The only part you need to read: Calling homemade pizza geniuses - any suggestions for making a really great crust? Not cracker thin, but not puffy and bread-forward either. I have a peel and a pizza stone.
TLDR version: We have an amazing butcher shop where everything they sell comes from locally raised livestock. On our last visit we got some of their pepperoni, which turned out to be sublime. I made a pizza with it. My sauce included from our garden: tomatoes, four different herbs, and two kinds of sweet pepper.
Needless to say, the toppings were ethereal. The crust? Eh, not so much. I just pulled a recipe from online, and it was what you’d expect: some flour, yeast, sugar, water, olive oil, and salt; rising time optional. (I let it rise about 1 hour.) I believe it said to start with 2c flour and 1c water, then add flour as needed.
The recipe said it was enough for one crust, so that’s how I did it, but it could have easily made two. The delicious, delicious pizza toppings ended up on the crust equivalent of a California King bed. In other words, way too much breadiness under the excellent sauce and pepperoni.
Naturally, I used a peel and a pizza stone. (Whattaya think I am, a clueless savage?) And I’m sure I can get better results next time by using the same amount of crust but making TWO pizzas. Still, tips from any Dope pizza makers welcome.
I’ve made a whole lot of homemade pizza crusts. I’m going to share with you the best recipe I’ve ever found. Getting the amount of dough-soon-to-be-crust ratio to what you want is merely a matter of determining how much to use for a personal-sized pizza like YOU want it.
1 cup warm water
2 tsp. active dry yeast
½ tsp. sugar
3 cups all purpose or bread flour
2 TB. olive oil
1 TB. honey
1 tsp. salt
Stir water, yeast and sugar into the bowl of a KitchenAid mixer till dissolved. Let stand in warm place 10 minutes until foamy.
Add flour, oil, honey and salt on top of the yeast mixture. Using the dough hook, mix till ingredients come together on Setting 1, then process for 4 minutes on Setting 2. (Or you can knead by hand for 8 minutes, until dough is smooth and elastic.)
Lift dough and lightly grease the bottom of the bowl, turning to coat dough. Cover with cling film and a damp towel. Let rest 30 minutes in warm place. (Mixture will almost double.)
Punch down dough. Divide and shape into 4 equal balls. – or in my case, 8. I like thin crust pizza. At this point, you can freeze the dough for use on another day. (I do this by placing each dough ball into a plastic bag and giving the bag a twist before adding another ball so the balls don’t touch. You can rearrange them after they’re frozen.)
For dough you are using more immediately, place on a lightly greased plate, turning to coat. Cover tightly with plastic wrap. Refrigerate 2 hours or overnight. Remove from refrigerator 1 hour before baking.
Preheat oven to very hot (500 degrees), but first place oven rack in lowest position along with pizza stone. Prepare pizzas. Sprinkle pizza stone with polenta or corn meal. Slide pizzas onto hot stone. Bake for 15-20 minutes for thicker pizza, 10-12 minutes for thin ones.
The honey is the secret.
If dividing into 4 is too much dough per pizza and dividing into 8 is too little, I’d try dividing it into 6 and see if it’s to your liking.
I have a good friend who is the general manager of 4 wildly successful pizza restaurants. I asked him once about how they make such wonderful crusts. He said the most important thing is to use double-zero flour (or maybe it was triple-zero, I’m not sure).
Double zero flour, especially the Italian flour Caputo Tipo 00 bread flour (also called chef’s flour), is popular with pizzerias. It is a white flour consisting of Italian wheat—a soft wheat made from durum wheat. This type of flour is the gold standard in pizza making, especially for Neapolitan pizza, which is a thin-crust pizza. The fine flour is also popular in New York-style pizza dough recipes.
I didn’t know there was a fancy version of flour, but as it is the predominant ingredient, I can buy that it would make a difference.
( as for recipes, I’ve been using 2 cups of flour with 3/4 cups of yeasty sugar water for a thin 16" pie. The rest of the ingredients are pretty much as above…)
ETA: I have added 1/4 teaspoon of garlic powder, or more than that of onion powder to the flour. It’s not bad.
That sounds great. And, I like the idea of freezing some of the dough. That makes the prep a lot easier - no need to start hours in advance as long as you remember to take an appropriate amount of dough out of the freezer in the morning.
I appreciate the input from @I_Love_Me_Vol.I (I’ll have to see if I can acquire any specialty flour) and the idea from @bobot - regarding the latter, I’d been thinking that one improvement, as long as there is going to be a lot of crust, would be to make it more interesting by adding some seasonings. Glad to see that idea validated.
I took a pizza class from a local chef. He made the best pizza I ever had. His recipe called for making it with cool water and raising it in the refrigerator for 2 days.
Can confirm that letting ferment in the fridge for a couple of days does good things. I also like to hydrolyze the flour before adding the yeast. Basically take 3/4 of the flour and add the water, let it rest for half an hour, then proceed with the dough making.
But… using other flours and letting it rise slowly in the fridge does improve texture and flavor. My wife is the dough-maker, and she likes the Antimo Caputo 00 flour (the red bag stuff). We’ve also had good luck with King Arthur’s Sir Lancelot flour, which now goes by the boring “High Gluten Flour” name.
Honestly though, the best thing I ever did for homemade pizza was getting a baking steel rather than a pizza stone. It holds more heat and transfers it faster than a stone, giving you crispier, better cooked crust.
Thanks for all the ideas to try … looks like I’m going to be serving up a lot of pizza in the near future!
@bump - funny, I never even heard of a “baking steel.” I think I’ll pass for now, given that it would be pretty pricy (it’s heavy and shipping to Hawai’i isn’t free) - maybe a Christmas present! By then I should have experimented with a lot of the advice in this thread.
I hope you have a good experience with the recipe I shared. It’s sure been a fine one for me, both for thin and more traditional crusts. When I used the larger amount of dough, I’d hand-throw the pizzas. For the lesser amount of dough, I find rolling it out works better. I like my crusts almost cracker thin these days.
Agree with others that leaving the dough to develop flavor in the fridge over a day or so is nice if you have the time. I don’t always, and this recipe still yields a delicious result.
Yeasties tolerate cold for awhile and it simply slows down their fermentation process. Which is the answer to your second question: Fermentation. Let it go long enough in a sponge stage and it will become sourdough. Give it a couple days in the fridge and while it won’t go full sourdough, the flavor profile becomes more interesting and slightly tangy.
heaps and bounds over what you can get out of a regular oven … (you need way more heat than a regular oven to get great pizza) … and it was less than $100.00
changing flour while still baking in your conventional oven is like slapping a K&N filter on a 90hp Hyundai Accent … it will improve a bit but it will not make it a sportscar
I’m having a hard time finding similar products in the US; I suspect that’s because 110V is too anemic to do a decent job on pizza, versus the UK’s 220V.
Still… if your oven gets to 500F (and most do), you’re good to go in most cases for good pizza. The trick is to get something to go on the bottom- my preference is a steel, but a stone will work, get it good and hot - like preheat it for 45 minutes on full blast.
Then the procedure is to get your pizza ready on your peel, open the door, slide the pizza in onto the steel/pizza, and then flip the broiler on high.
A good starting point would be to wait about 4 minutes then check. If everything’s working as it should, your bottom crust will be done at about the same time as the cheese on top starts getting browned.
Remove the pizza to a cutting board to cool, turn the broiler off, and turn the oven back on. Wait a little while until it gets back up to temp. Usually this is close to the point when your second pizza will be ready to go.
If you’re going to err, err on the side of waiting too long- i.e. don’t make your pizza then wait. Wait, then make your pizza. They tend to stick to the peel if they sit there too long.
Here’s a recipe by the inimitable Kenji Lopez-Alt that details all of this. You can’t really go wrong with this recipe- sauce, crust, procedure, etc…
From what I gather, if you can find a metal shop locally and get them to cut you a 3/8" piece of steel to the appropriate size and file the edges down, you’re good to go once you clean and season it. That might be easier to find than shipping one all the way from New England to Hawaii.
When steel was mentioned I immediately thought of my Pizzaz pizza cooker. It’s the one kitchen gadget that I use on a consistent basis. I’ve had it for over 10 years now and it’s still cooking pizzas perfectly. It cooks from the bottom and top on a rotating metal plate… It’s great for frozen, homemade and take n bake pizzas. I also use it for grilled cheese sandwiches, frozen fries and tots, etc. It also is a great way to reheat cold pizza.
make your 2nd pizza (its fast, anyway), once you take your first out of the oven … a raw pizza that has been sitting out in the open for 10 or so minutes - will most likely stick to whatever it is sitting on …
To add to the steel discussion, bump, that’s exactly what I did. Went to the local metal seller and got a chunk of 3/8" steel and then the sucky part of cleaning it and seasoning. Had to order flaxseed oil from the jungle for the seasoning. But now I have a lovely steel just as big as the grates in my oven.
pro-tip from somebody who used steel plates for quite some time:
you can hugely speed the pre-heating up, by having your steel plate sit for a minute or so on your gas or electric burner …(careful when transferring it down from the range to the oven - its gonna be hot-hot-hot)
direct heat transfer beats transfer by air by a huuuuuge margin …
and my pre-heat times went from 30+ min to 10 min …
but then again, the UFO-oven landed and made everything much better.
