Basics with Babish did pizza dough this week. I’ve been waiting for Sunday all week because of that.
He mentions that the recipe is Jim Lahey’s overnight pizza dough. The recipe looks super simple and I love the fact that everything is listed in grams. Baking is science and that’s usually why I don’t do it. I don’t really like following directions in the kitchen, but I can make an exception for pizza. And no, it is not this guy, but I like to imagine it is.
| Ingredient | Quantity |
|---|---|
| AP Flour | 500 Grams |
| Salt | 16 Grams |
| Active Dry Yeast | 1 Gram |
| Water | 350 Grams |
Sift your green ingredients together in a bowl then add your water to the mix slowly. Fold with a fork until it comes together and looks like a fucking mess. Then push it in to the center of the bowl and cover with a tea towel for a whopping 20 hours. I forgot to mention, you’ll need some time.
After 24 hours, you’ll have a mass of dough that has doubled in size and has little bubbles in it. Mine dried out a bit here (I think) because I didn’t wet the covering tea towel for the first part of the ferment. It was also pretty cold in the house, I think I could have gotten a better rise if we kept the heating up a bit.
Once I was ready to go, I liberally floured the clean counter and turned the dough out on to it. I cut it in to four pieces. These pieces made very small pies, personal size.
Next time, I’m just going to cut the dough in half and make one pizza and one fucked up calzone thing full of cheese.
Pretty sexy. I’m really happy with the flavor that comes from the slow ferment. It really tastes like what ‘pizza dough’ should taste like. It ended up pretty under-done even with a 525F oven. I used a cast iron pan as a stone of sorts. I think I’ll get better results with a real stone and steel.
I’ll be working on this one for sure.
Update 0
Yeah I bought a steel. I still need to practice with it before I put my talents on display. Suffice it to say I like having a 1/4" plate of steel in my oven to play with.
Update 1
Making sexy looking pizza with some practice!
I’ve found that using the convection bake setting on the oven as opposed to the broil setting gives the best results. You want the steel to be the hottest thing, not a source above the pizza.
Preheating the oven to 525 for an hour makes sure that the steel is crazy hot. So hot that water just dances on it.