The Best Kept Italian Secret called Biga Pizza Dough

[Music] this is um the recipe for how you make the biga which is the first step of the pizza dough so uh what biga is is it's a pre-ferment so it's kind of like a shaggy stringy dough that sits in the fridge for two days before you actually go ahead and make the pizza what it does basically it just allows the um flavors to develop without the gluten to really uh without allowing the gluten to really develop so it's not going to come like a dough in the end it's going to be in pieces you'll add water a specific amount of water to this and then you're going to get the dough so for this you need 300 grams of water it doesn't really matter if it's it doesn't have to be cold or hot or anything just room temperature water is fine that's 300 grams of water you need four grams of active dry yeast then you need 600 grams of flour so what we do is you have your water you're gonna take the yeast just mix it in there it doesn't have to be um extremely well mixed at this point just put it in there to incorporate you'll know the yeast is good if most of it sinks you take your 600 grams of flour you mix it in the water and you're just tossing it together excuse your fingers this gets mixed for no more than i don't know a minute and a half to two minutes it's almost done you're just basically looking to have the any loose flower sort of be incorporated but you're trying to keep it in these strands so it kind of looks like a torn up cloth or rag or a mop or something like that you're not looking for this to look like a dough okay so that's biga that's what it should look like it's very stringy and shaggy i'm going to take that and put it into a container you kind of want a bit of a taller and more narrow container so that it prevents it from all spreading out you want it to kind of grow upwards i'm going to toss it in this container then what i usually do with this is i um as soon as i'm done making it like right now i would put a piece of saran wrap over top of the top of the container and then seal it with the lid leave it on the counter for about uh one hour and then put it in the fridge for 48 hours until you're ready to make the pizza dough i'm just going to show you the next step here to making the dough you'll need a large bowl so we're gonna mix it by hand this is 90 grams of tap water um that's at about 110 degrees fahrenheit and you're going to need 12 grams of sea salt table salt would be okay as well and then your previously made vega i've got the bowl here it's not a great deal of water i'm going to kind of tear apart the vega and sprinkle it into the water and hopefully it remained kind of stringy here like it's still more in pieces it's sort of become a little bit like one mass but uh it still tears apart very easily and the stringy pieces are still there and this part takes a little while um before you can get into a smooth dough if you have a mixer when you do uh get yourself a mixer for this um it does make it a little easier but by hand works just fine too so here i've got the biga i can sprinkle my salt in now and with one hand i'm going to start just trying to get that water through the biga and you're going to notice that uh unlike you know a normal dough it's already a lot more hydrated than what we're used to seeing at this point so when you look at it looks very very wet but eventually the water is gonna work its way into that dry beaker and if we keep working it it'll eventually turn into a nice smooth dough so this um you probably need to knead this for anywhere between 12 and 15 minutes it's gonna feel really wet and slimy for a while resist the urge for sure to um add flour uh it's going to seem like it needs flour but it definitely doesn't need any more at all eventually you're going to find that it'll clean the bowl nicely and it'll be perfect it just it's that bigger that needs to absorb the water that we've put in this dough when it's done we'll give you a 65 hydrated dough which is pretty much standard for wood ovens the standard is usually 65 to 70 percent so i'm going to keep at this for about another 10 minutes make sure you're getting all the lumps out of it as you're as you're kneading this you're going to find that it it's going to feel a little lumpy under the fingers because there's all those dry bits of flour and dough and vega so you want to get it basically to a smooth consistent ball and i'm going to keep going for another 10 minutes or so i've transferred it to the counter so as you can see it's still very lumpy and very wet i'm gonna leave it for five to ten minutes just to allow all the water to soak in okay so now the dough is coming along it's almost done while you're trying to smoothen it out you can also just get it as a ball and roll it around on your counter so you're forcing it to become a little smoother so after i wash my hands i took some flour and i lightly floured my hands just to help dry them as well i just rub the flour through there so when you come back to the dough it's not just going to be as sticky as it once was so you can flour your hands up a little it can help you may even want to have the flour right next to you just to get a little flour on them definitely trying not to add more flour to the dough the little bit on your hands won't hurt anything so this whole process in a mixer would have been basically putting the bigger in the water together and the salt allowing the dough hook to go to just uh mix it on a higher speed for a little while it would be really wet and kind of sloppy the way it was before and then when it would turn into a ball at that point you would put the mixer on to low speed and it would just knead it as a ball and it's about a 10 12 minute process altogether by hand obviously it's a little more a little more of a task and you kind of have to get a feel for it what i do when i need the dough is i grab the end of it fold it over on itself and then push with the heel of my hand then i turn it 90 degrees pull it and do it push it in with the heel of your hand and you turn it and you keep pushing it do this for another three four minutes and then that'll be it you could use any plastic container even a cookie sheet or whatever really doesn't matter and you could cover it with uh plastic wrap but in the proofing box we sprinkle some flour on the bottom so what i do is just i'm gonna portion it off into 250 gram dough balls using the scale so if it takes a couple pieces it's fine so what i'm going to do now is i'm going to take that this is going to make a it's a 250 gram dough ball and i'm going to kind of stretch it apart and keep folding it underneath itself so i keep pulling off to the sides keep folding it underneath itself if you need to get a little bit of flour in your hands you can you want to keep pulling it apart and creating a ball and using your index your index and your thumb you can kind of squeeze around it pushing your hands to the bottom and causing it to come upwards so it's like you're trying to grab around it but with the other finger underneath you're pushing it up and and you can also use your thumb to push from underneath and then basically what i'm looking to do is pinch the bottom another way to do it is to put it down so this would be like a completed dough ball that'd be ready to put in the proofing basket and the proofing container so you could also put it on the counter and using the sides of your hands keep spinning it around in a circle and as you're squeezing it together it's sort of pinching the bottom and while at the same time it's creating a tighter top to the dough ball and then i take that and place it inside the proofing basket and that's but another way to do it too you may like this way as well you basically take it and fold it over on itself and push down on it and just keep folding it over and pushing it down and turning it so that i always end up ending up at the top so you basically fold it over itself three or four times until you create a ball and then you can finish it off just on the counter and that's another way they can stay in here for three hours at room temperature i'm gonna put the lid on and cover them so to get your dough you want to sprinkle a little bit of flour so it sort of gets underneath and the one thing you want to make sure is that um when you go to grab the dough that the edge doesn't curl under and get caught okay so i use this this is that stainless steel spatula and you want to kind of just get under the edge and then scoop it up now we got to make sure we remember which was the top side of the dough so we take that we dip it in some semolina semolina is a really dry type of flour i'm going to use a wooden board for stretching i like to take some flour and rub it right into the board so that the board is really slippery i don't even need to keep the flour on it and pretty much get rid of it but now the board is slippery for stretching i'm going to take my dough so the top side that was facing up is now facing down in the semolina and flip it over give a little bit to the bottom when i put it down i just need to remember this was the top side we start by taking our fingers going right to the center and kind of carefully and gently pushing down in the center trying to flatten the center taking extra care not to pop or push out any of the air that is going toward the crust so once we have a disc like that take it and flip it over this is the bottom i'm going to do the same starting at the center working my way out you can turn it whatever you like and turn it back to the correct side facing up and so the stretching technique looks like this i'm going to go across the top part of the dough flattening as we go and grabbing with our hand making sure not to grab the crust but grabbing underneath and pulling and holding down the dough with the other hand putting it over this side of the edge of your hand and turning it so now it's turned 90 degrees and move across the top flattening pull turn it 90 degrees so you're just slapping it like that and every time you bring it down it's stretching and getting wider and wider and depending on how the dough is you may or may not want to do it too many times just until you get the dough about two-thirds stretched so it's going to be a 12-inch dough this is probably about 10 inches right now that's when we would dress it so this is for a margarita pizza with just some with just a bit of tomato and some fresh mozzarella so we take our tomato we spread it in the center the pizza is a little smaller right now than it will be once we put it onto the peel so here's one of the pizzas completed usually you want to see that there's a good spring back in the crust the bottom can be kind of charred and i usually cool it on a rack for three four minutes it's it is a big learning curve so don't get discouraged took me a very long time to get a good product and i'm still learning every time so good luck have fun you

Channel: Karl Tettmann

Views: 33,188

Rating: 4.8093023 out of 5

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Id: _Zut8epE3zY

Length: 15min 42sec (942 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 14 2020