Pizza dough for a home oven
Most pizza dough recipes are written for an oven that reaches 450°C. Yours does not, so the dough has to do more of the work. This one is cold fermented for flavour and hydrated enough to puff hard the moment it hits a hot plate, which is how you get an open, blistered edge out of a domestic oven.
The dough
Makes four 250g bases, enough for four 30cm pizzas or three larger ones.
- 500g bread flour, or 00 flour if you can get it
- 325g cold water, which is 65% hydration
- 10g salt
- 3g instant yeast
Mixing and the cold rest
Mix the flour, water and yeast until no dry flour remains, then leave it covered for twenty minutes. This rest hydrates the flour and does part of the kneading for you.
Add the salt and knead for five minutes. The dough will be sticky at first and will come together. Cover and leave it on the counter for an hour.
Divide into four, shape each piece into a tight ball, and put them in separate covered containers in the fridge for 24 to 72 hours. This is where the flavour comes from. Twenty-four hours is good, forty-eight is better, and at seventy-two the dough starts to get slack.
Take the dough out two hours before you bake. Cold dough does not stretch.
Preheat, and why the top rack
Put the plate on the upper third rack and run the oven at maximum for 45 minutes after it signals it is up to temperature. Ovens lie about being preheated; the plate needs the full time regardless.
The top rack matters because the base is going to cook in about four minutes on the steel, and you need the top to keep up. Close to the roof of the oven, radiant heat from above browns the cheese and the cornicione in the same window. Turn the grill on for the last five minutes of preheating and leave it on while you bake.
Stretching and baking
Flour the ball generously, press it out from the centre leaving the outer two centimetres alone, then lift it onto your knuckles and let gravity do the last of the stretching. Never use a rolling pin: it crushes out the gas you spent two days making.
Build the pizza on a floured peel or the back of a tray, and work fast. Dough that sits on a peel sticks to it. Top lightly. The single most common home pizza mistake is too much sauce and too much cheese, both of which put water on the base faster than the steel can drive it off.
Slide it on. Six minutes, give or take, until the edge is puffed and spotted and the base is set. Check the underside with a spatula after five.
Back to back
The plate loses heat to each pizza. On 6mm, give it about five minutes between pizzas to recover with the oven and the grill still going. On 10mm you can go almost straight into the next one, which is most of the reason to own the thicker plate.
Cold ferment for at least 24 hours, preheat the plate for 45 minutes on the top rack with the grill on, and go lighter on the toppings than feels right.