I started making my own pizzas in 2010, from an online recipe. It was fun! But things got way better when I was given the Pizza Pilgrims Book for Christmas in 2014. I had never even considered making the dough a whole day before; a delicious improvement.
Thing is: chef quality pizza dough made in a wood fired oven doesnât always fit with everyday life. I started with the Pilgrimsâ recipe, but itâs constantly evolving with what works best for me. Read on belowâŚ
Dissolve the sugar into 300ml of the lukewarm water. Add the yeast, then whisk the mixture so that the yeast has some oxygen to work with. Cover the dish/jug/whatever with a tea towel.
Mix the flour and salt in a bowl, and clean a surface ready for kneading. Dust the surface with flour.
Use the oil to grease the 8 bowls and 8 plates. Put them to the side.
Hopefully by now the yeast has been resting for 10-15 minutes. Small bubbles should have formed on the water surface - gas produced by the yeast. Pour in the remaining 300ml of water, then whisk the mixture again.
Pour the yeast mix into the flour, and roughly mix it all together using the spatula. Tip the roughly mixed dough onto the floured surface. Knead for 15mins; doing this correctly is important for getting the gluten fibres stretched and aligned correctly, to produce elastic dough. Correct technique is much easier to understand visually - here is a video of the technique I currently use.
Leave the kneaded dough to relax for 10-15mins.
Aggressively knead the dough for 15secs. Divide it into 8 - I recommend using a knife to cut the ball into quarters, then balling up each quarter and cutting those in half. Place each 8th into one of the oiled bowls, and cover with one of the oiled plates. The oiled plate âlidâ avoids sticking even if the dough overflows the bowl while proving.
Leave the dough bowls in a warm place for around 12hrs. The liveliness of the yeast can be very variable, so exactly how long will depend on how quickly the dough proves. The longer the prove, the tastier the pizza base, but youâll need to stop the prove if the dough overflows the bowl.
(Many recipes recommend proving on a flat surface, giving the dough room to relax outwards. I find this only works with high gluten flour that has been kneaded expertly, otherwise the dough is not elastic enough and falls apart when youâre trying to make a pizza. Proving in bowls seems to provide extra structure, allowing you to get away with lower quality preparation!)
Once the prove has finished, you can either use the dough right away - see below - or preserve it in the freezer for future use.
Freezing: intermediate steps need a lot of space per dough, so you donât need to freeze all doughs at once. A few at a time is fine. Place each bowl directly in the freezer, trying to keep the plate on top of the bowl, to prevent the dough drying while it freezes. After an hour or two, remove the frozen dough from the bowl - this will hopefully be easy if using the suggested flexible bowl. Put the dough into a sandwich bag quickly, before the edges start to soften, and put the sandwich bag back into the freezer.
I have used all of the above cooking options at different times. The domestic oven works well, although it can be difficult to get the dough to bubble at these temperatures. The fired pizza oven is great for the theatre and sense of occasion, but is a lot more effort to work with - you need space inside/outside, you might need to cook outside, and wood fuelling requires its own expertise. My preferred compromise is a counter-top electric oven (I currently use a G3 Ferrari) - it achieves the temperatures required for bubbling the base, and is very easy to work with, albeit there is no wood smoke in the flavour, and it takes 4mins per pizza instead of the 90secs of an authentic fired pizza.
If youâre feeling special you could get:
You will notice the difference. But if youâre doing this every week, ânormal qualityâ tomatoes and mozzarella, plus dried basil, still makes for a tasty pizza but with lower expense and lower effort. I tend to save the special stuff for parties.
Blend the tin of tomatoes; most blending wands fit straight into the tin, or you can use some other receptical; make sure you have a spoon ready for applying your new passata to the pizza. Chop/grate all your other toppings before doing anything with the dough.
Place the dough on the large floured implement. Press it flat, starting in the middle and working outwards. Flip over and do the same on the other side to get it a little thinner. If the dough is weak - not very elastic and likely to pull apart - then this is as much stretching as is safe; you can try to pull it a little thinner, but donât let it leave the surface it is resting on. But ideally the dough will be nice and strong, in which case: pick the flattened dough up and rest it on your knuckles (these are smoother than your finger tips), then stretch it outwards until you can see a some light passing through it. You can try spinning the dough in the air if it seems strong enough!
Bring the refractory stone out of the domestic oven if applicable.
If you are using a refractory stone, or the right sort of counter-top oven, you can get a better quality base by adding toppings while the base is already cooking. Fired ovens do not permit this since the stone is in a covered chamber. Either way you should work quickly, before the base absorbs the flour dusting and starts to stick.
So, if you can (see above): transfer the pizza base onto the cooking stone by sliding it off its current surface; you may need to agitate/wiggle the surface slightly to get the base moving. Otherwise: leave the pizza base on the flat surface you pressed it on.
Apply the tomato passata with the back of spoon, thin enough that you can still see the base 50% of the time. Tear small chunks of mozzarella onto the passata, then sprinkle parmesan; be sparing with all of these - a light pizza is a good pizza. Add any other toppings you like. Drizzle a small amount of oil on top.
Either:
In a domestic oven, cooking could take up to 10mins. Keep an eye on it but no intervention is needed. In a fired oven, cooking takes just 90secs, and you should rotate the pizza half way through. Counter-top ovens will be somewhere between these two times, and may also require the pizza to be rotated during.
Rotating the pizza: there are fancy implements for this, but I often find itâs easiest to bring the pizza out of the oven and rotate it 180 degrees with your fingers.
Remove the pizza from the oven once the base has browned slightly. Sprinkle any leaf ingredients such as basil or rocket. Enjoy!