Pizza Dough (Napoli Style)

If it's good pizza you want, you need high heat and quality ingredients.  If it's GREAT pizza you want, you need to start with an excellent pizza dough!  It needs good "chew," some crunch, and a tiny bit of char.  It should be heavy and dense, but packed with plenty of little yeasty bubbles.  This recipe will provide you with 5 (or 6) 12" dough balls that you can use to make the pizza of your dreams!  Let's do this!

You Will Need:

The first thing you will need is time.  If you want to make pizza on Friday night, you'll need to start making this dough on Thursday afternoon and I'm not kidding...  You will also need EXACTLY:

• 1Kg, 00-grade Flour  (It's important.  It's VERY important!  Use your googler and find the 00 flour, it's higher in gluten and it's everything to this recipe).
  
• 1/4 Teaspoon Yeast (Yes, I know it's a small amount)
  
• 640g Cold Water
• 30g Salt

A quick note about 00 flour... Here in the U.S., we sort and label our flour by the amount of protein they have.  The higher the protein, the higher the gluten formation.  This means greater elasticity and "chew!"  In Italy, they grade their flour a bit differently.  Flour is graded based on how finely the flour has been ground. Coarsely ground type “2” flour is at one end of the ruler, and powder-fine “00” flour is at the other.  

I find 00 flour here at the Restaurant Supply store and they only sell it in 50lb sacks.  That's OK with me, it just means more pizza.... you might have to source yours from the interwebs.  Luckily, it's cheap.  You can make about 30 12" pizza crusts for less than $30.

Ok, let's get started!  If you don't have a kitchen scale, this is the time to buy one.  You could ask "Google" to tell you how many cups is equal to 640g of water, but it will only tell you that one cup has 240g in it, and then you'll have a bunch of math to do.  Honestly, every home cook who's even a little bit serious needs a kitchen scale.  Get one on Amazon and put it to use!  Put a bowl on the scale, zero it out, then add 30g of salt.  Zero it out again, and carefully pour in the cold water until you have 640g.  Now, stir until the salt is completely dissolved and pour it all into the bowl of your mixer (this is so much easier if you have a mixer)!  Dry out your bowl and fill it with 1Kg (1,000g) of 00-flour.

Now, turn the mixer on it's slowest setting and watch as it stirs you water.  Dump 5 or 6 large spoonfuls of your flour into the water and wait until it's mixed together.  It should resemble some loose pancake batter.  Sprinkle in the yeast.  Let the mixer ride for a minute to thoroughly mix the yeast in then slowly add all of the rest of the flour except for a spoonful or two.

You'll need to KNEAD the dough for a solid 15 minutes.  You can either turn this dough out onto your countertop, dust your hands with that last spoonful of flour and get to it... or you can use the dough-hook on your mixer.  Either way, this is a chore!  The dough is heavy, and the gluten will build and it will put your hands (or your mixer) through a pretty thorough workout!  It needs to be done though, so smash, pull, fold, press, and repeat for 15 minutes!  I let my stand mixer and the dough hook do this for me, but the mixer does get HOT... 

When you're done, put the dough back onto your cutting board and cover it with a damp tea-towel for TWO HOURS.  I know what you're thinking... you're thinking, "I can't wait to come back in two hours to see how much this grows!"  Well, you're going to be disappointed.  This dough won't grow much at all.  Why?  Well, we've made it very hard for the yeast to work.  We fed it salt, no sugar, and we dumped it in COLD water.  We don't want a fluffy loaf of bread here, we want a heavy dense gluten ball for pizza!  Trust me, it will be OK!  

When your two hours is up, take a final weight of your dough ball.  Divide the total by the number of pizzas you want.  This ball of dough will make five or six 12" pies, depending on how thin you like your crust.  I like mine a bit on the chewier thicker side so I divided 1,665g by five and got 333g.  So... I pulled off 333g of dough and rolled it into a tight ball before dropping it into a small tupperware box.  I did this 5 times.  Then I parked all five containers in my basement utility room where it's 65 degrees.  

Leave your dough balls in a 60ish place overnight, for up to 24 hours.  The dough will rest, the yeast will wake up and you'll end up with a pizza dough that you can stretch, toss, and use to make EXCELLENT pizza!!  If you're not making pizza right away, park the dough in the fridge for up to 5 days.