Concluding New York Style Pizza
Our next goal was New York Style pizza. Soft, chewy crust covered in a rich sweet tomato sauce, it was very different from the Neapolitan style that we were coming from. Nonetheless, it turned out delicious.
Making the Dough
Preparing to make the pizza was much the same, with a few differences. There was a pinch more salt in the dough, and the sauce was mixed with salt and sugar and cooked down. But, the largest difference was in the flour. Neapolitan style pizza uses lower gluten, fine grind flour because you want the pizza to be light and crisp. New York style, on the other hand, uses high-gluten flower in order to get that chewy and soft texture. We went with All Trumps, a commercial General Mills flour.
This also meant that we had to mix the dough a bit differently. Instead of mixing by hand, we instead relied on our machine to mix it for us to develop the gluten and thus the chewy texture.
Shaping the Pies
Shaping the pizzas was also pretty much the same, except for one major thing. Bubbles. In Neapolitan style, you want as much air as you can get, then you try to push it out to the edge of the crust to get an airy, fluffy crust. But, for New York style we weren’t sure whether we wanted the air in the crust, evenly distributed, or if we wanted it in the pizza at all. We tried both pushing the air out, and trying to get rid of as many bubbles as possible. Finally, we decided on the latter, looking to Coop Pizza’s pizza for guidance.
Toppings
Over our three rounds of New York style, we tried a variety of toppings. We started with the basics, plain cheese. High moisture mozzarella, mixed with Parmesan made for a greasy, tasty classic New York style slice.
Our next try was pepperoni. While tasty, it was a bit salty and kept getting buried in our cheese.
Our third, less classic try, was pesto. With a thicker crust it held up much better then when we tried it with Neapolitan, and it was delicious. We again used Kenji’s recipe.
Last but not least, we tried sausage and mushrooms. This one was my favorite. The classic plain pizza was topped off with home made sausage and mushrooms, to make a rich, mouthwatering pizza.
Thing We Learned
- Pop your bubbles.
Ultimately, we came to the conclusion that we didn’t want an extremely light or airy crust in New York style and we wanted the crust to be thinner and flatter.
- Don’t bake too long.
One of the big breakthroughs was learning to stop and pull our pies out of the oven. Overcooking caused the pizza to be almost hard, not the chewy, soft texture that we were going for. Rather than wait for the blistering of the Neapolitan crust, we found better results pulling the pie out at a more toasty brown phase.
- Properly knead your dough
When trying to get less bubbles in our final product, we learned that the kneading stage of making your dough also helps to remove air from your dough. Properly going through the motions and of kneading and stretching to get the air out helped to reduce bubble-popping work later on.
Conclusion
All in all, New York style went well. By the end we were able to make a slice with the desired soft, chewy texture, some flop, and delicious toppings.
