The real secret to NY-Style pizza (It's not NYC water)

this is a proper New York slice and after studying some of the top pizza shops in New York I found a few secrets that I think are going to help me make it at home wow that is by far the best place we've made yet [Music] so this is episode two of my New York Pizza Series where the goal is to recreate the perfect authentic New York slice at home and where we left off last time I attested three popular New York style pizza recipes but none of them gave me exactly what I was looking for look at that it's not it but then I had an idea we need a crisper more evenly browned and sturdier crops So the plan is to move my pizza steel down to the second rack of my oven and I'm gonna turn the temperature down to 500 degrees Fahrenheit so that pizza was better but it still wasn't quite there and honestly I was starting to get a little discouraged but then I realized something else largely thanks to a comment on last week's video that would completely change the course of this challenge you see the recipes I've been using have called for a pretty high hydration much higher than is typical for a New York pizza shop and the reasoning was that since we're baking in a lower temperature oven at home we need to bake the pizza for longer and therefore more of the water in the dough is going to evaporate which is of course true but I think they actually overcompensated for that effect when they were developing the recipes I mean in kenji's recipe he went a full 10 higher than most New York pizza shops and Adam ragusio went even higher in fact in his video he said this I really prefer wetter does these days they bake up lighter and crispier but that's a bit misleading and honestly it kind of led me down the wrong path for a while so here's what actually happens when we increase the hydration in our dough we know that as a dough Rises during fermentation what it's really doing is filling up with a bunch of tiny little gas bubbles specifically bubbles containing carbon dioxide and water vapor so Once the dough starts to bake those gases rapidly heat up and expand and at the same time even more gas is being produced due to the evaporation of the water and the dough and you can imagine that the more water you use the more gas is produced and the bigger those bubbles can get so that's why Adam says that higher hydration does bake up lighter but why crispy well we can see that since the higher hydration dough forms bigger bubbles the borders of those bubbles will be stretched then so the exteriors of the bubbles will get very crispy because the water can evaporate off of that thin dough very quickly but again those are just a few bits on the exterior of the dough it still contains more water overall therefore the overall structure of the dough ends up a little bit floppier and chewier rather than the crispy and slightly rigid structure that we want so with this knowledge I came into the challenge with a renewed sense of direction I took my Kenji recipe which originally called for around 67 hydration and reduced it all the way down to 60 all right that is what we're looking for this is definitely the best slice we've made yet it's got a little bit more structure to it it is a little chewier than I would like and not quite crispy enough it is getting closer though but but the sort of realization has led me to question my method as a whole I mean if I have to modify these recipes so heavily just to create something slightly resembling a New York style pizza are they even the right recipes to begin with if authenticity is what I'm chasing I shouldn't start with recipes designed for home Cooks what I need to do is study the pros the people who have mastered this style of pizza that is New York pizza shops I'm not going to New York though as much as I would like to I did actually go a few weeks ago though and I had the opportunity to try one of the most iconic slice shops in the city and I recently found out that that same iconic Shop opened up a satellite location in my old college town all right here we are there it is I'm just kidding let's keep it moving [Music] so first impressions of the slice it's very thin but it's got that perfect crisp relatively sturdy crust that I've been looking for tip sag test it's not nearly a 90 degree angle like I was seeing with my pizza and if you just give it a little crease right here it stands perfectly sturdy really nice Browning on the cheese here without being too greasy bottom is really nicely charred as well I don't think I could wait any longer let's give it a try so we'll just talk about the cross first because that's what we're focusing on in this episode but really this is exactly the crust I've been trying to achieve I mean the visuals tell pretty much the whole story again it's nice and sturdy but it's still got a little bit of chew to it and it's also got a really nice crunch when you bite into it um again it's a really thin crust but it does have a good bit of airiness to it nothing crazy though flavor wise the crust does leave a little something to be desired I think maybe it keeps a little bit more salt but texture wise it's 100 spot on now in terms of the cheese again it's not too greasy so I think they really nail the cooking temperature there I think it could have a little bit more flavor if I had to guess honestly I don't think that they're using a full fat cheese it does get a little rubbery after it cools down but I mean that's pretty hard to avoid with any cheese two main traits I would use to describe the sauce would be sweet and tangy personally I think I like a little less sweet than this so I think that's something we're going to work on improving with our own recipe all right well I think we got what we need so it's time to head back to the lab and work on this recipe so I think Joe's is a great embodiment of the New York slice that I'm going for but it does definitely have its flaws namely the flavor and seemingly the quality of ingredients as well but that's where our next shop comes in it's one that makes it a point to maintain the tradition of the New York slice but that also tries to improve upon it primarily by using higher quality ingredients try to serve what the people want like a good version of a New York style and the beauty of it is not bad for you so scars is quickly becoming known as one of the best slices in New York unfortunately though I haven't actually had the chance to try it myself that's okay though I think that with the help of the internet we can gain a lot of insight into how and why this pizza is so great now again there are aspects of both shops that I think I want to replicate for Joe's it's mainly the texture of the crust which is going to come from the dough recipe and from the baking method and then for pretty much every other aspect of the pizza I'm gonna look to scarves but since the cross is what we're focused on right now let's start with Joe's Pizza recipe NYC I would imagine there's a lot of Joe's Pizza out there so I should probably specify New York got a few promising links here yeah that's not right next this one claims that Joe's revealed the secret to the recipe but nowhere in the actual article does it say that it is Joe's recipe so next this is what I'm looking for this is what I'm looking for all right we struck gold folks I found this forum pizzamaking.com basically you know people can go and ask questions about pizza making as you might imagine and someone was asking for Joe's recipe so this guy who used to work for Joe's entered the chat and basically the rest is history I mean he gave us the entire recipe everything from the dough to the sauce to the cheese so honestly I think we got what we need here it ended up being a lot easier than I thought it would be now let's see what we can find out about scars pizza recipe NYC so this one definitely isn't going to be as straightforward as Joe it seems like the owner's scar here he keeps his recipe pretty Under Wraps but there is one thing that I knew going into this and it's the thing that most people point out when they mention scars and we also Mill our own flower as well and so that you're Milling from grains like this these are wheat berries these are a hard white wheat we try to replicate New York style pizza without using what 90 something percent of New York style pizzas are like you know chemically laced flowers and stuff we don't use any of that so on this pizza making Forum people are speculating about the recipe and they're trying out different formulations so that'll definitely give me a good place to start but on top of that there are a few pretty good videos that we can get some Clues from we make some high protein and low protein flowers so you're starting on low just to get everything Incorporated salt the olive oil you get one rise when you're bowling lower rise when it's in the fridge then you get the last fries when you pull them out and we are allowed to rise all day the day of use basically yeah this shot gives us a really good idea for the texture of the dough it definitely looks very similar to Joe's in terms of the structure so these videos pretty much just give me all the ingredients that are included in the dough and they give me a good idea for sort of how the dough should look and feel throughout the process a few things we don't know is number one how much freshly milled flour he uses and he also uses a bit more salt and a slightly higher hydration which makes sense because that freshly milled flour is going to be a little bit more absorbent than a typical white flower would be so with my newfound knowledge and experiences I developed three new recipes each one aimed at testing a different variable so recipe number one is what I'm calling my Joe's dough as we learned Joe's uses a hydration of 57 and they bake their pizza at 625 degrees Fahrenheit so what I've got here is a 60 hydration Dough because again since I can only bake at 550 degrees Fahrenheit I do think we need to add a little bit of extra water to account for that just not as much as Ken Kenji or Adam use in their recipes and by the way for all of these recipes I'm using bread flour because that's generally the highest protein flour that anyone's going to be able to find at their local grocery store all right time for the Moment of Truth look at that that's like Joe's that's like Joe's right there I mean it's got that same Crackle that is a good slice of pizza right there I would say it could be a little bit crispier that's my only critique but let's see how it tastes wow this is by far the best slice we've made yet way better than any of the recipes we tested in the last episode I think we're on the right track here now recipe number two is sort of an attempt to improve the basic Joe's recipe because if you remember I did find the Joes though to be a bit Bland in flavor so what I did here was Bump the salt content from 2.7 up to 3.2 and I also used a bit more olive oil than I did in the first recipe I also bumped the hydration up to 62 which is still significantly lower than the 67 from kenji's recipe but I just wanted to see what effect using sort of a mid-level hydration would have so this is still a super solid slice the one problem is I did need to bake it a little bit longer to get it to the same level of crispiness as recipe number one even so I don't think I got it quite as crispy but really the main testing point for this slice of pizza was the flavor so it is kind of subtle but I do think I prefer the higher salt levels in dough number two it just really makes those sort of fermented bready flavors pop a little bit more overall this slice is a little bit too salty but I think that I can balance it out more just by using a little less salt in the sauce now finally recipe number three is my first attempt at a scar style though so we know that a lot of what makes scars dough special is his addition of some freshly milled flour however I don't want to do that because it's just not practical for most people myself included actually I don't own a Flour Mill but what I did do was replace 10 of the bread flour in the recipe with whole wheat flour so in my mind that should be a much easier method one that anyone can follow to incorporate some extra flavor and nutrition into the dough all right now this is the one that I'm super curious about because I've never made a pizza with anything but 100 white flour maybe not quite as rigid as recipe number one I might have actually stretched it a little bit too thin which really I didn't think that was going to be a problem because whole wheat flour doesn't develop gluten as well so I thought the dough might tear if I tried to stretch it out but I feel really wasn't an issue at all so pretty nice crispiness to it pretty solid structure as well I mean I would say it's on par with the other two recipes yeah so the whole wheat flour definitely adds a pretty nice bready weedy flavor to it it is pretty subtle but given that the flour didn't have any other noticeable negative impacts I don't see any reason not to include it alright so with all that testing done it's time to build my ultimate rest so we're going to talk in terms of Baker's percentages just that the recipe can be scaled however we need it to be and if you're not familiar with how Baker's percentages work basically the flower is always at 100 and then the rest of the ingredients are expressed as a percentage of the total flour so for example if you have 100 grams of flour and 60 grams of water that's a 60 hydration likewise two grams of salt per 100 grams of flour equates to two percent salt and so on now like I mentioned there are aspects of each of these three recipes that I liked but for all three I did keep the sugar and the yeast the same even though Joe's and scars don't seem to use sugar in their dough I think that since we're baking at a lower temperature in our home oven the sugar does help the crust to caramelize a little bit better now for the yeast it doesn't really matter how much you use that's just gonna affect how quickly or how slowly the dough Rises for me though I like to err on the Lower Side just about a half percent because the slower the dough Rises the more opportunity it has to develop those nice fermented bready flavors and now for the flour so again by by default the baker's percentage is going to be a hundred percent but in recipe number three ten percent of that flour was whole wheat and that's something that I definitely want to maintain because it added a nice flavor to the dough however I think I do actually want to bump that up to 15 based on my research cars uses somewhere between 10 and 20 so I figured I might as well split it right down the middle and in my experience that increased whole wheat content didn't make the dough any harder to shake so I might as well push it as high as it can go until I see any negative impacts now for the hydration I definitely like the texture of recipe number one so I would go with the hydration of 60 but since I am using 15 whole wheat flour which absorbs much more water than bread flour I'm gonna bump that up to 61 and that should give me about the same texture that I saw with recipe number one now for the salt both recipes two and three use 3.2 percent salt and I definitely thought that brought out the flavors of the wheat in the dough a little bit better and for olive oil again I did like the texture of recipe number one the best so I'm not gonna mess with that I'm just gonna stick with three percent olive oil there we go I don't think this is gonna be my final final recipe just because I still need to rework the baking process based on some of these other new things that I've learned but I do think that it gets us most of the way there now in the meantime if you didn't see the first episode of this series where I tested some of the most popular New York style pizza recipes geared at home Cooks you can catch up on that one right here otherwise I'll see you in the next episode where we're gonna figure out what's the best cheese for a New York slice so thanks a lot for watching and I'll talk to you in the next one

Channel: Charlie Anderson

Views: 800,033

Keywords: How to cook, how to become a better cook, how to become a better home cook, how to cok

Id: hhXJSqMfkMo

Length: 13min 43sec (823 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 14 2022