Here’s how I make my pizza lately.

The overall dough recipe is:

• 500g all-purpose flour (high protein AP flour, though, use bread flour if you have it)
• 330g water
• 1.5tsp yeast (plus a pinch)
• 0.5tsp sugar
• 0.5 – 0.75tsp salt
• 1tsp extra virgin olive oil (EVOO)

You’ll also want the following:

• a kitchen scale
• stand mixer / food processor / large mixing bowl with a sturdy mixing device like a spoon or your hand
• something airtight for bulk fermenting and proofing the dough, such as a large mixing bowl and plastic wrap
• pizza/baking steel/stone
• pizza peel – wooden – for launching uncooked pizza into the oven, and then pulling it out again
• semolina flour, corn meal, or some other mechanism for making sliding the uncooked pizza easier (more on this later)
• cooling rack

Poolish / pre-ferment:

The day before (anytime, longer means more flavour), I mix 150g of the flour, 150g of the water, and a pinch of yeast into an airtight container with a spoon. I leave this covered on the counter until the next morning.

Dough:

In a food processor, stand mixer, or just a large bowl, mix together the remaining flour (350g), and the salt. Then add 100g of cold water, the poolish from the night before, and mix together. Cover.

In a bowl or measuring cup or whatever, mix 80g of warm (or cold) water, the sugar, and the yeast. Stir to dissolve.

Ignore both for 10-20 minutes.

Mix them together along with the oil until a dough forms. The dough is typically fairly sticky, but getting your hands wet will make it easier to work with. Remove dough and put it on the counter and form it into a ball. Cover with an upside down bowl.

Ignore for 20 minutes.

Knead the dough for a few minutes and then ball and put in a bowl greased with olive oil. I typically put a bit in the bottom of my bowl and use the top of the dough ball to spread it around before putting the ball in. Cover (plastic wrap, damp towel, pot lid, whatever) and put in the oven with the light on for 1-2 hours.

2-3 hours before cooking time:
Divide the ball into four pieces about 205-215g each (or more smaller ones for more smaller pizzas).

Get the balls in some airtight container (or baking sheet with plastic wrap). I have Pyrex containers that I grease with a little olive oil.

1 hour before cooking time:
Put the steel/stone/pan in the oven, on the middle rack, and turn it on to cooking temperature, typically 500-550°F.

A brief aside about launching pizzas:

The first pizza dough recipe suggested corn meal— you sprinkle a bunch on the peel before dropping the shaped pizza dough on it and topping. The corn meal lets the uncooked pizza slide off the peel into the oven. That’s great— but it goes everywhere. And at 550°F the corn meal not covered by a pizza burns and smells amazingly bad.

I have some copper baking mats, so that’s what I’ve been using instead— the mat slides with the pizza into the oven, and because it’s so thermally conductive might as well not be there. However, it turns out that these are infused with plastic and shouldn’t be used in an oven above 500°F.

I like the convenience but I don’t like the plastic.

I see semolina flour recommended on the internet (Reddit’s wonderful r/Pizza ), so I will eventually get around to trying it. I miss the faster cooking time at 550°F too.

Others use parchment paper, but it’s not supposed to go above 475°F (though lots of people do).

Shaping pizza:

This has taken the longest to figure out. Practice as well as getting better at producing high-gluten doughs has helped, but I would keep a rolling pin handy for when hand-shaping goes poorly and you can easily make a very thin crust pizza with a rolling pin.

So to hand-shape: Get your ball of dough and drop it into a generous amount of flour on the counter. Flour your hands.

About 1.5-2cm / 0.5 – 0.75″ from the outside of your ball, press a circle into the pizza dough with your finger tips, working around the ball. It will look a bit like a condom that’s just come out of its wrapper when you’re done.

The goal is to flatten and stretch the middle section while not squishing the outer rim as much as possible. Using your fingers begin to flatten the centre bulge down, eventually forming a disc. At this point you could lift the dough up and spin it in the air gently, or pass it from hand to hand rotating as you go. One technique is to interleave your fingers and then gesture with them as if something is gently exploding inside them— boom. Now put the dough over your hands while you do this. Stretch, rotate, stretch, rotate.

I would probably go watch YouTube videos on how to shape pizza. It looks easier than it is.

Anyway— when you rip it, just say fuck it and fix it with a rolling pin. You can make it bigger than your final size and then roll the excess inwards to make a rim. I don’t think this is as good as if you do it by hand but not having rips and tears in your dough is useful for having a pizza and not a mess.

Put the unfloured-side of the pizza down on your peel with launching lubricant of choice.

Grab a fork and poke all over the part that’s going to get sauced and topped.

Sauce:

This is unhelpful but: I put a can of tomatoes, a small can of tomato paste, some sugar, some dried basil, some dried oregano, some garlic powder, a blorp of olive oil in a blender and purée it. Taste and adjust. If you are used to some salt this will taste green without it, add salt if you want; there’s salt in the cheese and dough and many meat toppings, so I leave it out here. This mix will last for many pizza nights. I freeze it afterwards and thaw it the day before.

In the absence of tomato paste, I have also dumped all the seasonings into a can of tomatoes (after straining out the liquid) and blitz with an immersion blender; with more time have cooked down half a can of tomatoes and then puréed it with the remainder and the seasonings.

Cheese:

You want low moisture, high fat mozzerella. Sometimes this is marketed as ‘pizza cheese’, but sometimes ‘pizza cheese’ is the opposite, intended for other pizza styles that are harder to make at home. The best I can get at my supermarket is 42% moisture and 28% milk fat.

Topping:

Cover in a thin, uneven layer of sauce. Everywhere should have at least a tiny bit of sauce but you really don’t want too much. Too little is better than too much.

Dust with finely grated parmesan.

Cover with mozzarella.

Cover with toppings. Again, too few is better than too many, especially for wet toppings like veggies and pineapple.

Cook:

Cooking time at 500°F: 7 minutes
Cooking time at 550°F: 5-6 minutes

I rotate the pizza half-way.

Let the pizza cool on a rack so the bottom doesn’t get soggy with condensation.