I Attain Pizza Nirvana–and Eat Only One Slice

We are mildly obsessed with homemade pizza at our house. (But not as obsessed as Kenji Lopez-Alt, who carried out a monster experiment in his monster cookbook The Food Lab about whether or not the mineral content in the water has anything to do with crust quality. You can read all about it in the Kindle sample available on the Amazon page linked to above.) My son regularly makes the complicated recipe for deep-dish Chicago-style pizza from Cook’s Illustrated, and I’ve been on a kick recently to make perfect thin-crust pizza. I wanted the crust to be crispy on the outside but chewy on the inside, a hard bar to clear when the crust is so thin. I also wanted to make a big enough pizza to serve 5-6 people at once, which meant that I needed to make the pizza the size of my pizza stone, a 14×16″ rectangle. And I wanted the pizza to rest directly on the stone for at least part of the baking time. The argument for using a stone is twofold: 1) it holds and concentrates the heat, and 2) its porosity draws moisture out of the crust as it bakes, ensuring a crisp bottom crust. (There’s a related, competing product out there called a “baking steel,” a rectangular piece of very thick and heavy steel, which sort of does the same thing but is much more expensive. I’ve opted for the stone and, now that I’ve finally figured out a procedure, have no plans to change.)

I had two big problems to solve: 1) I wanted to use every square inch of the stone. Normally you make a round pizza that’s significantly smaller than your baking surface and you use a peel to slide it on and off. But a big rectangular pizza is pretty floppy and hard to maneuver. I have ended up with pizza dripping off the sides of the stone on a number of occasions, setting off the smoke alarm and driving myself crazy. 2) I needed a perfected pizza dough recipe.

Let’s take a look at the dough first. I like the idea of having a “master recipe” that can be used for several applications. So I wondered if I could use the insanely-popular “no-knead bread” idea that’s been floating around ever since Jim Lahy originated it. (I think he’s the official creator; don’t anybody sue me, please!) I knew that, in general, the wetter the dough the chewier the end result and the better the crust. The no-knead recipe uses about half the amount of water as flour, while the more typical ratio is one-third the amount of water as flour. For the size of pizza I wanted to make I needed three cups of flour, so that would mean 1 ½ cups of water. Then you add some salt—maybe ½ teaspoon—and, depending on how long you’re going to let the dough sit, either ¼ or ½ tsp. yeast. There’s no oil in the original recipe. You let the dough sit at room temp for 12-18 hours, which means that you can put the dough together in the morning and make your pizza that evening. I tried out this version, but of course the dough was very hard to handle at that rate of wetness. When you make it as bread you don’t shape it to speak of at all. I was never very successful with transforming it to pizza. But going back to the 3-to-1 ratio wasn’t quite right, either. So I split the difference, using 1 ¼ cups of water to three cups of flour. I felt that the dough also needed a little oil and a little honey, classic additions to pizza dough, and some gluten since I’m using whole-wheat flour. (Ever since I got my grain mill, baked goods made with white flour just seem wimpy and flavorless to me.) You could certainly make your crust with white flour, and if you do so you don’t necessarily need the gluten. But I’d encourage you to try the whole wheat version, using (gulp) store-bought whole-wheat flour. I think you’ll like it! (You can buy some of Bob’s Red Mill “vital wheat gluten” right there in the baking aisle with the whole-wheat flour—right  next to all the “gluten free” products. Ironies abound. Also–a further refinement I made after writing up this original recipe–you can replace one cup of the four with semolina, a coarsely-ground high-protein flour product that’s frequently used in making pasta. Crust made with semolina is a bit lighter and chewier than that made with al regular flour.) If you forget to make the dough the night before you can certainly just do it at the time, adding a larger amount of yeast to compensate for the shorter rising time.

Now for the technique. There’s no such thing as a 14×16″ peel, at least that I’ve been able to find, but I do have a rimless sheet pan that’s the same size as my stone, so I used that as a makeshift peel. Again, though, the floppiness of the uncooked pizza made it impossible to just slide it onto the stone. Plus, the stone I had originally did not have a back lip, meaning that if I did indeed manage to get the pizza to cooperate there was nothing to keep it from scooting off the back of the stone. More smoke alarms! So I offloaded my original stone to my son and got myself one with a lip.  I needed one more item: something that I could put on top of the sheet pan to use as a liner to help the uncooked dough slide onto the stone. I tried parchment paper, and that worked fine as long as I didn’t let the dough sit on it very long. But if I did, the paper started to absorb moisture from the dough and get about as floppy as the dough itself. The obvious item to use instead was aluminum foil.

So here’s what I’m now doing, and I feel that I can finally move on with my life to bigger and better things since it is perfect:

1) I heat the oven to only 400⁰. My usual setting is 425º, but when I mistakenly set the temp lower I was quite pleased with the results. Those recipes that tell you to heat your oven to 450⁰ or even 500⁰ are just wrong, in my opinion. Be sure you give the oven/stone at least 20 minutes after it reaches temp to heat fully, and 30 minutes is better. (I just leave the stone in my oven all the time on the lower rack.) Many of my pizza fails have been due to the stone’s not being hot enough.

2) I cut a piece of foil the same size as my makeshift peel/baking sheet, spray the foil with cooking spray and press out the dough to the edges, leaving a little ridge around said edges, then slide the dough/foil duo to the baking stone using the baking sheet and let it bake for 5 minutes.

3) I slide the baking sheet under the foil and take the dough/crust back out again. Now it is firmed up somewhat and I can put on the toppings. I resist the siren call of putting on too much tomato sauce and make sure the sauce isn’t watery. I sauté the vegetables before using them—one nice version has shallots, red peppers and mushrooms–so that they won’t be watery. And I don’t use too much cheese.

4) I slide the now-topped pizza back onto the stone, still using the foil, and let it cook for another five minutes. At that point I’m able to grab a corner of the foil and tease it out from under the pizza, using a spatula to lift up the pizza edge if necessary, thus achieving my goal of having the pizza in direct contact with the stone.

5) I bake the pizza for at least another 5 minutes, until the cheese is melted and the bottom a nice medium brown. You may feel that your pizza needs another couple of minutes.

6) I then slide the baking sheet under the pizza one last time and deliver it to the table. Success!

I give the official recipe below. Let me just first make another point: The first bite of pizza is the best. When I bit into that slice last night and heard the crunch, I knew I’d accomplished my goal. The temptation was to gobble down that slice and have another one. But, for once, I remembered my own advice and slowed down, enjoying every bite. It was tempting to say, “Oh, I’ll have another small piece,” but I resisted. I’d had a great lunch out and wasn’t all that hungry; one fairly generous piece was plenty, along with some salad. I left the table feeling what is always the goal: “pleasantly satisfied.” The great food writer Melissa Clark apparently has a “one-piece-of-pizza” rule, which I’ve just tried to find in a book she co-wrote a number of years ago, The Skinny. The quotation’s in there somewhere, I’m sure, but I’m going to quit wasting time looking for it. (I would totally recommend the book if you haven’t read it. I call the “the American French Women Don’t Get Fat” book, written for people who actually shop at the regular grocery store and don’t go mushroom hunting in France. The original FWDGF book is pretty great too, by the way.) Savor, savor, savor! Take your time! I’m surprised at how (relatively) easy it is to be satisfied with less food when you take your time.

Okay: Here’s your own ticket to Pizza Nirvana:

One final, final, final possible tweak: You can buy perforated rectangular baking pans and just press the dough out on them, resting the pan directly on the stone. The perforations allow you to get the benefit of the stone without going through all the backing and forthing with the aluminum foil that I outlined above. But you may not want to buy extra pans, and I do find that it’s hard not to have the dough press through the holes and made the slices hard to remove. Also, if by any chance there’s  hole in your dough, well, see all the smoke alarms notes above. I think the foil idea is the best in spite of the fiddly technique.

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