How to make your pizza dough at home

The best pizza dough you ever made

The first pizza dough we are making together is for everyone who wants to learn how to make pizza the easiest way, using simple, easy-to-find ingredients: all-purpose flour (or sometimes it is called hard baker’s flour), active dry yeast and salt that can be found in any grocery store. And most importantly you will be able to bake this pizza in your average, household oven, without the need for a professional pizza oven. I choose to make a moist enough dough that is easy to knead by hands, but not too moist to be difficult to handle when we get to the pizza making part. At certain steps of the process I will add my practical advises based solely on my practical experience and the tons of experiments I went through in the last 15 years.

There are recipes in many cook books or on the internet for making pizzas in 2-3 hours from start to finish. Those pizzas will never be anything close to be decent. The rising agent is yeast in your pizza. Give enough time to the yeast to do its job. Anything between 8-24 hours of fermentation time is good enough to make an excellent dough.

This very easy-to-follow method of mine is for mixing the dough at nighttime, let it rest overnight (first fermentation period of 10-12 hours), cutting and rolling the dough balls the next morning and the pizzas can be baked on the afternoon or at nighttime after a second fermentation period of 4-6 hours. Some people do the 48-hour or even 72-hour pizza dough. I look at it as over exaggeration. In my opinion 18-24 hours of fermentation is more than enough time for making an amazing dough that results in exceptional pizzas, and most importantly I want to teach you an absolute practical and usable method that fits your very busy life. Who has time and patience to nurture our weekend dinner throughout the entire week, right? This method requires 15 minutes of your time to mix the ingredients at night, 5 minutes work next morning, and then just making the pizzas on the same afternoon or whenever you are ready within the next 24-48 hours.

Before we start working on the dough, let me introduce my dough recipe book available on Amazon: https://amzn.to/3R1DtjY

 

You can find dough recipes with various flour types that fit everyone’s level, from beginner to advanced. You can also get some unique pizza combination ideas as well as useful and practical tips how to make your pizzas at home.

 

Ingredients for this recipe: (we use only the 4 essential ones)

1. 500g all-purpose flour

2. 325g lukewarm water

3. 1/8 tsp dry active yeast (half of 1/4 tsp)

4. 12g salt

Dissolve the yeast in lukewarm water. Always use warm water, gives just a necessary kick to the yeast. If the water is too hot, the proofing will be too fast. After the overnight rest, we might find a way over proofed dough in the morning. That’s why never use hotter water than lukewarm. On very hot summery days, when your room temperature is higher than normal, you might want to use a little bit cooler water to keep the same proofing time. Just a bit cooler water, not too cold!!!

Add the flour.

Add the salt.

Now we start working the ingredients together with our hand. I suggest to use only one hand. With this amount of dough, you don’t have to make both hands sticky, you can hold the rim of the bowl with your clean hand, while incorporate the ingredients with the other by a constant squeezing motion. Open and close your fist.

The mix is slowly coming together.

After a couple of minutes, as the dough picks up the loose pieces from the side of the bowl, you can move it to your counter top to start the kneading.

Hand-kneading the dough consists of basically two, very simple motions. First you push it it out with the edge of your palm.

Then grab the farther edge of the dough with your fingers and fold it half towards you.

Then repeat the movement with the edge of your palm and push it forward again. Then fold it again. Knead the dough for 5-10 minutes. From around halftime you will realize it stops leaving sticky marks on the surface you are working on and becomes smoother and smoother. Here is the dough after 5 minutes of kneading.

The dough is still a bit rough around the edges, but it will be beautifully smooth by the next morning when you cut and roll the final dough balls. Put the dough into a plastic container and cover it with wrap or a damp kitchen towel.

Let it rest on your counter top at room temperature for 10-12 hours. Here is what it should look like after that amount of proofing time: doubled in size and very smooth.

Here is the perfect opportunity to show you something that other recipes never do. I made a second small batch with much more yeast in it to show you some signs of imperfection. You can see the difference between the dough at IDEAL fermentation level after 10-12 hours of resting (on the photo above), and the dough which already has the 2 very significant signs of being OVER-PROOFED. Protruding gas bubble on the top half, as well as the collapsed part on the bottom half (on the photo below). You still can use this dough, however you might find it a little bit more difficult to stretch out the dough balls when you make the pizza. It is better to avoid to be over-proofed.

So now we have a bulk fermented dough. We have to cut it to the right size in order to make dough balls. You can use a knife or a dough cutter. This recipe makes either 4 x 205g dough balls (making 9″, personal size pizzas) or 3 x 275g dough balls (making 12″, medium size pizzas), or 2 x 415g dough balls (making 14″, large pizzas). I cut personal size pieces from my batch:

Now we have to roll the dough balls. Here is a short video for that:

Just a little recap where you are now in the process. Following the mixing of the ingredients, your dough was bulk fermenting for 10-12 hours on room temperature. Then you cut the dough for the required size and rolled the dough balls.

Now you put the balls into airtight containers or on a tray and cover it with food wrap for a final rest period, before you start making pizzas. If you want to make pizza(s) as soon as possible, then just let the dough balls rest on room temperature on your kitchen counter (make sure the container or tray is airtight, otherwise the outside of the balls starts drying out in no time!!!) for 4 more hours, then they are good to go. If you want to bake the pizza(s) at a later time (meaning more than 4 hours from balling the dough),then put them into your fridge and just take them out 4 hours before you make the pizza(s). You can keep them in your fridge for another 24-48 hours if it is needed. Just make sure to leave them out on room temperature for 4 hours before using them. Your dough balls at the end of the fermentation process:

Congratulations! You have just made your own, double fermented dough. Just like a pro, but in your own kitchen!!!:)

In this post I used lots of pictures and written explanations. Next time I will post videos showing the kneading process and how to hand-stretch the ready dough ball.

If you have questions about anything I explained in this post, or you bumped into some difficulty, I want to hear from you. I will help you figuring things out. The successful dough making process is depending on many factors. Sometimes our dough just doesn’t turn out the way we expected! Never get discouraged! The more you practice, the better you get at this! You can write a comment, gladly help you to get over any obstacle to make better pizzas at home.