A few words about yeast and flour

Yeast is a live organism. Given the proper conditions it metabolizes making copies of itself. In the process it produces CO2 gas - which will give rise to the dough in the presence of gluten. At 130F it dies, and below 85F it acts more slowly. We prepare a dough that contains gluten, a result of mixing the flour with water and kneading. The gluten network then traps the CO2 created during the fermentation process, causing the dough to rise and create the pockets of air in the crumb after we cook it.

For this reason, it is best to start with a flour that has a high protein content, sometimes called strong flour. You could use bread flour, which meets this characteristic. All purpose flour would work, but the pizza would be less elastic and more difficult to stretch.

Fast vs Slow Fermentation

This recipe is designed to make your pizza proof fast. That's why we use a whole tablespoon of active dry yeast. There are countless variations on how to make pizza dough. These basic instructions are enough to get you started. The procedure described below produces a very delicious pizza as related to me by thousands of participants in my pizza workshops.

You can, of course, use less yeast and allow the dough to proof for a longer period of time, even overnight or longer. This process will produce a more flavorful dough as the yeast will compete with bacteria in the environment, producing a different kind of fermentation. While the yeast ferments producing alcohol, the bacteria produce lactic acid which will add complexity to your dough.

Starting with less yeast also produces a more digestible dough, as the yeast slowly consumes the starches present in the flour.

Dough Hydration

For NY Style pizza I like to have a dough with 65% hydration, which refers to the amount of water relative to the flour. For every hundred grams of flour we would add 65 grams of water.

However, even if I weigh the ingredients carefully, I rely on the visual and sensory clues from the dough determining how much to add and mix - always a little at a time, allowing the flour to hydrate slowly and gradually. Conditions are subtly different every day, which means at any given time we might need more or less flour than the recipe calls for.

Stretching the dough

We never use a rolling pin to stretch our pizza. Doing so would crush the gluten network and deflate all the nice bubbles we worked so hard to create.

There are many methods to stretch the dough. I prefer a combination of gently pushing the dough into shape and then letting the weight itself to do most of the heavy lifting, finishing with a gentle final stretch it using my fists and carefully separating them.

Baking

We cook the dough at the highest temperature our oven can give us, with some exceptions.

Although not really required, your pizza will turn out better if you use a pizza stone, or better yet a pizza steel, in your oven. The stone or steel loose very little temperature when the colder pizza hits it, instead immediately transferring a sudden burst of heat and cooking the crust almost immediately. Also, the pizza dough reaches a high temperature very rapidly, making the CO2 trapped inside expand with the heat. This results in a nice, tight, bubbly texture in the inside of the crunchy dough.