This post has been in the draft section for a few years now! Hell, Megan and I just celebrated our 3rd wedding anniversary this past summer and little Nicky is now 18 months. With both of us currently on holidays, and since I’ve tested this recipe with the kiddies at school a number of times with great success, I figured it’s time to finally get around to publishing it. Wait! Did I also mention that we recently received a donation of the whole modernist cuisine collection? Modernist Pizza (MP) is definitely going to be integrated into my curriculum in the upcoming semesters. It’s time to step up our pizza game at school!

We call this the wedding pizza because this is the dough recipe that we used for the pizza at our wedding. I still remember testing recipes with a pizza oven that I borrowed from my chef in the months leading up to the big day. There was a lot of inviting people over and trying pizzas prior to the wedding, and we made something like 60 doughs with 2 home stand mixers the night before we got married.

This is a Neapolitan style, my favourite type of pizza (right up there with Detroit style, until I explore more on the MP).

Ingredients:

• 50g water (1)
• 50g bread flour (1)
• pinch of instant yeast (1)
• 340g water (2)
• 3g instant yeast (2)
• 520g bread flour (2)
• 10g salt

Tools Required:

• scale
• whisk/spatula
• stand mixer fitted with hook attachment
• baking steel/pizza stone

Instructions:

1. The day before: to make the poolish, in a stainless steel bowl, mix water (1), flour (1) and yeast (1) until homogeneous. Cover with plastic and rest at room temperature for 12-18 hours prior to the start of the dough.
2. The next day: In a stand mixer fitted with a hook attachment, add poolish, water (2), yeast (2) and flour (2). Mix on low speed for 1-2 minutes until a shaggy mass.
3. Cover with plastic and rest dough for 20 minutes.
4. After the 20 minutes rest (aka. autolyse), add salt, and mix medium speed for 4-6 minutes.
5. Stop the machine, scrape down the sides.
6. Mix on high for 4-6 minutes, or until full gluten is developed. This can be done through the window pane test.
7. Cover with plastic and rest dough for 20-30 minutes, then divide dough into 4 equal pieces (roughly 245g each).
8. Shape them into rounds, lightly spray them with water, wrap and refrigerate overnight.
9. Pre-heat oven to 550°C for the rationale with 2 fans with a baking steel.
10. Stretch pizzas to roughly 12″, dress with sauce and toppings of your choice.
11. Bake for roughly 4 minutes and 45 seconds or until the pizza is done to your preference.

Variations:

• Variations on sauces and toppings are totally up to you. Off the top of my head, I’m not sure what to write at the moment, will definitely update this later.

FAQs, Tips, Troubleshooting:

• DDT: 24-26°C/75-78°F
• When we cover our doughs, we typically use shower caps, it’s resusable. 🙂
• When I bake at home, I put my baking steel on the top rack and preheat the oven as high as I can for a long long time (30 minutes). Just before baking, I turn the oven off and set broiler to high and cook for approximately 7 minutes.
• On hydration. The hydration for this recipe is roughly 68.4%. We have also tried a range as low as 64% and as high as 72%. The higher the hydration, the looser the crumb.
• Transfering the dough into the oven sometimes can be a struggle, I get my students to put it on a half sheet of parchment since its much easier to handle.
• Refrigerated dough can be kept in the fridge for up to 3 days. In my experience, the dough is best on day 2.