15 Mistakes to Avoid When Making Pizza at Home 🍕

since I first started really getting serious with cooking maybe 10 or 11 years ago I've been obsessed with making pizza it was definitely one of the first things I tried to make and I'm sure there were a lot of pretty bad pizzas but you know what they say about pizza all pizza is good pizza and it's true like I probably made thousands of pizzas over the last ten years and I've never really been disappointed but it's one of those foods at least for me that when I make them I'm never fully satisfied like there's always something better I could do something I can tinker with the recipe but I have learned so many skills over the years that I'm gonna teach you in this video to really perfect the dough to perfect the sauce and finally the techniques needed to get the pizza that you love and you would get in a shop the texture the crispy mess all that goodness in your home oven when it comes to making pizza at home every element is important but I do think the dough is the most important it's like a sandwich without good sandwich bread you're gonna have a really shitty sandwich it's just the way it goes so we're really gonna focus our energy on making the perfect pizza dough at home and most of you will be using something that looks like this right here this is baker's yeast or active yeast or dry yeast and what this stuff actually is is a single isolated strand of yeast which gives you great control on your fermentation and also gives you a really quick rise but there are some downsides to that so most recipes will tell you to just dump in a whole packet which is great if you want a really quick rise but since you're speeding up the fermentation you're gonna be losing a lot of flavor and you really just don't need as much yeast as most recipes say so instead of adding one tablespoon of yeast or an entire packet of this stuff I'm just gonna add about one and a half teaspoons so I can extend my fermentation just a little longer and develop more flavor in my dough to activate my yeast I'm gonna add in some warm water and I'm also gonna add in a little bit of honey you can use sugar or you can skip this step but I like adding a little bit of extra sweetness to my dough and these fees off sugar so this is always going to help with the activation of these this has been activating for about 15 minutes you can see we've got some nice bubbles it smells yeasty and you want to make sure your yeast is activated you don't want to go further if there's no sign of activation or your bread won't rise because sometimes these packets they'll die out over time another thing I see a lot with pizza recipes out there are hydration levels that are super low giving you a denser dough and we want some of that fluffiness in our crust which means we don't want to add too much flour so what I'm gonna do is use both some Italian style double zero flour and also some all-purpose flour you can use a hundred percent all-purpose flour no problem sometimes I'll use whole wheat it's really up to you and what you have in your pantry but I'm just gonna start off with two cups of each and we'll see how the dough goes because all flour is not created equal and it's going to absorb the water at different levels so we want to start with less flour and have the ability to add more rather than the opposite it's much harder to add water once you've added your flour into your dough we've got our flour added I'm just gonna add about two teaspoons of salt and then this isn't necessary but I like adding some olive oil to really get a nice smooth and flavorful dough that's about two tablespoons of olive oil right there [Applause] way too thin on that so I'm gonna need at least another cup of flour and we'll mix that up and see where we're at so this dough is a probably a little more wet than you might be used to but don't be scared of the stickiness at this point as it rests it will get more smooth and also when we need it we're gonna be adding more flour so that's gonna remove some of the stickiness and also lower the hydration so I'm just gonna let this sit for about 15 minutes to rest and then we'll start the kneading process [Music] so I've been needing this dough for about four or five minutes and tip number three is just giving your dough some space when you're rolling out gluten and working gluten it will tighten up and if you give it some time to rest your dough is gonna completely transform so if it ever feels like it's too sticky or it's really tensing up on you just give it like 5-10 minutes to rest and then come back at it and start kneading it again all right so check this out start very smooth so before you start going and adding a ton of flour because you're nervous that it's sticking just let it rest look how much better that already looks so I'm just gonna give it a few more minutes of kneading and this thing will be ready to proof [Music] all right so that is looking very nice and smooth and supple so we're ready to proof I'm just gonna throw that right into here now this is the first proofing and fermentation right here we're gonna let this double in size it should take around one to three hours depending on how much yeast you put in and your environment but this gives us a great time to work on some sauce I want to take a quick break from pizza to tell you about today's video sponsor bright cellars which is very relevant for tonight's meal because I love wine when it comes to Italian food and especially for pizza night but when I go into a wine shop I have no idea what I'm doing wine is something that I like but I just don't know that much about which is why bright cellars is great they're curating wine from all around the world to fit your palate and also pair well with what you're serving up all you have to do is take a quick seven question quiz and once they have your flavor preferences bright cellars goes to or curating the perfect wine that they send right to your doorstep which is fantastic for a time like this because I'm certainly not going to the market right now so because I did that online quiz I got a nice variety here at red I've got some whites Wow quarantine just got a little better if you don't like a bottle that you got and your order bright cellars will actually replace that bottle in your next order which is great but I'm excited to try this I think my favorite part about bright cellars are definitely these education cards and I'm a food nerd so I like learning about my drinks understanding where it comes from the flavor notes and of course the pairings wandering giants is the one for this pizza party because check this out pairings bold smoked cheeses sausage and mushroom Stromboli and swanky dinner parties now just having that little pairing section is fantastic that's so much more information and knowledge than I would ever have with wine pairing so if you're interested in getting wine delivered to you for your own dinner parties bright cellars is giving you 50% off your first six bottle box so make sure you check the link in the description and take your quiz to get started today so I'm not gonna sit here and tell you have the perfect pizza sauce recipe because there are so many different ways to make pizza sauce every pizzeria has their own twists in their own version and different styles of pizzas traditionally have different styles of pizza sauces but one thing I don't want you doing is buying a pre-made pizza sauce because I feel like it's just not worth it and normally they aren't that great and it's really easy to take a can of tomatoes and to enhance it into a delicious pizza sauce so that's what we're gonna do right now the first thing I'm gonna do is slice up a few cloves of garlic it's totally up to you how much garlic you want to use and then I'm gonna get a pan on medium heat and add in some olive oil and just start frying up that garlic on a very low heat making sure to not burn your garlic now this is optional but I like a little spice in my tomato sauce so I'm gonna take some chili flakes you can use fresh chilies as well and I'm gonna sprinkle those into the oil so what I'm doing here is I'm on a very low heat a too right now making sure that the garlic doesn't burn and I'm just slowly infusing the garlic and the chili and a loyal so basically just making a flavored oil I've got my Tomatoes here these are crushed Tomatoes you know and you can have any type of tomatoes but the key rate here we've got vine ripened crushed Tomatoes that's the only ingredient on the ingredient list you don't want a ton of other stuff you don't want tomato puree basil it's just pure Tomatoes and then all of this tomato in there dump it back in and now that what that does is it gives us extra liquid so we can reduce this and let that infuse and really build flavor over time so I'll just keep that on a low heat and simmer that away for the next hour maybe 2 hours until I've got a tasty tomato sauce all right I've been cooking this down for about an hour and a half and a nice low heat it's looking good I'm just getting it to the thickness and consistency that I want and then of course just make sure it is seasoned properly I'll let that cool and we'll make some pizzas tomorrow here you go it's been proofing for about two hours remember if you use less yeast it's gonna take longer than the traditional recipes so we're going to shape these into some nice pizza dough's my next tip is to always pre shape your pizza dough when you go to a pizza shop you always see them pulling out these perfectly shaped dough's from the containers and then they can just effortlessly shape the pizzas if we just started to roll out this shape it would be very difficult to roll out into that perfect circle so we're just gonna take our dough sort of fold it on to itself like that I'm gonna roll it up into roll like that and then just start tucking it and pulling it and getting some tension and every time you pull you're using a little bit of that stickiness of the dough on your surface to create tension and you'll see as we keep pulling and let it stick to the surface we've got these beautiful circular dough balls and that's alright if you get these bubbles like that that's actually kind of nice good sign of fermentation right there it's happening just gonna take a little bit of semolina you can use flour too nonstick your surface we'll add these babies spread them out because they will rise and then I'm just gonna hit them with a tiny bit of olive oil on each and this is going to keep the surfaces from drying out keep them nice and moist which is very important we have our beautiful pizza dough's right here and I told you about lowering the yeast levels for a longer fermentation but another way to develop a lot more flavor in your dough is to slow down the fermentation by throwing these in the fridge overnight so most pizza shops do take advantage of this sometimes they'll let these go balls proof from the fridge for 2-3 days we're just gonna let them proof for 24 hours and of course if you want to make pizza the same day just let these sit out ever in temperature until they gain a little size but we're taking the long road on this dough for the ultimate results so I'll just put some plastic wrap on this and you will in the fridge for at least 24 hours one of the best parts about making pizza at home is it gives you a chance to customize your own pizza and also use up what you have in the refrigerator which is a big bonus but I do ask that you give your toppings a little love there's nothing worse than going to a pizza shop and you can see that they just threw on like some raw mushrooms there's no way a mushroom is gonna taste delicious if you just throw it in an oven for five minutes it's just not gonna be good so what I had in the fridge were some mushrooms and some spinach and to cook the mushrooms I just took out a pan added a little butter through my sliced mushrooms a little bit of salt and just cook those down until the water released and then once the water releases and evaporates then you're starting to fry those up in oil and I just cooked them until they had some nice color and then I removed those and for the spinach I use the same technique as we use for the tomato sauce which was adding a little bit of oil throwing in some garlic frying up that garlic in the oil and just wilting that down until that garlic oil really infuses in the spinach and sometimes I'll just blanch ingredients I give I have some broccoli rabe I'll blanch that and throw it on raw but it is nice to just enhance your ingredients a little bit before they go onto the pizza tip number eight is understanding your oven because all ovens are not created equal so for recipe tells you to do one thing well they might be using a completely different oven so if I take a look inside my oven this is an electric oven and I can already see there's a heating element right here so I want to take advantage of that because that's where I'm gonna get a ton of heat output but sometimes ovens will only have an electric coil down here or some type of gas coming from the bottom so wherever the oven is hottest that's where you want to put your pizza because you're gonna get the crispiest crust coming directly from your heat source and tip number nine is cranking your oven to the highest temperature that it goes because the longer your pizza is in the oven the more moisture will be pulled out of the crust so it starts to dry out which is why a lot of pizzas at home tastes dry and super-moist like you get at a pizza shop now of course our oven isn't gonna get up to a thousand degrees like a wood fire oven so we're not gonna be able to cook our pizza in three minutes but you do want to crank your oven up to the highest temperature that it goes for some reason people seem to be scared to crank their oven to the highest temperature and they're just set on putting it at 350 degrees Fahrenheit but your Elving can get pretty high usually around 500 degrees and you just want to go to the highest temperature possible this thing goes to about 550 degrees and I'm gonna set it on convection because that's gonna give me a little extra heat as well alright now that our ovens preheating there's something very important yeah this right here is a pizza steel that I have but you might have a ceramic pizza stone the key is getting something that can absorb all of this heat and that's what a classic brick oven does the bricks in the oven work as a thermal mass absorber and they take in all of that heat from the fire and then when you put the pizza on the bricks it transfers all of that heat into the pizza giving it a nice spring a nice crust and it cooks it extremely fast so anything really heavy that's gonna absorb a lot of food you want to use that you can pull this off with a cast iron pan as well or ceramic or in this case I have this Pizza steel and I want to let this preheat for at least 45 minutes to an hour it needs a lot of time to absorb all of that heat in just about 24 hours oh boy you can see they've proofed a nice bit they're now touching and they weren't of course before they're still nice and moist but I did want to take these out while the oven is preheating just to give them at least an hour hour and a half to get back to room temperature so we have our beautiful pizza dough's right here and tip number ten is making sure that you roll your pizza dough out in something because you don't want to go this far and put all this effort in the dough and just have the dough stick to the table so your three main options are more flour which is totally fine you can roll it out in oil which I do all the time if you want a nice crispy crust and you want to avoid more mess oil is actually pretty nice and clean if you just have a countertop like this but I'm gonna use some semolina flour today I like rolling it out because it gets pushed into the crust and you get a really nice toasted semolina flavor when you go to cook your pizza so let's roll out some pizza all right so just sprinkle on that semolina Wow super fluffy tip number eleven is making sure you keep the integrity of your crust when you go to roll out your dough because we've developed all of this air as you can see that air bubble in our dough and if you want a nice fluffy dough we're not just gonna take a rolling pin and roll out our dough because will deflate all of those beautiful air pockets that we created so I'm just going around the dough like this creating that crust creating that edge that barrier right there to hold in all your ingredients and then making sure to not push into the crust like this once you've created the crust we're gonna work the dough from the inside so you start by just patting it out like this and getting the cross getting your circular shape and then we can start just letting gravity take over it's as simple as that you see I'm going around the edges right under that crust you can see where my fingers are oh you can see I have a few holes it's totally fine I wasn't really paying attention but there you go we're already at the size that might even be a little thin but hey it's my first pizza so it's not a problem I'm gonna take my pizza peel sprinkle on some more of that semolina so it slips right off and then we'll just boom right on so tip number 12 is to keep it simple so you really can taste the essence of the dough and the sauce and the toppings are just a little extra boost so I'm gonna start off with just some tomato sauce not so much that it gets soupy you want just a nice coating for flavor I'm gonna hit it with just a little bit of that spinach and mushrooms of course it needs cheese I'm gonna be using fresh mozzarella and I'm just going to spot that throughout the pizza nice and evenly and then a few basil leaves for a little extra flavor that looks absolutely fantastic still feels like it will slide right off we are preheated right now and tip number 13 is taking advantage of the broiler that Pizza Steel's been in there it's been absorbing all of that heat and it's good to go it's gonna give you a nice crispy crust when you throw the pizza on it but we need a nice crispy crust and we also want to be cooking from the top to char the top of your pizza like it's coming out of a pizza oven so what I'm gonna do is write when the pizza hits that steel I'm gonna change the oven from convection heat to broil on high and then we're gonna get that char from the Topix they'll get that crispy crust from the heat already in the steel and I'll give credit to Kenji Lopez on that one I'm pretty sure he created this technique but I haven't tried in a while so we'll see what happens but luckily I have three other attempts at it to get it perfect right let's see if I can do this one-handed baby slide off already here cooking a wag of enclosed royal oven changed so we'll see what happens I might need to change it to a low broil and I think good things are happening in here let's give it a a peek come on so we got some great leopard spotting and a lot of that has to do with the longer fermentation time to get those fermentation bubbles and they burn up in the oven under crust crispy looking good and then that char on the ingredients I am very very happy with this right here tip number 14 is adding some next-level flavor right here so what I did last night was chopped up a bunch of garlic added that to a jar with some chili flakes and some oregano and then top that off with some oil I only had grapeseed oil that I would definitely recommend olive oil and you can put whatever you want in this but this is a flavor bomb right here and I'm just gonna sprinkle some on my piece of course this is gonna be much better the longer that it sits but just a little chili garlic oregano oil to cap it off and then I would definitely suggest just a sprinkle of salt to make sure all of those flavors come alive if this thing came out so let's give this a try beautiful fluffy crust crispy bottom I think we could get a little more char on the bottom mmm mmm it's fantastic but my head goes right away to the improvements and it needs a crispier on the crust maybe if I just keep preheating that in there for a little longer it will give me a crispier crust or I can start the broiler a little later damn fluffy love so this was incredible but tip number 15 is just accepting the learning curve of course right when I taste it I'm just thinking about how I can improve and I've been making pizza for ten years and I'm still trying to get better so just keep that in mind pizza is all about the quest it's all about trying to get that perfect pie at home and that's what makes it so fun and you can serve it to your friends see what they think get the feedback and then improves [Music] all right round two this one the crust feels a little better what I did was I let it sit in the oven for a minute before I set the broiler and I can tell it's got a crispier crust yeah listen to that still not charred like I want it but definitely crispier you can see it holds up this one is a lot better with that crispy under crust little tinker's for perfection so I'm really happy with that minor adjustment so I actually just posted that last pizza on my Instagram life by Mike G I thought it looked beautiful I prefer the char when a pizza comes out at a restaurant and it's got a nice char that's when I know they're doing something right but I would say overwhelmingly maybe 70% of you thought it was too burnt which I understand by the picture and of course if you don't like it burn just keep it in the oven for another two minutes without the broil then change it to broil for the last minute or so but hopefully this video helped you on your quest for perfect homemade pizza at home and make sure you click the link below to check out bright cellars which made a perfect pairing for our pizza party last night and much more homemade goodness coming to you very soon I've been very inspired in the kitchen with all of this time at home I've been cooking up so much stuff and I've got a lot of great ideas to keep you inspired at home over the next few months so I'll see you soon you

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Views: 1,211,888

Rating: 4.8562951 out of 5

Keywords: pizza recipe, perfect pizza, pizza at home, homemade pizza, the perfect pizza, home oven pizza, perfect crust, homemade pizza dough, amazing pizza dough, pizza dough recipe, brick oven pizza, pizza sauce recipe, perfect pizza sauce, home to make pizza sauce, pro home cooks, lifebymikeg, mike greenfield, 15 pizza mistakes, how to master pizza, 🍕, oven pizza, Neapolitan pizza, no frozen pizza, pizza steps, new

Id: 7UB1saPQe-c

Length: 24min 23sec (1463 seconds)

Published: Thu May 07 2020