Pizza is a hot, open-faced Italian pie with a yeast dough bottom.
That’s what culinary textbooks call it. I suppose it’s true. Well… it’s technically accurate (but kinda misses the entire point).
Because pizza isn’t one food. It’s thousands of them. Thick-crust, thin-crust, deep-dish, stuffed. Chicken Alfredo, Hawaiian, white pie, even taco pizza (if that’s your thing). Cooked in wood-fired ovens, gas-powered deck ovens, coal-fired kilns, on a grill, on a continuous conveyor belt (like Dominos), even in a regular oven — pizza doesn’t care how it gets hot, as long as it gets really hot.
And this is where home cooks get frustrated. Your oven at home tops out around 500°F — it’s built for casseroles, not rocket fuel. A real pizza oven runs closer to 900°F. In a home oven, the kind you pick up at Home Depot, even if you set it for as hot as it will go…. the crust is overcooked by the time the cheese finally melts. Same dough, same toppings, completely different result — all because the heat isn’t even close to the same.
Here’s the good news: you’re not stuck with a Home Depot oven. Our kitchen’s TurboChef Fire hits 842°F — real pizza-oven heat. You’re about to learn to build the dough and sauce. Then you’re going to bake it the way it’s supposed to be baked.
No more excuses. Make great pizza (or else).
In the US, we have four basic varieties of pizza:
New York-style pizza: characterized by a crisp, thin dough with light tomato sauce and usually a limited number of toppings, given the thin crust.
Chicago-style pizza: characterized by a deep-dish dough with an inch or more of toppings and sauce. Sometimes covered with another layer of dough and sauce to make a pie.
Neapolitan-style pizza or Pizza Margherita: made from simple and fresh ingredients such as a basic dough cooked to crispness, fresh tomatoes or tomato sauce, cheese, and fresh basil.
Chain pizza: Think of all the places you tend to order pizza from. They are as close to “real” pizza as Taco Bell is close to “real” Mexican food.
Are chain pizzas bad? Yes. Yes they are. But only in comparison to the real thing. I order from a chain from time to time (and I feel deep shame for that fact but will undoubtedly do it again.).
A bit of history
Do you need to know where pizza came from to enjoy it or cook it well?
Probably not, but it’s interesting and this is how you will win at trivia night. Let’s go.
Pizza didn’t come from Italy. It started in Greece as flat bread made with just a few ingredients, then moved to Naples, Italy sometime in the 1700s. Like so many other amazing foods, it started out as street food for poor people – no tomatoes, no cheese – just flatbread cooked with olive oil, salt, and fresh herbs.
In 1889, Queen Margherita and her husband Umberto I, visited Naples and saw peasants eating this large, flat bread. Curious, the queen ordered her guards to bring her one. The Queen loved the pizza and ate it every time she was out amongst the people, which of course irritated the rest of the Italian nobles. After all, Queens shouldn’t eat peasant food.
Queen Margherita didn’t care. She ordered Chef Rafaelle Esposito to the royal palace and ordered him to bake her a special pizza. To honor the queen, Chef Rafaelle made her one topped with tomatoes, mozzarella cheese, and fresh basil (to represent the colors of the Italian flag: Red, white, and green). The Queen loved it and the rest, as they say, is history.
(Sort of. There is tons of argument about if ANY OF THIS HAPPENED).
Pizza variations began to be made in different parts of Italy. Bolognese pizza had meat. Neapolitan had garlic, crumbly Neapolitan cheeses, herbs, and fresh vegetables.
Pizza spread to America, France, England and Spain along with Italian immigrants, where it was little known until after World War II. While occupying Italian territories, many American and European soldiers tasted Pizza for the first time. When they returned to their home countries, the veterans sought out the little Italian restaurants that served pizza, and made it the most popular fast food in the country.
CRUST
To make great pizza, you’ve GOT to make a great crust. To make a great pizza dough, you have ONLY two options:
- exactly, perfectly, slavishly follow a great recipe or
- understand the process of making pizza crust and how dough works in general so you can guess just from reading a recipe whether it will work or not and KNOW how to complete each step in the recipe.
Want to make great pizza? Sure you do. Know this stuff:
A Few Words on Yeast
What are the different types of baker’s yeast?
There are three main types of commercially produced baker’s yeast: active dry, instant, and fresh. All of them will work to leaven doughs in any given yeasted baking recipe, but each has slightly different properties, and, for the more discerning palate, varying flavors.
Dry yeast is partially dehydrated, sent into hibernation, and ground into granules.
You’ll often find this sold in ¼-oz. packets or a 4-oz. tinted glass jar in the baking aisle. These dormant yeast cells can be stored at room temperature for several months (or at least until their expiration date) HOWEVER… they are heat-sensitive and how alive they are (their potency) can vary.
Be sure to store it away from super warm areas up until the moment you’re ready to bake— yeast will begin to die once exposed to temperatures higher than 120°F. To extend shelf life, store sealed packets in an airtight bag in the freezer to keep the yeast in a more secure state of suspension.
THREE VARIETIES
- Active: The yeast with the sneaky name! They call it “active” when it is actually asleep in the packaging; Active yeast requires proofing before being added to dough and is best for baked items with slower fermentation times; Most recipes call for active dry yeast
- Rapid/ Instant – No need to proof the yeast: you can add it directly to the dough and get kneading! Best for doughs that will rise quickly and be baked soon after forming. Sometimes called “breadmachine yeast”
- Fresh or Cake: stays active longer and goes to work faster; make sure you use the proper conversion when using fresh yeast in a recipe which calls for active or instant
PROOFING YOUR YEAST
Before being added to your recipe, active dry yeast should be dissolved in lukewarm water with a pinch each of flour and sugar to ensure its activity level. If your yeast mixture does not increase in size and become foamy in 10 to 20 minutes, your packet was likely Dead on Arrival and will no longer make your dough rise. How does this happen? How can you buy a packet of dead yeast? The manufacturing process for active dry yeast kills up to 25% of the little buggies.
IMPORTANT: When proofing your yeast, be careful you are NOT adding additional liquid to the recipe. Make sure you take the liquid used to proof the yeast from what’s called for in the recipe (otherwise you’ll throw off the flour to liquid ratio and end up with a sloppy mess). You won’t make bread, you’ll make soup. It will be disgusting.
WORDS of wisdom from chef bates
Still not sure what all this means? Check out this post on Spruce Eats How to Proof Yeast: Test your yeast to see if it’s still good
What is fermentation?
Scientifically, fermentation refers to the chemical decomposition of complex organic compounds into simpler substances.
In baking, fermentation refers to the process whereby yeast converts sugar to carbon dioxide and delicious alcohol flavor compounds, causing dough to rise.
When yeast is allowed to consume sugar really fast – say in an overly warm proofing environment – the less taste, texture and quality of the final pizza crust.
Think about it. Mass-produced bread is churned out quickly to produce more and more product to send to the shelves at Publix or Walmart, resulting in bread that is generally bland, mushy, and lacking in flavor. Why is sandwich bread sold for $3.00 a loaf so terrible? They add a dough conditioner to the mix to speed up fermentation. This step saves on time but does not allow for extended flavor and quality to develop through the fermentation process.
On the other hand, SLOW fermentation improves flavor and texture because the yeast has an opportunity to create more of the alcohol flavor compounds that make good bread tangy and delicious. Long, slow fermentation = flavorful pizza crust, rich in aroma and texture
What happens when you add water to flour?
Gluten does not exist in flour. Surprised? I bet you are.
The endosperm of certain grains—namely wheat, barley, and rye—contains a pair of proteins called glutenin and gliadin, which, when they get wet, absorb water like tiny sponges, and form gluten. When flour is mixed with water, the gluten created by the combination of gliadin and glutenin naturally swells to form a continuous network of fine strands. You don’t have to knead the dough for this network to form… it happens naturally.
Why is gluten so important to great pizza crust?
When gluten is kneaded, the network of tiny strands of protein are strengthened as they come into alignment. Under a microscope, this interwoven collection of proteins actually looks a bit like a net. A “net” is a good way to think of gluten because, as the yeast in the dough eats sugar and creates CO2 gas, the net of strands “catch” the bubbles like a balloon.
Gluten creates this net for catching bubbles because it has four important properties:
- gluten absorbs twice its weight in water
- it’s really sticky
- it is extensible; this means it will stretch when pulled
- it is elastic; when stretched it will return to near its original size.
What is dough hydration and how does it affect the final pizza?
In bread baking ‘hydration’ refers to the amount of water relative to the amount of flour in the dough.
For example if a recipe called for 100 grams of flour, adding 70 grams of water would make a dough with 70% hydration (7:10 ratio). This is relevant to pizza because varying the level of dough hydration directly affects the qualities of a finished crust. Too little hydration and the crust will be dense and dry, while too much water will result in a dough that is sticky, too fluid to shape, and difficult to slide into the oven.
Increasing hydration means adding more water to the dough recipe. Decreasing hydration means reducing the amount of water in the dough recipe.
Imagine a really dry dough with very little water in it. That dough is a brick. Dry dough is strong but not at all stretchy. Also, once baked, it would be very dense and well, disgusting.
On the other hand, a very wet dough with not much flour is slime. Wet dough has almost no strength whatsoever but it is very stretchy. When baked, the dough would be much lighter but it would not be able to hold a shape. These extremes illustrate the importance of proper hydration. For pizza, we need a dough that is:
- stretchy – so that we can stretch it out thin
- strong – so that it doesn’t tear and can hold its shape
- airy – so that we get a nice light crust
Achieving all these qualities is a bit of a balancing act. When reducing hydration you will always lose a little stretchiness and when increasing hydration you will always lose a little strength.
But it’s not that simple. Different flours absorb different amount of water so you have to add different proportions of water to flour to achieve the same results. Here are the general hydration percentages for the different kinds of flour you might use when making your pizza:
- Italian 00 flour — 55%-60% hydration.
- Standard all-purpose white flour — 65%-70% hydration.
- High-gluten bread flour — 58%-65% hydration for a hand-stretched NY-style dough like the one in this recipe. (Bread flour can go higher — 70%+ — for wetter, more artisan styles, but that’s a stickier dough that’s harder to control until you’ve got more reps under your belt.).
- 100% whole wheat — 70%-80% hydration range.
What is the autolyse stage?
In addition to the two proteins which create gluten, flour ALSO contains enzymes that break down long proteins into shorter ones in a process called autolyse (auto meaning “self” and lysis meaning “break down”) – pronounced ‘auto-leez’ – rhyme with ‘please’,
Bakers have known about this process for years, and many incorporate an autolyse step into their recipes, mixing together flour and water and allowing it to rest before adding the remaining ingredients and kneading. Autolyse cuts kneading time, and produces a dough easier to shape, with more volume, better texture, flavor and color.
The French Master Baker Raymond Calvel coined the method in his book “The Taste Of Bread.” In his experiments, he noticed that mixing flour and water together and allowing it to rest resulted in a better quality bread, with less kneading time.
The science behind it comes from two enzymes at work; protease and amylase. Protease breaks down protein to start gluten bonds forming, and amylase breaks down starches into sugars that the yeast will consume when added later. The process allows the dough to start gluten development in a passive way, and will require less kneading to produce better results.
What does salt do to pizza dough and why should you wait to add it?
Salt greatly reduces the effects of the enzymes at work during the autolyse stage so it is important it is NOT added early. Salt also tightens the dough and makes it more challenging to knead. ON the other hand, if you DON’T add salt to your pizza crust, it will taste flat and disgusting.
So… don’t add salt at the beginning. (But don’t forget to add it later. You’ll be sorry.)
What is “oven spring?”
When bread is introduced to the oven, two things happen, the yeast gets a final “kick in the pants” and goes crazy producing CO2 gas. It’s as if it knows it’s about to die and wants to enjoy its last meal. Also, the moisture in the crust is converted to steam and pushes up on the dough, helping with the last push upward and outwards.
Oven spring continues until two things happen: the high heat kills the yeast and the exterior gluten structure of the dough (the crust) sets, holding in the outward motion. Oven spring is important in pizza making because the crusty rim of the pizza SHOULD puff up while the toppings hold down the center.
What is a cold fermentation?
Cold fermenting your dough—that is, storing it in the refrigerator after forming it—improves both its flavor, texture, and its browning characteristics as the yeast slowly gets to work digesting carbohydrates.
Pizza dough gets better and better over the course of a few days in the refrigerator, peaking at about 3 days. Of course this means you will need to add in time to remove from refrigeration, allow it to come to room temperature before stretching and baking.
What are the stages of fermentation?
- Pre-ferment: Many professional pizza makers take a small amount of dough, often from a previous batch and allow it to rise before adding the rest of the ingredients. This preferment is rich in flavor and adds much to pizza’s tangy, rich crust.
- First Fermentation: After adding the pre-ferment to the dough, the first fermentation takes place; this can take as long as 48 hours for a cold-fermented dough and as short as 90 minutes in a humidity and temperature controlled proofer.
- Second Fermentation: Punch down the bread, knocking out the CO2 that has formed, shape it into the form you want to slide into the oven.
- Proofing: After shaping (also called “makeup”), the bread is proofed again. This process can last anywhere from one hour to one day.
- Oven spring: Finally, the loaves of bread expand by means of yeast and steam during the baking process until the crust has set and the yeast dies.
Stretching your dough
Most beginning pizza makers freak out a little when it comes time to stretch the dough they’ve made into a roughly pizza-like shape.
Never fear! It’s not as hard as you think and really just requires practice and a couple of pointers.
You can do it!
And if you are still nervous, here’s a video from our friends at King Arthur’s Baking Company:
Working With Our Pizza Oven: the TurboChef Fire
Everything above about home ovens topping out around 500°F? That’s not what you’re working with here. Our TurboChef Fire runs at 842°F (450°C) — most of the way to that commercial 900°F benchmark we mentioned earlier, and about 350 degrees hotter than the best a home kitchen can do. That gap is exactly why a pizza baked in this oven and a pizza baked in your oven at home are two different foods.
How we run it: 775°F on the bottom, 700°F on the top. Slide the pizza in, give it 90 seconds, then give it a partial turn and another 90 seconds. Done — 3 minutes total, start to finish. That bottom-hotter-than-top setup is deliberate: the crust needs the harder hit of heat to set and brown, while the top stays just cool enough that your cheese and toppings finish without scorching before the crust catches up. The turn halfway through is what keeps the browning even instead of leaving one side pale because it sat closer to a hot spot.
Why it cooks so differently than a home oven — beyond just the temperature: A home oven relies on one thing — hot air slowly surrounding the food. The Fire stacks two heat-transfer methods at once. High-speed convection blasts the pizza with forced hot air far faster than a still oven ever could, while independently controlled top and bottom elements hit the crust and the toppings with direct radiant heat at the same time. That’s why the bottom can run at 775°F while the top sits at 700°F — the crust and the cheese are cooking on two different heat curves simultaneously, instead of one average temperature trying to do both jobs.
Preheating: It takes a full 20 minutes for this baby to get hot. Don’t launch a pizza into an oven that hasn’t come fully up to temperature — an underheated Fire will cost you the fast, even cook that makes this oven worth using in the first place.
The door: Treat it with more respect than a home oven door. The glass and frame sit inches from a chamber running 700-775°F, and the handle itself is a separate installed piece, not a molded part of the door — don’t yank on it, don’t lean on it, and don’t let it slam shut. Open it fully before sliding a pizza in or out so you’re not scraping toppings off against the frame.
Avoiding getting burned: This is the single easiest place to get hurt in our kitchen, so slow down every time you’re at this oven.
- Assume the door, the interior, the pizza, and the peel are all hot — every time, no exceptions, even if you “just” opened the door for a second.
- Use the peel to load and unload. Don’t reach in with your hand to adjust a pizza mid-bake.
- When you are moving the pizza to the cutting board, announce loudly “hot moving” so the rest of your crew behind the line gets out of your way. That peel is HOT and can burn someone badly just by brushing against their skin. Give the turn its full attention — it’s the moment you’re closest to the opening with the door held open, and it’s also when you’re most likely to be rushing because you’re thinking about the timer instead of your hands.
- After shutdown, the oven needs roughly two hours to cool before anyone touches the interior for cleaning. Don’t shortcut that waiting on “it’s probably fine by now.”
Cleaning: Only TurboChef-approved oven cleaner goes anywhere near the interior — other cleaning chemicals can damage the oven and void the warranty. Never spray cleaner into the vents or openings, and never use a hose or water jet to rinse it. Damp towel only, and only once the oven has fully cooled.
SAUCE
While the dough is important – and it really, really is! – the sauce is almost as vital. Lucky for us, making great pizza sauce just requires understanding three simple rules:
- cook it low and slow
- make it thick
- keep it simple
Cook it low and slow
Tomatoes are amazing vegetables, filled with bright delicious flavors …. which evaporate into the kitchen as you boil them mercilessly on the stove. Fresh tomato flavor is derived from volatile compounds, right? Heat increases their volatility. During heating, these compounds escape into the atmosphere, creating the wonderful tomato aroma that fills a kitchen when there’s a simmering sauce pot.
Unfortunately, this also results in a corresponding flavor loss in the sauce. Why? The flavor LEFT THE POT and is floating around in the atmosphere. Also, the caramelization that happens with tomatoes under higher temperatures can easily turn the sauce from a beautiful crimson to a brownish-red color (a sure sign of a poor quality sauce) and a burned or bitter flavor.
The solution? A VERY long cook time at a VERY low temperature.
Make it thick
Pizza sauce is not like pasta sauce. With a pomodoro or marinara, there are lots of ingredients that blend together – onions, garlic, lots of fresh herbs. With pizza sauce, we want the opposite: a thick, heavily flavored sauce that will not weigh down the dough or be so wet is absorbed into the crust, turning it slimy.
This is why so many pizza sauce recipes either call for the addition of tomato paste or cooking the sauce down by 1/3 to 1/2: they are looking for that thick consistency that leads to a sauce that is spread more than one that is poured.
Make it simple
The best pizza sauce recipes don’t have a ton of ingredients. The sauce isn’t the star!
To make great pizza sauce, make sure the acidity of the tomatoes is balanced with a tiny amount of sugar, don’t neglect the salt, add a strong aromatic backbone (a blend of dried herbs), and a pinch of heat. The recipe below for pizza sauce will LOOK simple (but the layers of flavor will win you over on the pizza).
Troubleshooting: Fixing a Pizza Gone Wrong
You did everything right and it still came out wrong. OR SO YOU SAY. Here’s what might have happened and how to fix it next time.
You added extra flour to make the dough “easier to work with”
This is the single biggest way students wreck this dough, and it usually happens with good intentions. The dough feels sticky, feels wrong, feels like it’s not doing what the recipe promised — so you dust the counter, dust your hands, dust it again, and knead in flour that was never part of the formula.
Remember the hydration math from earlier: this recipe is built at 63% hydration on purpose. Every bit of “just a little extra flour” you work in during mixing or shaping quietly drops that percentage. You’re not fixing the dough — you’re changing the recipe, mid-recipe, without meaning to. And a dough that’s drier than it’s supposed to be won’t stretch thin without tearing, won’t trap gas the way it should, and bakes up dense instead of light — even though every other step was perfect.
Fix: Measure by weight, not volume — that’s why the recipe gives you grams. And when the dough feels sticky during mixing or the early stretch, that’s not a problem to solve with flour. Sticky is normal at this hydration. Let the mixer do its job, or if you’re hand-kneading, use short rests instead of extra flour — the gluten will relax and get less sticky on its own.
The dough won’t stretch — it just snaps back
This is gluten being stubborn. Remember that gluten is elastic — it wants to spring back to its original shape. If you rush straight from the cooler into stretching, the gluten is still cold and tight and will fight you the whole way.
Fix: Give it more bench rest. If it’s fighting back after a minute of stretching, stop, let it rest 5-10 minutes under a towel, and come back to it. Don’t force it — you’ll tear it, and torn dough doesn’t hold sauce or oven spring right.
The dough tears the second you stretch it
Opposite problem, same root cause: the gluten network is either over-proofed (it’s been eating and expanding so long the structure is exhausted) or over-handled (you’ve stretched, folded, and re-stretched it into fatigue). Either way, the “net” we talked about earlier has holes in it now.
Fix: Once it tears, you can’t un-tear it. Patch small holes by pinching dough from a thick spot into the thin one — don’t try to stretch a patch back to full size, or it’ll rip again in the same place.
The crust is dense and bready instead of light and airy
This is almost always a fermentation or hydration problem, not a stretching problem. If the dough didn’t get its full cold-fermentation time, the gluten network never fully developed and the yeast didn’t have time to build the flavor and structure that makes a crust light instead of gummy.
Fix: Don’t shortcut the 48 hours. If you’re in a time crunch, that’s a scheduling problem to solve upstream — not something you fix by kneading harder or adding more yeast.
The crust is pale and floppy instead of browned and crisp
Go back to the very first thing this post told you: your oven tops out around 500°F and a real pizza oven runs closer to 900°F. At home-oven temperatures, you’re fighting physics — you don’t have the heat to set the crust before the toppings finish cooking.
Fix: Preheat your stone or steel for a full hour, not 15 minutes — the stone needs to actually soak up that heat, not just sit in a hot oven. Put it on the highest rack. If the top still isn’t browning by the time the bottom’s done, finish it under the broiler for the last minute — watch it the entire time, because broilers go from “perfect” to “charcoal” fast.
The middle is soggy or gummy
Sauce that’s too thin, or too much of it, will do exactly what we warned about — soak into the dough instead of sitting on top of it. Wet toppings (fresh mozzarella that hasn’t drained, watery vegetables) do the same thing.
Fix: Go back and check your sauce against the “make it thick” rule — it should spread, not pour. If your toppings are the problem, drain them first: pat fresh mozzarella dry, salt and drain watery vegetables like mushrooms or tomatoes before they go on.
The edges are burnt but the center’s still raw
Usually means the oven’s hot enough to scorch the exposed crust rim before the center — which has sauce, cheese, and toppings insulating it — has caught up.
Fix: Roll your dough rim slightly thinner than you think you need to, and don’t overload the center with toppings, which slows down how fast it cooks.
How Do You Know It’s Right?
Before you cut into it, check these. A good pizza tells you it’s good before you even taste it.
The rim. It should be visibly puffed up above the level of the toppings — that’s oven spring doing its job, the crust setting around gas the yeast produced right before it died in the heat. A flat rim means the dough didn’t get enough oven spring, usually from an oven that wasn’t hot enough or dough that was under-proofed.
The color. You’re looking for leopard-spotting — random dark brown to near-black blisters across the rim, not one uniform tan. Uniform pale gold means your oven never got hot enough. Solid black across the whole rim means it got too hot, or it sat too long.
The bottom. Lift a slice and look. You want color — golden-brown at minimum, with some darker spots — and it should look dry, not shiny or pale white. A pale, floppy bottom means the stone wasn’t hot enough or wasn’t preheated long enough.
The sound. Tap the bottom crust with a finger. It should sound hollow, almost like knocking on a door — that’s a sign the crumb structure set properly. A dull thud usually means it’s underbaked or the dough was too dense to begin with.
The cut. Slice it open and look at the crumb — the interior of the crust. You want visible irregular air pockets, not a tight, uniform crumb like sandwich bread. Big, random holes are the gluten net doing exactly what we described earlier: catching gas bubbles and holding them. A tight, even crumb means the dough was under-fermented or over-worked.
The center. Cheese should be melted through with some browning — not a flat, unbroken sheet of white, and not a greasy pool sitting on top of the sauce (that’s usually too much cheese, or cheese with too much moisture in it). The sauce underneath should still be visible in color, not fully absorbed into the dough.
Recipes
Pizza Dough
Ingredients
- 263 grams High gluten flour about 2 cups
- 166 grams Water about 3/4 cup
- 4 grams Salt about 3/4 teaspoon
- 3 grams Sugar about 1/2 teaspoon
- 2.5 grams Olive oil about 1/2 teaspoon
- 0.9 grams Instant dry yeast about 1/2 teaspoon
Instructions
- Put water into the mixing bowl, add sugar, then add the flour and the yeast. Mix at low speed for about 2 minutes, then mix at medium speed until all of the flour has been picked up into the dough. Add the oil and mix for 2 minutes at low speed, then mix at medium speed until it develops a smooth, satiny appearance (generally about 8 to 10 minutes using a planetary mixer).
- The dough temperature should be between 80 and 85F. Grease dough box and refrigerate overnight for first 24 hours of cold fermentation.
- Bring dough to room temp 2 hours before scaling. Scale the dough into 2 20oz portions and round into balls. Turn the dough balls with salad oil, and return to plastic dough boxes spaced about 2 inches apart.
- The dough balls will be ready to use after 48 hours of cold fermentation
- To use the dough balls, remove a quantity from the cooler and allow them to warm at room temperature for approximately 1.5-2 hours. The dough can then be stretched onto skins, or shaped into pans, proofed, and baked.
MASTER PIZZA DOUGH BULK RECIPE
So what happens if you need to make 15 pizzas? Follow this bulk recipe instead, that’s what.
INGREDIENTS
| VOLUME (Single Pizza) | WEIGHT (Single Pizza) | WEIGHT (Bulk Quantity) | BAKER’S PERCENT | INGREDIENT |
| 2 cups | 263 grams | 25.0 pounds | 100% | High gluten/ Bread flour |
| 3/4 cup | 166 grams | 15.5 pounds | 58 – 65% | Water |
| 3/4 teaspoon | 4 grams | 6 ounces | 0.5 – 3% | Salt |
| 1/2 teaspoon | 3 grams | 4 ounces | 0.5 – 3% | Sugar |
| 1/2 teaspoon | 2.5 grams | 4 ounces | 1 – 2% | Olive oil |
| 1/2 teaspoon | 0.9 grams | 2 – 3 ounces | 0.17 – 0.5% | Instant dry yeast |
Note: Water temperature should be adjusted to give a finished dough at 80 to 85°F.
INSTRUCTIONS
- Put water into the mixing bowl, add sugar, then add the flour and the yeast. Mix at low speed for about 2 minutes, then mix at medium speed until all of the flour has been picked up into the dough. Add the oil and mix for 2 minutes at low speed, then mix at medium speed until it develops a smooth, satiny appearance (generally about 8 to 10 minutes using a planetary mixer).
- The dough temperature should be between 80 and 85F. Grease dough boxes and refrigerate dough overnight.
- Bring out dough 2 hours before scaling. Scale the dough into 20oz portions and round into balls. Turn the dough balls with salad oil, and return to plastic dough boxes spaced about 2 inches apart. Cross stack the uncovered dough boxes in the cooler for 2 hours as this will allow the dough balls to cool down thoroughly and uniformly. The dough boxes can then be nested, with the top box being covered. This will prevent excessive drying of the dough balls.
- The dough balls will be ready to use after 48 hours of refrigeration.
- To use the dough balls, remove a quantity from the cooler and allow them to warm at room temperature for approximately 1.5-2 hours. The dough can then be stretched onto skins, or shaped into pans for proofing.
Pizza Sauce
Ingredients
- 28 ounces whole peeled tomatoes canned, with their juice
- 1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
- 1 tablespoon unsalted butter
- 2 medium cloves garlic grated on microplane grater (about 2 teaspoons)
- 1 teaspoon dried oregano
- Pinch red pepper flakes
- Kosher salt
- 1 medium yellow onion peeled and split in half
- 2 6-inch sprigs fresh basil with leaves attached
- 1 teaspoon sugar
Instructions
- Process tomatoes and their juice through food mill. Purée should not be completely smooth, but should have no chunks larger than 1/16th of an inch. Set tomatoes aside.
- Combine oil and butter in medium saucepan and heat over medium-low heat until butter is melted. Add garlic, oregano, pepper flakes, and large pinch salt and cook, stirring frequently, until fragrant but not browned, about 3 minutes.
- Add tomatoes, onion halves, basil sprigs, and sugar. Bring to a simmer, reduce heat to lowest setting (bubbles should barely be breaking the surface), and cook, stirring occasionally, until reduced by half, about 1 hour.
- Discard onions and basil stems. Season to taste with salt. Allow to cool and store in covered container in the refrigerator for up to 2 weeks.
Great Links
Understanding the Role of Fermentation by Bake Magazine
What is Gluten? The Science behind great pizza crust by Serious Eats
New York-Style Pizza Sauce Recipe by Serious Eats
Pizza Physics: Why Brick Ovens Bake The Perfect Italian-Style Pie by NPR