Pizza - 24-hour pizza dough

About this recipe

This is a standard recipe for Neapolitan pizza that I always fall back on when working with yeast. It's simple, tasty, and almost impossible to get wrong. You will find many recipes for Neapolitan pizza, but they are essentially very similar, because what they all have in common is that you make the dough with flour (tipo 00, a very finely ground and sifted flour), water, salt, and a leavening agent such as sourdough, or what we will use in this recipe: yeast. So you can vary the amount of water you use to make a lighter dough, or the amount of leavening agent to speed up or slow down the rising time (not without consequences for the taste of your dough). Here we start from a solid basis, but feel free to experiment once you're tired of playing it safe.

The quantities listed here are for 6 dough balls of about 250g each—you can always make less, but why would you want to?! You can simply freeze the dough balls to use later. Or freeze a freshly baked pizza to pop in the oven on a lazy Sunday evening (take that, Dr. Oetker!). What's more, most kitchen scales can't weigh 0.2g of yeast, so it's decided: you have to make pizza in batches of 6.

by @baking - Feel free to contact me via Instagram or Facebook. 

Ingredients

• 960 g 00 flour (preferably with a protein content of at least 11 g)
• 576 g water
• 28 g salt
• 1 g instant yeast (or 3 g fresh yeast)

Step-by-step plan

1. Measure out your water in a measuring cup. Measure out your yeast and stir it into the water. It doesn't matter if some yeast particles are still visible.
2. Weigh out 00 flour and salt and mix. The flour acts as a buffer between the salt and the yeast.
3. Add the yeast water to this. Mix with a rubber spatula, or if you are using a food processor, you can let it do the mixing and kneading.
4. Incorporate the water and flour until you have a slightly lumpy dough. Mix with your hands or a food processor until you have a more consistent dough, and knead for about 10 minutes by hand or about 5 minutes with the machine (the machine kneads a little more intensely and quickly than you would by hand). The more you knead, the smoother the dough will become and the less it will stick.
5. By kneading, we help to form gluten bonds, and the stronger these become, the better they will be able to retain the CO2 gases from the fermentation process—and the lighter the crust of our pizza will be.
6. Shape the dough into a ball, cover with a damp towel, lid, or reusable foil, and let rest for 20 to 30 minutes. This allows the gluten to relax.
7. Take the dough out of the bowl and knead again for about 10 minutes by hand, or 5 minutes with a food processor, until you have a nice smooth dough that is elastic enough to pass the 'windowpane test' (where you pull a piece of dough open and hold it up to the light; if you can see the light through it without the dough tearing, the gluten is well formed).
8. If you are only making two pizzas, it doesn't matter much whether you immediately form separate dough balls for each pizza, weighing about 250g, and then leave them to rise in a sealed food container (jar) at room temperature. But the more dough you make, the more interesting it becomes to let it rise in bulk (one mass) during the first rising process, as this makes the process as uniform as possible for the entire dough ball.
9. Place the large dough ball in a container or bowl and cover it as tightly as possible with a lid or plastic wrap (you can also brush the top of the dough with oil to prevent a crust from forming on the surface).
10. Leave covered to rise at room temperature (+- 20°C) for about 18 hours.
11. After rising, place the dough ball on your work surface, ensuring that the top remains the same. Now you can use a dough scraper or knife to divide the dough into about 6 portions of approximately 250g each. A drop of olive oil on your scales will prevent the dough from sticking during weighing. If you have combined several pieces of dough to make 250g, add them to the bottom of the larger piece. This way, you can hide them in the middle when shaping the dough ball, without losing your smooth top.
12. Take a 250g portion and turn it over on your work surface so that the smoother side is touching the work surface. Now go around the dough piece, folding the edge of the dough toward the center and pressing it down lightly (the dough should stick together on its own). Do this with a light hand so that the dough sticks to your fingers as little as possible. Then turn the ball over so that the seams now touch the work surface, and place your hand around it like a bowl. Move the ball around in your hand (think of rolling meatballs) to smooth out the seams at the bottom and obtain a nice, firm ball of dough. Be careful not to roll the top downwards, so that it remains the same top.
13. Repeat with all dough balls.
14. Take a relatively low but wide food storage container with a lid (or a specially designed dough crate with a lid) and lightly brush the inside with olive oil so that the dough balls are easier to remove after rising. Place the dough balls one by one in the box, each ball should have about 10 by 10 cm of space.
15. Leave to rise again for about 4 to 6 hours at room temperature. During this phase, the balls will deflate and the edges will touch each other, but this is completely normal. Using some semolina (fine wheat semolina) and a dough scraper, cut them apart and scoop them out of the box, then roll them in semolina, shape them, and add your toppings. Go to the recipe 'from dough ball to freshly baked pizza' for extra tips on how to do this.