Pizza is one of my loves. Perhaps by only true love. I love pizza. I love pizza so much that I’ve gone on pilgrimage to the birth of pizza in Naples, Italy. For the past year I have been practicing making my own pizza dough. Today I think I found the best combination of preparation-time and taste yet.
The 6 ingredients are simple:
- 600 grams of unbleached bread flour
- 4 grams of active dry yeast (this is key)
- 10 grams of sugar
- 12 grams of salt
- 380 milliliters of water
- 20 milliliters of olive oil
That and pizza stone is all you need. I promise. This is how to prepare it. The whole process takes a couple of hours, mostly because you need to let the yeast do its thing. So I’ll walk you trough a typical pizza night at our home.
Let us suppose you want to have pizza by 8pm, this is what you would do:
- 5:00pm:
- Use your kitchen aid bowl and place it atop your scale. Zero the scale and add 4 grams of active dry yeast. As I noted above, this is key to the best pizza. Do not use instant yeast, active dry yeast is key.
- Zero your scale again and add 10 grams of sugar. Zero it again and add 380 grams of water (grams and milliliters weigh the same for water and most liquids)
- Mix the ingredients with a spoon or fork and let them sit for 10 minutes.
- 5:10pm:
- Turn your scale on again (it probably has auto-off) and zero it. Add 600 grams of unbleached bread flour. Zero it again and add 12 grams of salt. Finally, zero it once more and add 20 grams of olive oil (remember, grams = milliliters for most liquids).
- Insert the hook attachment to your kitchen aid and mix the ingredients at low speed until most of the flour is off the sides of the bowl. This should take about a minute or two.
- 5:12pm:
- At this point there should be very little loose flour in the bowl and you either have one glob of dough or two moving around. Up the speed to medium and mix for 4 minutes.
- 5:16pm:
- Get a metal bowl about 3 times as larger as the dough and oil the bottom of it. Remove the hook attachment and use your hands to peel the dough off the hook and bowl. The dough should be sticky.
- This is a good sign. Place the dough in the bowl and cover it.
- Leave the bowl to rest at room temperature, about 70f, for 2.5 hours. Go party 🙂
- 7:45pm:
- 2.5 hours have passed. Place your pizza stone on the lowest rack and set your oven to 550f. Yes, 550 degrees Fahrenheit, or as high as your oven can handle.
- By now, the dough should have grown. That is the active yeast doing its job.
- Powder your hands with some flour, as well as a cutting board.
- With your powdered hands, get the dough out of the bowl and work it into a ball.
- You will get 2 large pizzas from this recipe, so cut the ball in half.
- Use your fingers to stretch the one half of the pizza into a circle.
- Grab your pizza peel and sprinkle some corn meal on it. The corn meal will act as a lubricant and will allow you to easily slide the pizza into the oven
- Grab the pizza and place it atop your pizza peel and top it with your favorite toppings.
- Insert the pizza into the oven and wait 8 minutes.
- 8:00pm:
- Get the pizza out of the oven and enjoy 🙂
The crust will be supple and buttery. I guarantee you will never, ever, ever, go to a local pizza shop again.
