Pizza Dough

I’ve been working on my pizza dough technique for years.  The recipe is super simple, but getting a stretchy dough that will cook up into a thin crisp crust is a challenging.  I’ve started using a scale for the flour-to-water ratio because it’s hard to describe how the recipe should look in terms of water ratio, so it’s hard to adjust later if the dough it too wet or too dry. Measuring flour by the cup has a lot of variation depending on how compressed or fluffy your flour is. This doesn’t matter 95% of the time.  But pizza dough, especially in a small batch, seems to be sensitive to water content.  A wetter pizza dough, more like ciabatta bread, will seem fine but bake up into a thicker and more bread-like thick crust.  And a dryer dough may be really hard to stretch into a thin crust without shrinking back towards the center.  But both the stretchiness and thickness are also dependent on kneading time, rise time, and dough temperature.  The good news is, homemade pizza dough will always taste great.

If the dough is hard to stretch, despite following all the instructions, try stretching it in stages.  That is, do what you can to form a disk, then let it rest for 5-10 minutes so the dough relaxes, then return to stretching it thinner.  Repeat as needed until you get it stretched.  This recipe makes 3 small pizzas, each about 12 inches in diameter.  I plan on about 1 cup of flour per 12 inch pizza.

The list of ingredients is short, but the list of instructions is pretty long. Don’t be intimidated. The pizza dough rise time is very forgiving so you can let it rise for as little as an hour or a couple of days in the fridge. We’ve all see recipes for no-knead bread that just advocate for leaving the dough to rise in the fridge for 24 hours instead of kneading. This will work with pizza dough, but I prefer to knead my dough so I’m sure everything is well blended. Clearly under kneading is not going to hurt anything if you plan on a long rise time. I’ve struggled a lot with stiff, hard to stretch dough when I try to make a low water content recipe. But a longer rise time seems to cure this, along with making sure the dough is at room temperature before you start to shape. I like dividing my dough into balls before the final rise because they fit better in my fridge that way. And when I’m ready to cook up my pizzas, the first step is already done.