5 Tips For Making Better Pizza At Home
Plus: Two Tools to Invest In
Hello Pizza Friends,
Last night I taught the virtual preorder-Pizza Night cooking class. We made two pizzas and a salad, and the whole process made me nostalgic for the bygone era of bi-monthly pandemic cooking classes. Not that I wish that time to return! But virtual classes are fun. Thanks to all who came.
One of things I wanted to express during class but didn’t get around to is that I really believe making pizza at home is a simple process. It’s a matter of mixing together flour, water, salt, and yeast (or sourdough starter). You don’t need a stand mixer to do this; you don’t need to knead by hand. You can bake your pizzas using sheet pans, cast iron skillets, and other tools you may already have in your arsenal.
In sum, I think you can make really good pizza at home with basic ingredients and equipment.
That said, I also think you can make excellent pizza at home by investing in a few tools and by keeping in mind a few details, all of which I share below.
Friends, next Friday I’ll be in California for the Pizza Night book tour. I don’t have a post prepped to send from the road, so I’ll share some snaps from my adventures instead, if that’s OK. I hope to meet many of you in person these next few weeks, so please say hi if you make it to any of the events!
PS: Pizza Night will be here Tuesday!! Get your copy here 🍕🥗🎉
5 Tips for Making Better Pizza at Home
Use a scale to measure.
It’s the only way to measure accurately. And it’s the only way to make meaningful adjustments should your dough turn out too wet or too dry, which may happen given your environment and the flour you are using. If you care about making a consistently good pizza crust every time, measuring by weight is essential.
Don’t be afraid of salt.
The general rule for bread and pizza dough is that the weight of salt should be roughly 2 - 3% the weight of the flour. This amount may seem like a lot when you stir it into your flour, but it’s not, and using the right amount of salt is important not only for flavor but also for strengthening gluten and controlling fermentation. Your dough will not taste too salty.
Don’t be afraid of water.
One of the challenges of baking pizza in a home oven is temperature: a home oven simply will not get as hot as a commercial oven. Pizzas baked in a home oven therefore take longer to cook, which means more water will evaporate from the dough. To make a pizza with a light and airy crust in a home oven, you have to use a high-hydration dough.
The best way to understand the relationship between oven temperature and dough hydration is to look at a recipe for classic Neapolitan-style pizza dough, which on average will be roughly 60% hydration, which is on the low end. Neapolitan pizza dough is low in hydration because it is baked in 900ºF ovens for 60-90 seconds, during which time very little water evaporates, which allows the crust to emerge light and airy.
If you bake a 60% hydration dough in your home oven, you’ll be left with a dry, hard brick of a crust. So, in sum, when making Neapolitan (or other) pizza dough for the home oven, you have to start with much more water from the start.
Invest in a Baking Steel.
The best tool you can invest in to improve your pizza crust is a Baking Steel. In short, steel is a more conductive cooking surface than stone, which means heat transfers more quickly from steel to food than it does from stone to food. J. Kenji Lopez Alt offers this explanation:
“How does the baking surface affect hole structure? Well those crust holes develop when air and water vapor trapped inside the dough matrix suddenly expand upon heating in a phenomenon known as oven spring. The faster you can transfer energy to the dough, the bigger those glorious bubbles will be, and the airier and more delicate the crust.”
Don’t rush.
Time is the ingredient first to be sacrificed when we are in a rush, and I get it: when life gets in the way, we can’t always make dough ahead of time; we can’t always preheat our Baking Steel for an hour; we can’t always sufficiently proof our dough balls at room temperature.
But when life allows, do give the process time:
Make your dough ahead of time. Not only will you be getting your prep work done days in advance, you’ll also be improving your dough’s flavor and texture: during a long, slow fermentation, enzymes in both the flour and the yeast break down the starches in the flour into simple sugars, which contributes both to flavor and to browning.
Let your dough balls proof at room temperature sufficiently. They’ll be effortless to stretch into 12-inch rounds.
Preheat your oven for an hour or more. A hot oven equipped with a blazing hot Baking Steel will ensure your pizza bakes properly in a timely manner.
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When will link to last nights pizza class be sent? I pre ordered book and unfortunately was not one of the lucky 500.
Thanks
I always refrigerate my entire container of dough after it's risen and then make my dough balls the day I plan to make pizza, letting them proof at room temp for several hours prior to shaping/baking. The pizzas always turn out great, but am wondering if there's a specific reason to make the dough balls after the first proof and refrigerate the individual dough balls. Thanks!