The Elements of Pizza

DETAIL 1: MATCH THE DOUGH AND ITS HYDRATION TO THE OVEN AND ITS BAKING TEMPERATURE

To shape the dough balls: 1 Take a piece of dough and stretch one-third of it sideways until it resists, then fold it back over the main piece of dough. Repeat, working your way around the dough and forming it into a round. The emerging dough ball will develop tension and form a smooth outer skin as you repeat this folding action. Stop when the dou

I developed and tested all of the recipes in my home kitchen in Portland, Oregon. The typical temperature indoors overnight is about 67°F (19°C), and the daytime temperature is usually around 70°F (21°C). In the summer the daytime temperature in my home kitchen is typically 5° or 6°F (about 3°C) warmer. The dough timelines in this book are importan

Enzo Coccia is one of my pizza heroes, and I met him at his pizzeria, La Notizia. Enzo is a third-generation pizzaiuolo making some of the best pizza in Naples right now, and La Notizia won the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana (AVPN) Best Pizza award for 2014, a great honor.

Here’s the basic drill for the five categories of pizza in this book. NEAPOLITAN, ROMAN THIN CRUST, AND NEW YORK PIZZAS Preheat the oven to its maximum temperature—550°F (290°C) is very common—with the pizza steel or stone set on an upper rack about 8 inches below the broiler coil, for 45 minutes total. This timeline allows the oven to be fully sat

If you’re feeling more ambitious, I have a dough recipe that uses a pre-fermented dough called biga. And if you really want to go the distance, I show you how to make a naturally leavened dough that uses your own starter and no commercial yeast. You can use any of these doughs—naturally leavened, made with pre-ferments, or straight—to make one of s

Italian whole peeled tomatoes. The richness of their flavor and their balanced acidity—perfect for pizza. Right now we are blending Rega and Ciao brand tomatoes to get the flavor and consistency that work for us.

DETAIL 6: ALLOW SECONDARY FERMENTATION TO BE LONGER THAN PRIMARY FERMENTATION

Rome, because it has two distinct styles of pizza that I admire: one a super-thin crusted wood-fired-oven style; the other called al taglio, served by the slice, which is found in bakeries. You will find pizza in both of these cities’ styles, with plenty of hybrids of the two, throughout Italy and beyond. In Bologna you will find very thin crust pi