The Ultimate Quest for Pizza Dough

Pizza dough, who knew it could take so much time to find a good pizza dough to make pizza?  After all, a pizza will only be as good as the dough it's cooked on.  It doesn't matter if you're a thin crust or traditional crust person making and finding a good pizza dough recipe can be a daunting experience.  

Finding a good pizza from a pizza restaurant can be a tough proposition too.  I can think of a couple of good places in former places I've lived, Buccilli's Pizza in Clare Michigan and DeO'Malley's Pizza Pub in Plymouth Wisconsin, both serving tradition style pizza crust, my personal favorite.  Where we live now, Gaithersburg Maryland, we have yet to find a pizza parlor that matches either of the above two.  There is a good thin crust pizza place close to here called Coal Fire, actually cooked in a coal fired oven.  Who would've guessed.  

In my never ending quest to find the better pizza dough I have made many different recipes from many different places but I was never satisfied with the outcome.  In my opinion all tasted, well, homemade, and nothing like a good pizza place can make.  In fact, one of the better pizza crust I have come across, or at least as good as I have ever made, was the Pillsbury Pizza dough sold in tubes in the local grocery stores.  Now how bad is that?  

My whole pizza dough life changed one day via Twitter (who said I was technologically challenged?) when someone tweeted to Mario Batali "What is the best pizza dough recipe?"  Mario is one of my favorite tweeters (is that what they're called?) if someone asks him a questions he will usually answer it.  Mario tweeted his answer back as "Mozza, the same one we use in our Mozza restaurant."  Since twitter is limited to 140 characters he couldn't very well give the entire recipe in his tweet and that's why google was invented, to fill in the gaps.  After a quick search on the 'net I came up with a recipe called Nancy Silverton's Pizza Dough. (I'm sorry it's an Oprah link but it's the best link I could find that explains the what and whys for making this pizza dough.)

The cast of characters is, for the most part, simple with a couple of surprise guests, raw wheat germ and barley malt.

  

1⁄2 ounce (1 Tbsp) compressed yeast or 1 tsp active dry yeast

26 ounces unbleached bread flour, plus more as needed

1⁄2 ounce (1 Tbsp) dark rye flour or medium rye flour

1 1⁄2 tsp wheat germ

1 1⁄2 tsp barley malt or mild-flavored honey, such as clover or wildflower

1⁄2 ounce (1 Tbsp) kosher salt

The barley malt is the interesting character, the Kramer of this show.  It's a natural sweetener and, I believe, gives the dough its flavor.  

One note of caution, this pizza dough takes a lot of time to make so if you do decide to try it make sure you give yourself plenty of time.  Sometimes I'll make it the night before and put it in the frig until the next day.   

 The day I made this pizza dough I ran out of bread flour, oops forgot to buy it when at the store, so I used 50% whole wheat flour and that's why the dough has a little hint of brown.  Still delicious, although not as good at using all bread flour as the recipe suggest.  

I normally cook my pizzas on a stone on the grill, which gives fantastic results and something an oven just can't match.  Also, I think I finally have a pizza dough recipe that can compete with the best pizzas I've had at any restaurant, so much so I would rather stay home and cook my own pizza instead of going out for pizza.

Original Recipe:

Nancy's Pizza Dough