Mastering Pizza

Stefano’s dough is almost 70% water (relative to the flour), which is pretty high for Naples-style dough. That amount of water, gives the dough a lot of bubbles and a big lift, which makes Stefano’s crust light and airy. His pizza oven is about 800°F (427°C) on the floor, which puffs up the dough pretty fast and makes the bottom crust nice and cris

As Dr. Jones explains, better-tasting pizza can be as simple as adding fresh-milled, whole grain flour to your dough. You might think, “Why not just add some store-bought whole wheat flour?” Well, store-bought whole wheat flour gives you the nutrition but not the flavor—because it’s not fresh! For flavor and nutrition, fresh-milled stone-ground flo

you’ve never made pizza dough before, I highly recommend starting with Bonci-style Al Taglio Dough (this page). I’ve fallen in love with this kind of dough recently, and the basic recipe in this book couldn’t be simpler. It calls for dry yeast and store-bought bread flour. You don’t need a mixer. Just stir everything together in a bowl with a spoon

removed to slow down its activity so it lasts longer at room temperature. Most of the recipes in this book call for active dry yeast because it’s consistent, predictable, and widely available. This kind of yeast is a little slow to wake up, which I like, because it gives pizza dough a long, slow fermentation time, and that helps build flavor. I don

For every 500 grams of flour called for in any of my dough recipes, you can use about 200 to 250 grams of active Whole Grain Sourdough Starter at 100% Hydration (this page) instead of the yeast that’s called for. To account for the flour and water already in the starter, reduce the flour and water in the recipe by 100 to 125 grams each. For instanc

When testing fresh flour for the pizzas in this book, we milled on the finest setting of our home mills. For every 1,000 grams (2.2 pounds) of flour we milled, we sifted out about 100 to 200 grams of bran/germ flakes. That’s an 80 to 90% extraction rate, which is high-extraction flour. Anything above 75% is considered high extraction.

Ovens that burn wood are actually part of a larger category called masonry ovens. In fact, the very first ovens were masonry ovens. Going way back, they were clay pots with lids that were put over a wood fire. Today’s Dutch ovens are direct descendants of those original primitive ovens. A lot of today’s wood-burning masonry ovens are still made of

Why? Oil makes the dough richer, softer, and easier to stretch thin. It also makes the crust crunchier. That’s what I’m going for in a crisp pizza Romana (this page and this page).

Hotter ovens cook dough more quickly, giving water less time to evaporate, resulting in a softer overall texture in pizza. Cooler ovens cook dough more slowly, giving water more time to evaporate, resulting in a crisper overall texture in pizza.