I’ve been making pizza for 25 years now. I’ve done it all — deep dish, NY style, Neapolitan, etc., etc. I consulted all the pizza recipe books, scoured the Internet (only in the past 14 years of course), visited the library, bookstores, and visited countless pizza shops and restaurants hoping to discover some secret about how to make a decent tasting dough. If you make your own pizza, you know what I’m talking about. For at least 18 or 20 years I could make a pretty good pizza crust. Sometimes bready, sometimes thin, and usually somewhat tasty crust. I could achieve results that were better than many pizza restaurants though never as remotely good as the best ones. What was missing? What was missing was that intangible flavor. That unique taste. It varies widely, but there is always something mysterious about the crust of the best pizzerias. In all styles it’s always the crust that makes the difference between good and great -enjoyable or unforgettable. What the hell is it?
I acted on various impulses. It’s vinegar. I added vinegar. Nope. I used more salt, less salt. Nope. Potato flour. A pinch of baking soda (along with the yeast). Nope. Nope. Nope. Fancy German yeast? (that made no sense). Rice flour. Caputo flour. Nothing really worked. The best suggestion came from Shanon. She’s an experimenter and perfectionist — much more so than me. She thought, why not make enough dough for two nights? Why not see what happens if you let it sit in the refrigerator overnight? Well, that was the single best improvement in my dough until I came across Jeff Varasano’s recipe. My dough acquired additional flavor and was always better on that second night. Voila. Better, but still not great. My other major problem was consistency — sometimes I’d make very good pizza while at other times (usually for guests, of course) I’d make mediocre pizza.
So, lacking still, I kept searching.
How did I make pizza up to this point?
Well, I basically used (with occasional experimentation) the proscription of just about every single pizza dough recipe one can find — whether from the recommendations of the worlds top chefs or from the recipes on the back of a bag of flour: One packet of yeast, two and one-half cups flour, one tablespoon olive oil, one teaspoon salt. Mix together, let rise an hour or two until the dough is doubled in bulk, stretch, bake, blah, blah, blah. I would either knead by hand or use the old Violet Delashmitt Kitchen-Aid mixer. I would only knead until I had a nice smooth ball of dough. I always equated kneading with mixing. (As a single man, I had equated needing with mixing too.) So, once mixed, once the ball was smooth….. done. That was a mistake.
Next time, the Jeff Varasano recipe distilled. Until then (and always) you’ll certainly benefit from a visit to Jeff’s Recipe page:
Yes, I do, Carolyn. PizzaHomeChef.com’s will take you through the ripece and technique for making a great pizza that you can stretch or roll very thin. As you get the hang of it, you’ll be able to stretch your dough till you can actually see light coming through. This is called windowpaning. When you can see the light, you’ll definitely have a very thin crust pizza. There’s a discussion of this at with some photos of this translucent dough effect.Then you can decide if you really like it that thin.So it’s partly about a good dough ripece (also available in the previous post) and partly about fine-tuning your technique.Please check in and share your progress.