Photos + Pizza

Dec 6, 2015

Neapolitan Pizza Dough

This is part of a larger series on making Neapolitan Pizza. The main post can be found here.

Neapolitan pizza dough is simple, but its complicated. It has only flour, water, yeast, and salt. But doing it right means following strict guidelines straight from Naples. I’m not going to cover it all. If you are interested in the gritty details, I’d recommend further reading by Peter Reinhart and Tony Gemignani.

Dough Ingredient Overview

500g Flour — Caputo 00 or King Arthur Bread Flour
379g Water — Room temperature tap water
20g Salt — Fine sea salt
1g Yeast — Fleischmann’s Active Dry Yeast

900g Total / 75.8% hydration

Other Useful Dough Ingredients

Extra virgin olive oil
Semolina flour

Tools

Kitchen scale with precision to 1 gram (Example)
Kitchen scale with precision to .01 gram (Example)
Three sealed reusable containers (Example)
Large non-reactive mixing bowl (Example)
Dough scraper (Example)
Wooden mixing spoon

Step by Step

Day 1

The most critical part of making dough is the accurate measurement of the flour and water. Unless you have made perfect dough 100 times, I promise you that weighing the ingredients is worth it.

The process I follow using the kitchen scale is quick and requires only one bowl, but it can be tricky for beginners who may forget to properly tare the scale. If you read the steps closely you won’t have any problems.

Start by placing a large mixing bowl on a larger kitchen scale. Set the scale to grams/g and tare/zero the scale out.

Add in the flour until the scale reads 500g, and tare again.

Add in the water until the scale reads 379g, and tare again.

Add in the salt until the scale reads 20g, and tare again.

Careful, this 2g was for a double batch. You want 1g

Add 1g yeast with a high precision scale or add a heaping 1/4 tsp

At this point I would recommend using a second scale with higher precision (0.01g) to accurately weigh 1g of yeast. If you don’t have a second scale, approximately 1/4 heaping teaspoon of yeast will work.

Combine the yeast with the other ingredients and remove it from the scale.

Stir using a wooden spoon just until the ingredients are incorporated fully and no flour is left behind. You may have to scrape the bottom of the bowl to get the last bits of flour, but once you’ve done that you are done. Be careful not to over-stir.

Cover the same bowl with plastic wrap, press’n’seal, or a clean wet towel.

Place the covered bowl on the counter and leave at room temperature for 18–24 hours.

Day 2

Prepare three containers by adding a few drops of extra virgin olive oil and spreading it around the container with a paper towel.

The dough has doubled in size by now and has nice bubbles on top

Remove dough from bowl and split into 3 equal parts (use that kitchen scale again) with a dough scraper or pizza wheel.

Ball each dough piece by folding the dough into the middle of the underside of the ball until smooth. This takes a bit of practice but with well floured hands and by using a bit of the bench flour often you can make a nice smooth ball. Keep rotating the underside into the ball until smooth.

Place each dough ball in one of the sealed containers and refrigerate for 24 hours and up to 72.

Day 3–5

After the final 24-72 hours cold ferment in the refrigerator, you can expect to see this type of bubbling on the underside of the dough ball.

This dough is just asking to be fired up in the oven!

Here is a view of a dough ball ready to be formed into a pizza

Be prepared with lots of flour, this is some sticky dough!

That’s it, you have your dough ready to go.