The Elements of Pizza

At Ken’s Artisan Pizza, we have been using the low-gluten flour from Shepherd’s Grain, a product of the Pacific Northwest, since we opened in 2006. The results are excellent. Dough made with Shepherd’s Grain flour stretches well, has excellent flavor, and has a protein content between 10.5 and 11.5 percent, depending on the previous year’s wheat-gr

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

GLUTEN’S ROLE IN PIZZA DOUGH Strong flours are high in protein, up to 14 percent as measured by flour weight, and have long been thought of as ideal for bread making. In fact, they’re really ideal for industrial bread baking, but not so much for high-quality breads. The high protein level works best with the intensive mixing and fast rising product

To help you get consistent, dependable results, I ask you to use a digital probe thermometer to measure water temperature for mixing dough, and to get the dough temperature after the dough is mixed. (A probe thermometer has multiple uses in the kitchen, especially for making sure meats are properly cooked.) My ideal bread dough temperature, for max

The typical sauce at a Neapolitan pizzeria is simply pureed canned whole tomatoes and salt. Most pizzerias empty cans into a big bucket and use an immersion blender to mix the sauce, while some use a more labor-intensive manual food mill. Olive oil does not go into the sauce. It goes on the pie as a dressing after the sauce and the cheese. If orega

An improvement to the earthen pizza stone is now on the market: the pizza steel, made from ¼-inch-thick steel. Steel is more conductive than stone, and in all of my test baking I get superior results with the steel. The stone doesn’t release its heat as fast as the steel does. A greater intensity of heat hits the bottom of the pizza crust, which is

I made some refinements too, with recipes for smaller batches of dough than those that were in my first book, and for using smaller amounts of flour to start and maintain a levain. This book’s pizza dough recipes are streamlined, and they take less time to make than the pizza doughs in FWSY—but they make better pizza. I decided to abandon my bread

HOW MANY DOUGH BALLS? The Neapolitan and New York–style pizza recipes in this book tell you to divide the dough into three equal pieces between 260 and 285 grams each. For Roman pizzas, you should divide the dough into five pieces of 150 grams each. If you don’t want that many dough balls, just cut the recipe in half. For bar pizzas, the Bar Pizza

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