How To Easily Master Pizza Dough

we're talking pizza dough I'm going to show you how to make it how to portion it how to stretch it and some tips and tricks along the way for problems you'll probably encounter when dealing with pizza dough now for the dough if you're here just for the recipe then go ahead and Skip ahead I'll put a little break point and you can just watch that but if you're intrigued by the ins and outs of dough then stick around one of the most important tools you're going to need for doing dough are some kitchen scales I have a bigger one that I use for the flour and water and then I have one of these smaller scales that can measure uh grams a lot more accurate than these bigger ones and I'll use that for the salt and yeast the bigger one isn't as precise with the yeast so it's always good to pick up another one of the smaller ones great thing about being able to weigh it is you can adjust this recipe a lot easier than if we were doing half cup4 cup cuz I can give you this recipe and you can cut in half and get half the results or do a third of it it's a lot easier to change the numbers when you weigh it so well worth the investment the dough recipe is four ingredients flour water salt yeast a lot of people will say don't use sugar don't use oil and I feel like it depends on what your goal is I did a little experiment you can see this picture here I cooked all these pizzas in my pizza oven on 900° for a minute and a half every single one of them and they had the same amount of sauce I didn't do cheese or toppings cuz I was trying to save a buck so here on the top left is the control that's the recipe I'm going to show you right now and on the right is sugar and you can see the difference just between those two the sugar had more Scorch marks and I even noticed while cooking it I had to be really careful it was burning really quickly but it did get Browning throughout you can see and then on the bottom here we have sugar and oil on the left and then oil on the bottom right so pretty much all of them except the control tended to burn a little bit more and I always thought if you added any sugar or oil it was just going to ruin it and I don't feel like that's the case I think it makes it harder to cook with but I don't think it's worth adding the sugar and oil at this point I would just stick with the four ingredients for Neapolitan style pizza dough but let's look at New York style okay here you can see the top left the control and all of these I cooked in the chefman electric Pizza Oven on the New York setting for 5 minutes same deal here with the sauce you can see the top left it's not very Brown I'm not loving that uh but the sugar in the sugar and oil and the oil all tended to do better I think the pure oil one didn't do as well so I would say based on this picture I mean look at that look at that Browning that's some great Browning on the sugar one so if if you're going to be doing New York style I would add to this amount I'm going to show you 2 tablespoons of oil and 2 tablespoons of sugar and that will help you get the Browning you need for New York style or thin crust it works for both so now let's let's get into the flour this is bread flour a lot of people will say use double O flour which is great but for me it's hard to get in my area and it's kind of expensive I just get this bread flour from Costco I've used allpurpose flour in the past and if you're in a bind it works I've noticed the dough is a little stronger and stays together a little more with the bread flour so it's worth doing but all purpose will work in a pinch the water I like to have mine about 95° uh around there like warm water it will help the the yeast bloom a little quicker salt I use table salt just cuz it dissolves quicker um the yeast so this is what where we can kind of control our results of the dough I have here 2 G of yeast I'll usually make this dough the night before I want to cook the pizza for dinner so I'll make the dough in the evening put it in the fridge let it sit all night then in the morning I'll get it out on the counter and let it bulk ferment then about an hour and a half before I want to eat I'll portion the dough but but if you're in a hurry and you made it the morning of you can put it in the oven on proof setting or turn it on like just for a few minutes and then turn it back off and it will help it bloom a little faster and if you're really in a hurry let's say it's 2: in the afternoon and you really want pizza then just up your yeast amount to about 10 gram it won't have as much flavor it won't taste as good but it will still work so you can control how quick you want to use the dough with how much yeast you use some people think you need to put sugar with your yeast to get it to grow to Blossom um here you can see that I have the three different bins and all of them Rose to the same amount the one with the sugar the sugar and oil and just the oil so the oil one had no sugar at all all of them Rose to the same amount so you do not need to add sugar for your dough to rise let's talk hydration so this recipe has 1,000 G of flour and 700 mL of water so that means it's a 70% hydration it's a water based on flour ratio depending on where you live your hydration levels will be different if you're in a drier climate you're going to want a higher hydration if you're somewhere where it's super humid you're going to want to do a lower hydration so these numbers I'm giving you are a baseline if the dough just keeps coming out way too wet or too dry adjust accordingly on to putting the dough together first thing I'm going to do is put some really warm water into a bowl this is 700 mL then we go in with our 2 G of yeast I like to just take a whisk real quick give it a little mix help speed up the process there now we're going to add 1,000 G of bread flour okay and then on top I like to add the salt after I haven't tested this yet so I don't know for sure but a lot of bakers will say that if you put the salt with the yeast right away it can affect it so I just keep them a little separate 22 G of table salt and you can mix this by hand there's nothing wrong with that let's go ahead and get going and get this all mixed up popped it off real quick to show you that all the flour has been Incorporated but it's still more of like a Shaggy dough looks almost more like biscuits so you want to go further than this we need that flour to really mix in all throughout so our dough is ready let me show you what that looks like our dough has come together a lot more it's got a smoother texture to it some gluten so our dough it's not as Shaggy before it doesn't look like a biscuit dough it's coming together more as a solid smooth Mass if you're making this dough in like 2 hours or you're going to be making pizzas in like 2 hours you'd want to get it to a point where you can do the window pane test which is stretch string it out and you can see through it like a window pane without it tearing this is tearing so it's this wouldn't be ready you'd want to need it more but since we're leaving this all night long it has plenty of time to develop all that gluten but on a shorter schedule need it longer so when you're done I like to put it into a bin with a lid you can use a bowl with Saran Wrap we just want to make sure it's not drying out so if you're if you are making this the night before generally I like to leave it out at room temperature for about an hour just to give it a little head start on proofing and then put it in the fridge overnight get it out the next morning so you can let it bulk f it all day before you portion the dough our dough is ready to go what I like to do is flour my work surface a little bit so it doesn't stick you can use a bench scrape spatula or your hand scrape the dough out onto your work surface get it all okay when I'm portioning my dough I like to keep a wet side so it's sticky and a dry side underneath not sticky okay and use a scale you're going to need a scale to make pizza so we're going for 245 gam per dough ball so you're just going to eyeball it in the beginning as you do this more and more you'll get better at it hopefully and I also like to keep just a little pile of flour up here and just dip it in so we don't have any wet wet dough sticking to the scale okay so we're at 234 so now I'm just going to take a little bit and add it 243 close enough this is why I like to keep a wet side CU if we took that wet dough and added it to this dry side it's going to have a harder time getting Incorporated where you can see this nice and sticky so now what we want to do is fold it up like a dumpling I like to grab here's a quick way to do it grab the corners pull them up and over till you've made a nice smooth spot here pinch it together see how there's holes here we don't want that we want to seal that up those holes are going to make our dough have weak spots so seal it up now we want to create some tension on the ball so it makes it makes a nice round circle dip your dry side in some flour I plac the Wet Side side of the ball right here on my hand like so and I squeeze and rotate squeeze rotate you can tell this will start getting this skin here will get Tighter and Tighter and I just go until it's got a nice smooth Sheen to it check the bottom that it's all sewn up okay nice good seal there and I like to take a cookie sheet ham it and then throw your doughball on wet side down right here you can fit these size balls on this on a normal baking sheet you can fit 12 let's do one more this one's going to be a little big yeah 269 so when it's too big I just chop it oh 241 close enough and then I'll have little scraps I'll just keep on the top and you can add them to doughballs they're a little too small so all four corners okay and then I even will sometimes put my hand underneath put my hand underneath and just roll my finger toward the middle to try and seal it all up we want a nice smooth texture here you're probably wondering when should I be doing this well what I normally do is I'll portion the dough an hour and a half before I want to make the pizza so I'll fill up this sheet pan leave it out and within about an hour to an hour and a half the dough has risen enough that it's usable you can also do it 6 hours before and put it directly in the fridge and it will slowly rise and be ready to go around that 6 hour mark or later it's going to take at least about 6 hours but you could do it later so if you know you're going to be out running errands you want to come home and just start making pizzas that's a great way to do it the reason why I like to measure every dough ball and get a good consistent number is if I had one that was 200 gram and another that was you know 300 and you're stretching them both out if you're stretching them both out to a 12in pizza when you stretch out let's say this this is a dough ball when we stretch this out to the 12 in your 200 g dough ball is going to be super thin and is more likely to tear and your 300 gam is probably going to be a little too thick of a crust and you may not enjoy it as much so it's a lot more consistent when you measure it so as you go along if you don't like the thickness you can adjust and do less or more weight you're ready to stretch your dough this is one of the harder parts of making pizzas so I've got stepbystep tutorial here to show you how to stretch your pizza dough first thing you're going to need is some flour I like to add cornmeal to it so this is about 34 cornmeal and a/ qu flour this will help uh everything stay nice and dry and not stick so first thing we're going to do is show you how to carefully take out a doughball so let's go for this one right here so I'll just sprinkle a little flower on the parts of the dough that are stuck together and just slice it free very gently we don't want to be too rough with it okay so we've got it loose and now we're just going to pour this on our work surface and just plop it right on it okay and I'm going to show you a few different ways to do this from beginner level to a little more advanced but in all of them we're going to do this first step okay so we want to get it coated so it is nice and non-sticky we're going to press at the top here and you'll see I'm leaving a crust so we're going to press and make our way down and leave a crust on the bottom work around the sides and you're leaving a crust all around about a half inch to an inch crust then I like to flip it over do the same thing and that's pretty much our base for all the techniques I'm going to show you today the first technique I'm going to show you is one that's great if you're starting off or if you have friends coming over wanting to learn this method I find to be a little more foolproof and um it takes a little longer but it works great so it's exactly what we just did but you're just going to do it over and over and the key here is you need a good pile of this cornmeal flour mixture if you were doing this just on the table over and over it would stick over time it would start sticking plus this sliding helps it to expand so you can see as I'm pressing around and still leaving that crust the pizza is expanding okay flip it and I try and when I flip it try and do like a 90° turn press it out you can see already it's starting to get bigger get your pile closer together press you might be worried about all this cornmeal going into the dough there's not nearly as much that goes in as you would think we'll shake it all off at the end and then you'll start to get to a point where you can almost just press it with your whole hand and it just starts going out further and further the great thing about this I'll show you you don't have any really weak spots which that's that's what happens to most people when they first start trying to stretch dough is they tear it or make weak spots this helps prevent that and what you can do if you want to get a little more advanced is kind of stretch stretch it out as you push this kind of leads into my next technique so from this point what you can have people do is get your hands like this okay like that and just pull the dough apart shift and pull it apart what's great about this technique is also knocking off the corn flour okay and I'd say with that let's check so I always keep a peel nearby to check our size okay we could go a little more cuz we want to fill up that whole peel so for the B beginner technique just keep stretching it or bring your pile back throw it on press it down see how my whole hand's fitting in here now that just goes to show how much it's stretching and then try and knock off that excess corn flour stretch it out now let's check it okay that's a lot better so it's close enough that when we get the toppings on we can still stretch it to the edges so that's pretty good okay so we have another base here I'm going to show you a little bit more advanced technique probably one of my favorites so we did our same drill here where we pressed it out we're keeping a crust and the key here is you need to have a lot of this corn flour and a surface that it will slip on if you did it on like a grippy hard like a wood surface it doesn't work as well it starts to tear the dough that's why I'm over here today um so I'll show you we're here keep your hands like this and spread it out and slowly what you're going to do is you take your palms and you're pressing down here leaving a crust and spreading and rotating you're kind of using your whole hand here to rotate it and stretch it every once in a while just scoop up your corn flour again and now I'm just pressing down and twisting you can see this method's quite a bit quicker we've already stretched it quite a bit it's why it's one of my favorites it gets stretched pretty quick and then we knock off the excess we've got ourselves a nice 12 in Pizza okay now probably one of the more Advanced Techniques um let's say we were starting off with a smaller one and we had stretched it out but it's still not quite big enough that's where the twist comes in you don't even have to go that high and the key with the twist you always want to keep your hands more rounded you don't want to point up cuz that will tear the dough so keep your hands more rounded on the edges you don't ever really want to punch the middle that's the weakest Point you'll probably tear it and just give it little twists so so knock that corn flow off this is actually probably my favorite way to finish a pizza I'll show you why look how big that is already I mean that's right to the edges on that peel so the little toss at the ends of great way okay so now we're going to try one of the dough balls we made about 8 hours ago and put in the fridge to let it rise in the fridge let's give it a try I literally just pulled this out of the fridge about 3 minutes ago I didn't even let it come up to room temp or anything let's see how it goes same deal coat it in the cornmeal flour mix keep a crust also one of the reasons I flip is because the dough starts to get a little wet on my fingers when I'm pressing because it's stretching out and exposing some of that wet dough but for a dough being this cold it's stretching pretty quick okay let's check it out I mean that did really well so like I said both are viable options I like the the option to put it in the fridge cuz then you can go out with on your day oh flower my eyes you can go about your day and come back and just whip these up really quick so some tips and tricks for problems you'll probably encounter when dealing with pizza dough the first trick I want to show you is when your pizza is completely stuck to the peel this thing's not going anywhere first thing you're going to need is a plate so with the plate put it over top and flip and then slowly pull it off see how it's all stuck boom okay now key part flower boom boom boom boom boom and you know what you can do two you can you can be very generous here cuz I'll show you a little trick to get rid of the extra flour spread it around that way we're not sticking anymore okay we want that nice and dry you might be thinking dude YouTube guy that's too much flour well let's see so now we flip it back over okay sometimes you might need to readdress the toppings a little bit but for the most part the benefit of this our toppings aren't completely messed up okay and now our pizza moves and watch all that extra flour we're going to get rid of shaking it around now our pizza is free to slide right into the oven you're about to launch your pizza and it's moving but you got one little spot that's stuck okay so you can do the total Flip or since this is the spot that's stuck you can peel that part up and then you always just want to make sure the peels dry okay cuz that could be the wet spot maybe from sauce take a little flour actually doesn't have to be a little cuz we'll shake it off like we did with the other one get it dry okay make sure there's no no more wet spots and then fold it back over fix your toppings and you're free to go again we got one little spot that's stuck we're on a wooden peel now the trick from the last video would work here as well but we've got an easier way to do it on the wooden peel also they get stuck in the front a lot because as you're launching forward if if you got some sauce up front and you've moved it around the sauce is kind of settled underneath you get that what happens when you launch is it folds forward you get toppings all over here's a quick and easy way to fix that take like a metal spatula with a little flower on it and just go under it and you're free to go you're out by the oven and you're about to launch your pizza and it's just a little bit stuck like it moves a little but you're a little worried so what you can do pull up the crust blow on under it and then it'll just Glide you've made your pizza on the counter and it's stuck it is stuck to the counter one of the things tip make sure when you go to get it you don't have sauce on the counter right here but it is stuck here's what we do flour right along there okay work it in and now get rid of the excess flour and we're good to go I hope that this video has helped build your confidence in making pizza dough I've got some other great videos on pizza recipes and other Pizza things in the description below that's the one double thumbs up

Channel: Some Dads Cook

Views: 7,003

Keywords: #someDadsCook, #cooking

Id: RoErAlDmk9k

Length: 26min 44sec (1604 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 09 2024