Pizza Dough

4 Pizzas or around 60 pieces of pizza bread

Dough:

• 600g Type 0 or 00 flour (I like to use Caputo Nuvola)
• 390ml Warm water (this is sometimes referred to as hydration of the dough, which is the ratio of water to flour. This dough has a hydration level of 65%, which makes it easier to form later on. Neapolitan pizza would be around 58% or so)
• 18g Salt
• 2.5g Dry yeast

Preparation

• Mix the dough vigorously for five minutes. This can be done by a machine
• Mix the dough by hand for another three minutes and form it into a large ball. Try not to rip the dough while doing that.
• Cover the dough and let it sit at room temperature for approx. half an hour.
• Stretch and fold the dough. You do this by stretching the dough with your hands while being careful not to tear it. Then, you fold the dough back over itself and repeat until you can't really stretch the dough anymore.
• Let the dough rest for another 30 minutes.
• Cut the dough into four equal-sized pieces.
• Stretch the small dough balls. The technique is a bit different than for the large ball of dough in the beginning: Lay the dough on a kitchen work table and pull the edges of the dough inward. This traps a bit of air in the dough, making it fluffy. You can do this edge-pulling around six or so times. The bottom face of the dough should be nice and even now.
• Put the dough in your hand, with the uneven side down.
• Close your hand into a grip, thus pulling at the sides of the dough. The goal is to make the dough sides as even and as nice as possible so that no air can escape. This also helps the dough gain strength and prevents it from ripping later on. Do this a couple of times until the dough ball looks nice. Do this for every one of the four doughballs
• Let the dough rest for another thirty minutes and repeat the last couple of steps another one or two times.
• Cover the dough and let it rest in the fridge for at least 24 hours.
• Before processing the dough, it should sit at room temperature for at least two hours as well, twelve or so is better.

Recommendations

• Use very little flour on the work surface when processing a stretching the dough. It's not as easy, but having too much flour on the surface reduces the hydration level of the dough and makes the results inconsistent.
• Turn up your oven as high as it will go. The pizza oven I'm using (Unold Dal Luigi) goes up to 450 degrees C and it's just borderline hot enough at the top to brown the pizza crust.
• If making pizza bread, you can put some olive oil on the little breadlings.