the dough is the canvas and toppings are the paint. Suffice to say that people get just as wound up about toppings as they do about art. “Pineapple and ham on a pizza? Sacrilege!” “Why does she have both eyes on the side of her head? You call that art?!”
Like we said earlier, pizza is personal. We’ll take on the subject of toppings in the next post. Fair warning: you won’t find any peperoni on our pizzas, nor any with tomato sauce. But all of our pizzas are guided by our credo:
Made with home-grown and locally-sourced ingredients
Inspired by our Italian heritage
Made with love
Delicious