Best Homemade Pizza Dough

I forgot some ingredients and timings, scrambled to recover it, and accidentally gave birth to the best pizza dough I’ve ever made.

On my pizza journey, I’ve been a steady disciple of the wonderful Elements of Pizza by Ken Forkish. Mainly, this is his Overnight Sourdough Pizza Dough, but with some significant changes to the starter and the timings of the feedings.

Because this is a sourdough-based dough, if you don’t already have your own levain culture, this recipe will be inaccessible to you. Even if you do, you’ll need to spend at least one feeding getting your culture in line with what this recipe requires.

Here’s the full recipe. This makes six personal Neopolitan-style pizzas, but scales up and down arbitrarily.

ingredients

• 1 Sourdough Starter
• 25g Whole Wheat Flour
• 200g White Flour (or bread flour or “Red Bag” Caputo Brand 00 Flour)
• 750g “Blue Bag” Caputo Brand 00 Flour
• 28g salt, preferably fine sea salt, iodine-free

instructions

Procedure here is going to be a bit less detailed than what you’ll get from the book. If it’s your first time making pizzas with homemade dough, consider practicing and coming back to this one.

at around noon the day before pizza night:

1. Put 50g of levain in a tub with 100g of 100F water. Dissolve as best you can.
2. Add 100g of white flour and 25g of whole wheat flour, mix with your hand until combined.
3. Leave out at room temp overnight, covered.

early morning of pizza night:

4. Open the tub of levain culture and breath it in. Mmmmmm.
5. Add 100g of white flour and 125g of water to get the hydration to 100%-ish.
6. Remove 50g of levain. Save it if you don’t have a mother culture, otherwise discard.
7. In another tub, dissolve 28g of salt in 450g of 95F water.
8. Add all the levain into this tub with water. Dissolve as best you can.
9. Add 750g of Blue Bag flour. Mix until just combined.

20 minutes later:

10. Kneed on a lightly floured surface for like a minute. Smooth it out and return to the tub.
11. Leave at room temperature, covered.

3 hours later:

12. Divide dough into 6 even pieces and shape them into dough balls.
13. Store on an oiled sheet pan and wrap with plastic wrap.
14. Leave out at room temperature.

literally any time that night:

15. Let them eat pizza.