I've gotten so much help learning to make bread and pizza dough (among other things) from folks on this site, I thought I would try and pass along what I've learned. I've been really happy with my recent batches of pizza dough. I thought I'd consolidate my lessons learned here. I occasionally use Peter Reinhart's Napolitano dough but I feel like the recipe below works best in my home oven. Please, pizza gurus, feel free to add corrections/suggestions.
Wild Yeast (Sourdough) Pizza Dough
Adapted from Peter Reinhart’s American Pie and Jeff Verasano’s website, with lots of tips gleaned from Bill/SFNM’s posts on LTH Extreme Cooking blog and videos and a tip or two from Bridgestone (hope you don't mind my gathering all the info together here). Holding back some of the flour with the initial mixing was a critical tip. Especially with a Kitchenaid mixer—the process is much more efficient with a wetter dough initially.
Starter activation:
I use a 3:2 flour:water ratio for a relatively dry starter. I’m not sure why—basically just an average of the different proportions I have read about.
1. Take starter out of the fridge 30 minutes before activation
2. Add :
½ cup (120 g) filtered water
¾ cup (90 g) bread flour
3. Stir vigorously
Now it looks like this:
4. Place in a warm place for 2+ hours (or until about doubled). Make sure to put something under the starter container, in case it bubbles over. I use the proof function on my oven set to 85 degrees.
On the rare occasion I catch it before it overflows, it looks like this:
5. When finished, remove 1 cup of starter, add another ½ cup filtered water and ¾ cup bread flour to recharge starter. Wait about 1 hour before putting starter back in fridge.
Dough:
4 cups (500 g) of bread flour (note: for chewier dough, you can substitute 2.5 T of Vital Wheat Gluten flour for an equivalent amount of bread flour--I can't decide yet if I can tell a difference but I put some in my last batch)
1-1 ¼ cup filtered water
2 t (10g) fine sea salt
2 T honey
3 T olive oil
1 cup activated starter (see above)
Note: instructions given are for mixer. If you don’t have a mixer, you can knead by hand for the same length of time (wet one hand and use it like a dough hook per Reinhart).
1. Mix 3 cups of the flour and 1 cup water with all the remaining ingredients. Dough should look wet and be very sticky. If it’s not, add some more water.
2. Mix with a spoon to moisten flour, then on low speed for 1-2 minutes
3. Let rest for 20 minutes
4. Mix for about 8 minutes more. Let rest 1 minute. Restart mixer pausing every 30-60 seconds to gradually add the remaining cup of flour and mix for another 3-4 minutes. The dough should be sticking to the bottom of the bowl but otherwise should NOT be sticking. Add small amounts of water/flour as needed to get proper consistency.
Sticking to the bottom only:
5. Let rest for 15 more minutes
6. Mix for additional 1 minute.
7. At this point, pull off a small piece of dough and dust it with flour. It should feel very smooth and should be elastic when you stretch it. If not, mix 4 more minutes, let rest another 10 and try again.
Very soft and smooth
Sort of a windowpane test (I usually can't get a true windowpane with my pizza dough)
8. Transfer to a lightly floured work surface and knead by hand for about a minute.
9. Divide into 4 pieces with a knife or dough scraper.
10. Lightly oil 4 small containers, place a piece of dough in each. Lightly oil top of dough ball and cover container.
11. Leave out for about 3 hours, and then refrigerate overnight. After that you should use the dough within 3 days or freeze in containers.
After 3 hours:
Voila!
Tips for Making Pizza
1. Don’t freeze dough until it’s had 1-2 days to rise
2. If using frozen dough, leave it out for a day on the counter or overnight in the fridge.
3. Remove refrigerated dough about 2.5-3 hours before use
4. Don’t roll out pizza dough. Dust the surface you will be working with a light coating of flour. Gently stretch it with your hands. If it looks like it may tear or it doesn’t stretch anymore, leave it covered with a towel for 10 minutes, then return to stretch it some more. The principle is that you are trying to keep the air pockets the yeast created.
5. When dough is stretched into a thick circle, transfer it to parchment paper dusted with cornmeal or flour for further stretching
6. When dough is fully stretched, transfer parchment with dough to a peel or the backside of a cookie sheet and use that to transfer parchment + dough to stone. (Mike G's tip)
7. Pre-heat your oven with the stone in it at your oven's highest setting for about an hour if you can.
Edited to add another big
THANK YOU! to Mike G for his life-changing parchment paper tip