Personal Pizza Project

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NY-Style Pizza - My Current Recipe

 Makes an 18" pizza.

Dough

Combine water, yeast, and molasses/sugar in a mixing bowl. Allow yeast to bloom before adding flour, oil, and salt.

Mix to combine, then allow to rest, covered, for 30 minutes. Fold dough several times, then shape.

Place into a bowl lined with EVOO and cover with plastic wrap. Place in fridge to rise for 24-72 hours.

Sauce

Stir to combine.

I have found that for inexpensive tomatoes, the flavour may not be quite as robust as one would hope. To mitigate that, I have used herbs and aromatics in varying amounts. Find what works for you, but a lighter, brighter sauce will go a long way. For herbs and spices, I've found that about a tablespoon of both dried basil and dried oregano work (or a small fistful of fresh basil), and a scant pinch of red pepper flakes.

Sauce with Weak Tomatoes

On low, blend sauce ingredients together but maintain some thickness of the tomatoes – you are not looking for a purée.

For the sauce, simpler is better. I've made pizzas with lots of herbs that tasted great but almost a little overwhelming to the mouth, so I had to scale it back.


Cheese

I currently use a mix of low-moisture mozzerella, part skim (I have yet to find full-fat low-moisture mozz) and parmesan cheese.

Cheese is one of the last places I have yet to even begin to explore. I've settled for store brand cheese for now because it's good enough, and I hope to try new things in the future.
It's important that your cheese goes on the pizza while very cold, so grate it and put it back in the fridge for at least 30 minutes before you plan to top your pie.

Temperature

It's odd to think of temperature as an ingredient for pizza (or any food), but I can say without a doubt that my biggest improvement in pizzamaking came from putting my oven on max temperature and cooking on a surface with a very high thermal mass. Thermal mass is the "ability of a material to absorb, store and release heat", and it is incredibly important when making pizza.

When I was working in a pizza place, I found that a pizza is better overall when it can get in and out of the oven as quickly as possible. It's important to cook the dough rapidly and with intense, direct heat in the same amount of time it takes for the cheese to melt. If you cook too long, the cheese will "break" and begin to leak bright orange grease all over the top of your pizza. From my understanding, this occurs when the proteins in the cheese begin to unravel as the solid milk fats begin to soften and turn to liquid.

To combat this and hopefully win this game of chicken between the dough and cheese, the ovens at the pizza place were set above 650F and had a very thick steel floor of the oven to reduce the amount of time it took for that spot to reheat in time for the next pizza. In a home oven, one can't get the same amount of heat, but we can try. The first thing I learned was that I need to crank my oven up to its max (home ovens can usually get to 500F or 550F). Doing so makes the oven hotter and therefore gives you a faster cook time on your pie.

The second and largest improvement I saw in my crust was when I started using a thick, heavy, preheated surface on which to cook. I started by using a cast iron pancake griddle but eventually purchased an 18" by 18" pizza steel. It is exactly what it sounds like: a 1/3" thick plate of steel that I cook my pizzas on. I have used pizza stones before but I'm in love with my steel because of how well it can hold heat and transfer that to my dough in a short amount of time. Whether you go for steel, stone, ceramic, iron, etc., the idea behind them all is the same: high thermal mass and good thermal conductivity.

It's important to preheat your cooking surface for 30 minutes to an hour before you launch your first pizza. This ensures it gets nice and hot and prevents a pale, doughy bottom on your pizza.

Shaping and Launching

With all that underway, now comes the time to launch your pizza. Have everything in place: your launching device (I use a large wooden pizza peel), your sauce, cheese accessible in the fridge, and toppings ready to go. I pull my dough out no more than 10 minutes before I intend to shape it as I find a cold dough is very nice and workable while minimizing the risk of tearing.

Stretch your dough as your desired, place onto a floured peel, then top. You want to put more sauce and cheese towards the edge of the pizza than the center to prevent a soggy pie. Because shaping typically causes a slight slope from the cornice to the center, cheese and sauce will slowly drift towards the center as they heat up.

Launch with confidence onto your preheated cooking surface and allow to bake. At 500F to 550F, you should expect this to take anywhere from 5 to 7 minutes. Again, it's a game of chicken between the crust and the cheese, so push it to the limit to get the best bottom you can.

When done, pull out of the oven and put onto a wire cooking rack for a few minutes to set. If you cut it now, the cheese will soup off of each slice you move, so give it a moment to slightly cool. If the bottom is too floury/mealy, you can shuffle it on the cooking rack to remove the extra grain.

The Finished Product




Mama Mia.

Pizza Through Time

A Restrospective and Ongoing Look at my Pizzamaking Career


I have been seriosuly trying to make pizza since sometime in 2016 when I started working at a pizza place in high school. At first, I didn't quite know what I was doing and I simply tried to put together components from other recipes into something that resembled pizza. I would do same-day doughs that were adapted from my mom's cinnamon roll recipe, I would make a tomato sauce and let it simmer on the stove for hours, and I'd use whatever store brand mozzerella cheese was available because it was cheapest. I'd usually bake it on a baking sheet, on an aluminium pan, or in a cast iron skillet at 400F for 20 minutes, not yet fully recognizing the relationship between temperature, cook time, and flavour.

Over time, I have done a lot of reading, a lot of watching, and a lot of pizza making at tasting in order to refine my pizza recipe that mimics a sort of NY-style. I recognize that there are still lots of ways to improve but I do think I churn out some very tasty pizzas using this recipe and technique. I also plan to include recipes for other styles of pizza such as Sicilian, Nonna, Detroit, Chicago thin-crust, and deep dish pizzas. Following this recipe is the long process of how I got to this point and some crucial changes I have made in my recipe along the way.

July 2016

The pizza pictured above was made sometime in July of 2016 and has a few key traits that I completely avoid nowadays when I make my regular pizza:

For this pizza, I was using the red sauce recipe that my mom gave me for spaghetti which involved a lot of herbs and spices and an all-day simmer. This gives a very deep, robust, and almost roasted flavour to the sauce which was great for any American-Italian dish. However, the extra cook time it gets in the oven on a pizza makes it pretty heavy compared to what you would find in a NY-Style pizza restaurant. I would use this sauce or some variation thereof for a few years until I started really getting into what could elevate a homemade pizza.

There is nothing wrong with a storebought dough or a dough you buy from a local pizza place. In fact, it may even be better than your first attempt at a scratch dough because the vendor is hopefully trying to sell you a decent product. My mom would wait until the local grocery store would put a batch of pre-portioned pizza doughs on clearance for $2.50 each and then buy dozens at a time to freeze, so this is naturally the first dough I used. With a storebought dough, however, you lose the control of what your dough can shape up to be.

If I am remembering correctly this oven was probably set to 425F. Hotter than baking cookies, sure, but way too low for pizza. I think the oven we had at the time could push 500F, but I wasn't using it. To me, 425F was hot and good for pizza, and a 15 to 20 minute cook time was no issue at all for me. The relatively lower temperature also meant that the cheese could melt but not brown and bubble, which I look for nowadays. You can see that the cheese has melted but not browned, the exposed dough is just getting golden, and the pepperoni hasn't crisped at all.

You can see that this pizza was made in a 10 or 12 inch cast-iron pan, which was way too small for the amount of dough I used. The crust on this pizza was pillowy, not thin and crispy, as the dough only had one way to go when the water inside turned to steam, and that way was UP. The center of this pizza is actually higher than the outer "crust" because it ballooned up as things heated up. There's nothing wrong with a pan pizza, but it's not the direction I head nowadays.

The fact that my cooking surface was so thick (a hefty cast-iron pan) but not preheated likely resulted in a pale, almost dough underbelly to this pizza. It takes a long time for that much iron to heat up, and by the time the cheese started to melt the dough was still waiting on the full heat it needed. Using a thinner vessel such as a baking sheet could have lead to a golden brown, almost fried bottom. Alternatively, preheating the cast iron until it was ripping hot (or starting it on the stovetop) would have given the dough a head start and be done at a similar time as the cheese.

Overall, I remember this pizza being great because it was the first pizza I can recollect being a pizza I made from the ground up. Of course it tasted good, because even though I had no idea what I was really doing I put in the effort to make a decent pizza. I remember knowing there was room for improvement but I did not yet know what exactly that meant, nor that I would do deep dives into it in the coming years.


The pizza below pretty is pretty much a carbon copy of the first one described above, just made about a week later. Again, note how pillowy it is, how the cheese has melted but is still not browned, and how the exposed dough is just barely golden.

December 2016

Keeping inside the cast iron but stepping back from a 'traditional' style of pizza, I attempted a deep dish pizza in late 2016. As you can see, deep dish is characterized by having a crispy 'dish' of dough that surrounds a layering of cheese, sausage, then sauce on top. Many think that deep dish is the go-to for people who live in Chicago, but my dad describes Deep Dish as the pizza you take visiting family and friends to get when they visit Chicago. Any other occasion, you get thin crust.

Immediately, you can see that got a good colour on the crust and even venture into the overdone category. Again, I used a store-bought dough and a homemade, precooked sauce to make this pizza. Overally, I recall it being pretty tasty but not quite like the Deep Dish I had tried previously. For one, things were pretty greasy and a slice had a little trouble holding its shape. I think even though I precooked my sauce, it was too loose and began to run over the pizza, leading to a slight soupiness.

Another thing typical of deep dish pizza is to used sliced cheese on top of the dough, rather than grated. I've heard of a couple of reasons for this, one being that the melted cheese will help create a barrier from the sauce and sausage grease that releases to prevent a soupy pizza. Having used grated cheese on this, I wasn't protected. The other reasoning is that a nice flat, sturdy layer of cheese slices allows for even topping placement without disturbing yoru dough too much.

Sausage is a traditional component of deep dish pizza, but not thinking nor caring too much about the quality of sausage used, I just used what I had in my mom's freezer. Breakfast sausage is what lined my deep dish pizza, and while it wasn't a bad flavour, I could tell it was not "on-brand" with pizza and could be a bit distracting. Had I used an Italian sausage, the flavour profile wouldn't have clashed as much as the seasonings you get in a breakfast sausage.

You can see that I topped this with extra shreds of mozzarella. Today, I'd top with a harder cheese like parmesan or pecorino-romano that has a little more of a funky profile compared to mozzarella.

June 2017

You can see that I've moved on from the cast iron onto a thin aluminum pizza pan, with holes in the bottom. This pan is good in that you can shape your dough and get it nice and large on this pan, but it's not great in that it's not a surface that holds a lot of heat. You can try to preheat it, and can do so quickly, but it loses that heat just as quickly as you gain it. What this leads to is a dough that cooks much slower than your cheese, so you either end up with a doughy crust or overcooked cheese.

I believe this was a store bought crust, and I definitely could have done a better job shaping this pie. It was tasty nonetheless but we're seeing improvement from starting to cook a pizza in a cold cast iron pan.

August 2018

Here we jump ahead to the tail end of my time working at a pizza place. I had been getting free leftover pizza from the slice counter for years at this point, which is largely the reason I wasn't cooking much pizza on my own at home. However, this was a dinner party and I wanted to do some personal pizzas for my friends.

Off the bat, we see my first real jump into a massive preheated cooking surface. This is a wood-fired grill with a 1/2" ceramic plate insert that was great for making pizzas. I don't have any actual good photos of a finished product but the first five or six pizzas were phenomenal. Nice crispy, slightly charred bottoms with tops that aren't overdone. A huge improvement as a result of looking into temperature as a factor. If I remember correctly, this was also one of my first jumps to not precooking the sauce - something I did before and after making this pie. Crusts were still storebought, but it's like I had a moment of clarity before going back to my old ways.

Something to keep in mind when making pizzas on a grill like this - oxygen. Opening the door frequently (10+ pizzas) allowed more oxygen to enter the chamber, fuelling the fire but also removing the indirect heat from the topside of the pizza - it's all being released as the fire grows stronger. This seems to have caused the plate to get hotter and hotter over time, resulting in pizzas that ended up well overcooked on the bottom while not being finished on top. Something to keep in mind and to regulate if you have this kind of setup.



Also, I recommend not dropping your pizza.

January 2019

Unfortunately, the moment of clarity was only a moment. We're back to the thin aluminum pan and a tomato sauce that I cooked beforehand, reducing the brightness of the sauce dramatically. Still a tasty pizza but it would be about a year of more pizzas like this before I really started to get serious.

June 2020

June 2020 is where things took a turn for the better. A few months of quarantine and many many cooking videos later, I was determined to make good pizza at home. Most of the pizza I ate in the first few months of the pandemic was from a local place that offered pretty egregious deals on occassion (something like two 24" pizzas for under $30), such that I could buy as much pizza as I needed (that's the key word, I was broke at this time and was looking for calories over nutrition) and save it for several meals. At some point, those deals became less common before stopping entirely, and I understood that if I wanted pizza I would have to make it myself.

Some big things that I immediately changed:

You can see that the shape is rectangular as a result of the griddle also being a rectangle. But the shape wasn't the goal - I was looking for crispy, leopard-spotted crust (which I didn't even bother to photograph) with a lot of chew and a top that wasn't overcooked. Shape aside, I think I nailed it. The crust has some colour, the bottom did have leopard-spots, and the cheese had areas of slight browning but it hadn't split and released all of its grease. This was a big victory in the kitchen.

It was also the first time in the home kitchen that I launched my pizzas rather than shape them on the cooking surface - a huge game changer. You can see in the following photo that I used a baking pan that was roughly the same size as the griddle, with some cornmeal on top. Cornmeal works great as a launching medium, but feel free to use flour if that's your preference. I prefer the texture cornmeal gives.



As a quick experiment with leftover ingredients, I hopped to the aluminum pan and changed things by precooking the dough with a thin layer of sauce, allowing it to brown, then adding a fresh layer of sauce and cheese on top. Essentially blind-baking the dough until almost done so I can cook again with cheese and toppings such that things are relatively evenly-cooked while using the aluminum pan. I repeated this a couple of times with leftover ingredients in July, and this resulted in a golden crust that was sort of crackery. Not bad, but not my goal. For the most part, if I was making pizza it was using the griddle.


July 2020




A decent pizza, but crackery, not a lot of chew, and not what I was looking for.

June 2021

Here's what I was excited to see. After a year of good pizza on the griddle, I splurged and purchased an 18"x18"x1/3" pizza steel - the perfect surface for cooking good pizzas in the home oven. We're still following the maxims of homemade dough, bright and uncooked sauce, a preheated surface in an oven as hot as it goes, and quick cooking times. The above photo was my first pizza off of the steal and it captured the last piece of the puzzle for me - the shape of the pie. Having a large wooden pizza peel to shape the pie on, then to directly launch on the pizza steel really seals it for me.


In the above pizza, I wanted to see just how far I could push the crust in terms of colour on the cornicione. This of course resulted in an overcooked, broken cheese, but the crust sure was tasty.

2021 and Beyond

I have largely plateaued in my pizza-making and have been happy with my recipe for the past couple of years. The largest change I have made has been the weight of the doughball. My original recipe had a doughball weight of ~480g, which was reduced to closer to ~400g, and it now sits somewhere at ~325g (you might be able to see this progression in the following photos). It's likely to shrink again. Other than that, the process is the same and it's all about finding the balance of temperature, time, and personal preference for flavour.








The thing I'm hoping to demonstrate in the above photos is the consistency of it. The best thing to do to make pizza you like is to make a lot of pizza you don't like. I've made a lot of shit pizzas that aren't shown here that were all a part of the learning process. For me, Friday night is pizza night and that's an opportunity to tweak things as I see fit.

2023 – Pizza at the Fire Tower

As a result of having to fly to my sister's to borrow a car, I couldn't lug my pizza steel with me to Nevada as I had originally hoped. I still wanted to cook pizza, but I had to figure out a way to make it taste good with the previously-mentioned qualities. At first, I made a Sicilian-style pizza. One with fluffier crust that is cooked lower and slower, directly in the pan.



However, I figured I could still get some good cook on the crust by shaping the pizza on a large, thin, 16"x16" aluminum baking pan and starting the cook that way. With the oven as high as it goes, I start to cook the pizza for a couple of minutes, just long enough to have the dough start to firm up and cook. When there are a couple of minutes left in the bake, I shimmy the pizza off of the pan, directly onto the oven grate (with the pan below to catch anything falling). This allows the bottom to get some blasting heat as the top finishes off. I found that this works well enough, and the bottom of the crust gets colour and therefore flavour. It results in a chewy AND crackery crust that I learned to like, but still made me miss the steel.





I also took a crack at a cast iron pizza again, six years later. I changed it by preheating the cast iron in the oven, not worrying about a cornicione (spreading cheese and sauce from edge to edge), and letting it rip a little longer than normal. You could call this Detroit-style-adjacent.



I'll stand by my claim that these were the best pizzas within 100 miles.

2024 – Steel at the Tower



This is still ongoing, but driving to Nevada directly has allowed me to tote my pizza steel, and though I've started staffing the tower, we haven't switched to seven-day staffing yet so I've kept it at the station. Above is the first pizza I made off of the ice, and it was so very good to bend the rules of a pizza to make something really really fresh.

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