Share your dough recipes!

(Moderator’s note: this topic was split off from a discussion of one member’s oven build. The original topic was What is the average finished cost of your Mattone Barile series ovens?)

Glad to here you having fun and good use of you oven. It’s been a mild winter for the most part here in Chicago but started off unusually cold and wet. So I decided not to risk anything, being a new at this and cover it up. I’m experimenting with dough recipes and what not, in my house oven. It’s been a fun. Trying to figure out the best way to slide the pizza of the peel with out using to much flour. I think if I get a perforated GI peel that might help. I think I too have the only oven in the yard in my town. I do have a Neapolitan restaurant near me. The owner wants to come over and show me some tips. That’s cool.

Happy cooking!

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Oh, man, you’ve been blessed by the pizza titans!

It’s really good to keep practicing even when the oven is out of commission for the winter. It took me a long time to learn how to toss a Neapolitan crust (and our kitchen has 7.5 foot ceilings so I REALLY have to be careful!), and I’d hate to get rusty at that skill.

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Thanks. Going to take full advantage of his advice. I want to find what is the best hydration for the dough, sauce recipes and the best toppings. Any good info I get I’ll share on an other post.

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If you learn some cool dough reciples, please share… Still looking for a great dough recipe! Thanks Bud!

Will do. Right now testing out different brands of flour and hydration levels.

Neo-Neapolitan Pizza Dough

5 1/3 cups (24 oz / 680 g) unbleached bread flour

2 teaspoons (0.5 oz / 14 g) salt

1 teaspoon (0.11 oz / 3 g) instant yeast

2 tablespoons (1 oz / 28.5 g) sugar or 1 ½ tablespoons (1 oz / 28.5g) honey

2 cups plus 2 tablespoons (17 oz / 482 g) water, at room temperature

2 tablespoons (1 oz / 28.5 grams) olive oil (optional)

Do Ahead – can be done up to 4 days in advance if you are going to refrigerate the dough

  1. Combine all the ingredients in a mixing bowl. If using a mixer, use the paddle attachment and mix on the lowest speed for 1 minute. If mixing by hand, use a large spoon and stir for about 1 minute, until well blended. The dough should be course and slightly sticky. Cover the bowl with plastic and let the dough rest (autolyse) for 25 minutes to fully hydrate the flour.
  2. Switch to the dough hook and mix on medium-low speed, or continue mixing by hand, for 2 to 3 minutes, until the dough is smoother but still soft, supple, and somewhat between tacky and sticky.
  3. Spread 1/2 teaspoon of olive oil on a work surface, then use a bowl scraper to transfer the dough to the oiled surface. Rub your hands with the oil on the work surface; then stretch and fold the dough one time, reaching under the front end of the dough, stretching it out, and then folding it back 1/3 of the way onto the top of the dough. Then do the same thing from the back end and then from each side, then flip the dough over and tuck it into a ball. Divide the dough into 5 equal pieces, each weighing about 8 ounces (227 g). If you are going to use this dough for Stromboli, divide the dough into 7 equal pieces. Form each piece into a ball, and then place each into a separate sandwich-size freezer bag misted with spray oil. Seal the bag and refrigerate overnight or for up to 4 days.

On Baking Day

About 90 minutes before you plan to bake the pizzas, place the desired number of dough balls on a lightly oiled work surface. With oiled hands, stretch and round each piece into a tight ball, and then place them on a pan that’s been lightly oiled (preferably with olive oil). Loosely cover with plastic wrap and let rest at room temperature until ready to bake.

About 1 hour before baking the pizzas, preheat the oven and a baking stone as high as the oven will go. If you don’t have a pizza stone, you can assemble the pizzas on baking sheets covered with parchment paper and bake them on the pans. While the oven is preheating, prepare your cheeses, sauces, and toppings.

When ready to assemble and bake, put about 1 cup (4.5 oz/128g) of flour in a bowl. Use some of it to dust the work surface, your hands, and a pizza peel, if you have one. If you do not have a pizza peel you can use a cookie sheet in its place. Put one of the pizza dough balls in the flour to coat the bottom. Transfer to the work surface and gently tap it down with your fingers to form a disk. Slide the backs of your hands under the dough, then lift it and begin to rotate it, using your thumbs to coax the edges of the dough into a larger circle. At this point the dough is draped over the back of your hands. Don’t stretch the dough with the backs of your hands or your knuckles, let your thumbs do all of the work; your hands and knuckles merely provide a platform to support the dough. If the dough starts to resist and shrink back, set it on the floured work surface and let it rest for a minute or two. You can move on to another dough ball, repeating the same gentle stretching. Continue working the dough and resting it as need be until it is about 10 to 12 inches in diameter. It should be thicker at the edges than in the center and the center should be thin but not paper-thin. If the dough rips, you can try to patch it, or you can form it back into a ball, move on to another dough ball, and try again in 15 to 20 minutes.

When the dough is ready to be topped, place it on the floured peel. Use flour rather than cornmeal or semolina, as it doesn’t burn as quickly in the oven. Top the pizza as desired, and then slide it onto the baking stone. If you aren’t using a baking stone, just put the panned pizza in the oven.

Bake for about 4 minutes, and then use the peel or a spatula to rotate the pizza. It will take anywhere from 5 to 7 minutes for the pizza to fully bake, depending on the oven temperature (convection ovens bake faster). The edge should puff up and be a deep golden brown, perhaps even slightly charred.

Remove the pizza, garnish as desired, and then let it cool for 1 minute before slicing or serving.

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Welcome to the BrickWood forums, Stacey! And thanks for sharing this recipe.

I am wondering how this would do in a wood-fired oven, since the added sugars may caramelize and burn in the 700°-plus heat before the ingredients cook.

But I approve heartily of the long fermentation period.

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I am not sure about that. I currently make mine in my oven at 500. We are planning on building our gas heated pizza oven this spring. It is a wet dough in the beginning but the next day it is soft and airy. It tightens up with some good old kneading while preparing the crust. Please let me know if you try it and how it turns out. I have tried using semolina on the bottom to transfer to my stone but found using parchment paper worked best. I am not sure this would work in an oven that hot. Maybe cornmeal would help slide?
Stacey

I’m pretty sure that 700-900°F would be beyond the capability of parchment paper and it would at least smolder. 500°F may even be pushing it. I buy mine in bulk rolls from Costco and they specify 420°F/216°C as the maximum. But if it’s working for you on a stone, that’s great!

There are different opinions about cornmeal. Some swear by it, and even consider it an adjunct to getting a crispy crust. Others avoid it because it scorches easily at these temperatures.

If you are using a pizza flour formulated for high-temperature baking, flouring the peel with that specific flour might be the way to go. Side benefit is that it will work down into the joints between the firebrick and keep them tight. (At one time BrickWood recommended flouring and sweeping the oven floor near the end of construction to seal the hearth bricks, but nowadays recognizes that your fire ashes are going to do that. Since you’re planning a gas-fired oven, you’d be more likely to benefit from the flour!)

So, speaking of your proposed oven, what’s your plan? You’ll find the folks here really enjoy reading about other people’s ovens, and we are a very supportive group.

Hi all, today was the big day. Oven was ready, dough was cold fermented for 3 days, sauce was spot on, pizzas were all made and ready to go. Then we realized we had no way of getting them from the pans onto the peel to put in the oven. The dough was so thin and sticky it was impossible to transfer off the pans even though we’d floured the pans. Can’t believe after the 400 steps to get to this point, getting the pizza into the oven was the failure point. Any recommendations? Flour the hell out of the pans and try again? Build the pizza right on the peel (though it doesn’t seem like it would have slid off the peel either). Help! Maybe my dough was too sticky if no one else has this problem.

Reading your post…and thinking you should cold ferment the dough in single serving balls, then stretch and toss them and straight into the peel from there.

Otherwise you are as stuck as you describe.

Use a second peel, slip it under the edge of the dough disc, and break the suction. You’re doing right with thin crust, but it does cling to the peel.

How frustrating! Hope this helps.

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Hi all, after 7 days of curing fires and 2 failures with pizza dough/cooking mechanics, we’ve achieved success. Had my Italian in-laws over for a trial and they raved about the crust and the pizza overall (small criticisms of the sauce but my wife made it so that’s not on me).
I’ve been baking bread in a steam oven for a long time so I should have known better than what I was doing with the pizza crust, but anyway I watched a YouTube video and followed to the T, and it came out spectacular. Link here, notes below: How to Make NEAPOLITAN PIZZA DOUGH like a World Best Pizza Chef - YouTube

Dough: 600ml water, 1000g flour (I did 50/50 bread flour/00), 2-3g saf instant yeast, 25g salt. Slightly different than he prescribes but I’m telling you it was absolutely perfect. Charred bubbles, crispy outside, soft fluffy inside with just the right chewiness. I put the flour, salt, and yeast in the mixer bowl and whisked thoroughly. The yeast in the water and 10% flour to buffer is a mess in my opinion, mixing the dry ingredients well together is much easier and no loss of anything. Then add the water and start the KitchenAid on lowest setting until the dry flour is all gone. I use a fiberglass chopstick to get the dough off the sides and into the heart of the mixer. You can use a spatula or back of a wooden spoon too. After 5-7 minutes of mixing, you should have a dough ball that holds together well and is slightly, just slightly sticky. If it’s too sticky, add flour teaspoon by teaspoon. You don’t want to throw the hydration ratio off too much.
Then take the dough out onto the counter and start kneading it. I almost always skip the hand kneading when making sourdough bread or regular bread and it’s fine, but DONT skip the hand kneading here. 5 minutes to finish it off is enough, somehow it makes a huge difference, maybe it’s your hands taking some of the moisture out or maybe it’s love, I don’t know. All I know is you must do it.
Then let the dough rest 2-4 hours in a dead oven where there’s no draft, covered with a damp cloth. Take it out, cut off baseball sized chunks and weigh them to 250g each. You should get 6 balls. Oil up a huge Tupperware or other plastic container and pop them in. They will double/triple in size in the fridge.
Then into the fridge for 1-3 days. It is much better after 2 days than 24 hours, but even 24 hours is enough for it to mature to greatness. After 3 days the yeast will be exhausted and it will be a saggy sad glop. Take it out of the fridge, give it at least 2 hours to come to room temp and start livening up again but no more than 4 hours. Then you’re ready to stretch over your knuckles into a 14" pie. If you use bread flour, the dough will not tear unless you’re a savage with it. It will take some effort and patience to get a 14" pie but there are plenty of videos that shoe you how to stretch the dough. Take your time. Takes me at least 2-3 minutes of stretching to get to 16/18 inches then it springs back to 14 and it’s perfect. Wrap a damp cloth on your peel and give the oven floor a quick wipe to clear the ash and have at it.

P. S. If your pizza doesn’t cook in 2 minutes, the oven is not not enough. I was temp gunning the floor at 700 and that wasn’t enough. 800/850 is where you want to be. Add more wood and spread it around and keep adding wood until it’s hard to look inside without fearing your eyebrows will burn off, then you’re close. Hope this helps!

Thanks for sharing all the practical trial and error data. I’m definitely going to print this and give it a shot now that we’ve finally run the curing fires.

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Mike, now you got it! Though the process I use is just a touch different in some details, it’s essentially the same as what you are doing. The important thing is to give the dough that 24 to 48 hours to ferment before trying to stretch and form it.

If you got the imprimatur from your Italian in-laws, that’s all the validation any of us can hope for! Here’s to many, many, many happy pizzas, and thanks for sharing the photos!

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Thank you Matt for all your help along the way! This forum was invaluable. The satisfaction of getting that first great pizza our of the oven is hard to beat.

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Great pizzas Mike. I’m going to try your recipe. My that I use, from Wood Fire Oven Chef on YouTube is a 68% hydration. Your looks to he 60.

Just curious though. Your oven looks like you built it sideways. Is that just a optical illusion on how you finished your stucco. Or was it planned that way?

The recipe I use is:

1 liter of water
10 grams of fresh yeast
55 grams of salt
20 grams of olive oil
1700 grams of 00 flour

Combine and knead for 15-20 minutes by hand until the dough is smooth

Rest for 1 hour

Divide into 250 gram balls of dough and let rest for 6-8 hours.

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I’m not going post it here so I don’t violate his copyright. But the Roman style dough in Marc vetri’s “mastering pizza” was amazing. Trying the neopolitan this week.

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