Bread Baker’s Apprentice Pizza Recipe

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Ingredients

• g Water
• g Dry yeast
• g Bread flour (for dough)
• g Olive oil
• g Salt

Jeff Varasano’s Pizza Recipe

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Ingredients

Process

Mixing Initial Dough

• Pour all the ingredients into the mixer, except use only 75% of the total flour for now. Everything should be room temperature or a bit cooler. If you’re looking for some free sourdough starter, ask me for some or check out Carl Griffith’s 1847 Oregon Trail Sourdough Starter.
• Mix with the dough hook on lowest speed for 2-4 minutes or until completely blended. At this stage you should have a mix that is drier than a batter, but wetter than a dough – closer to batter.
• Cover and Let it rest for 20 minutes.

Wet Kneading (the key to the chewy texture)

• Start mixing dough on low speed.
• If you are using a Kitchen Aid, and you lift the hook, the dough should fall off by itself. The hook should look like it’s going through the dough, not pushing the dough around.
• Five minutes into the wet knead, start adding remaining flour gradually.
• Increase the speed of the mixer slightly.
• One of the best ways to see how your dough is doing is to sprinkle a little flour on in and just feel it. It should feel baby bottom soft.
• Allow to rest/rise for a few hours

Portioning

• Pour dough onto floured surface.
• Knead for a few seconds
• With a dough scraper, cut into single pie portions and knead into ball
• The proportions above will provide 12” very thin pizzas. For thicker (1/2”) crust, increase by portion size by 50% (e.g., make the three pizza recipe for two pizzas)
• Put dough balls into lightly olive-oiled, one-litre plastic (e.g., Ziplock) containers
• With the lid on, put into the fridge for up to five days. Leave out on the counter if making today.
• Allow to warm/rise one hour at room temperature

Prepping the oven

• Put the pizza stone into the oven
• Turn the oven to bake at the hottest temperature possible
• Allow to heat for at least 20 minutes

Forming the pies

• Pour dough (it should be soft/slack enough to literally pour out of the plastic container) onto well-floured surface
• With your fingers, delicately press and stretch out the dough to desired diameter/thickness, turning and dusting with flour occasionally
• The dough will be very soft and you will need flour to keep it from sticking to the surface and your fingers
• Sprinkle peel with flour and/or corn meal
• Fold the stretched pie into half and half again (so it looks like a quarter-pie slice)
• Lift onto peel and unfold
• At this point, it’s good to (over the sink) do just a little shaking of the dough on the peel, to make sure that the flour/corn meal is working and it’s not stuck
• Add toppings

Cooking

• Slide the dressed pizza from the peel onto the stone
• Allow to cook until you think it looks done… then give it at least one minute more (until you start to feel some anxiety) – the little bit extra browning on the crust and cheese makes it better

Credits

This recipe and methods described herein, have been adapted from the Jeff Varasano’s New York Pizza page.