Thursday, November 3, 2022

[Lesson #3] The Trick to Handling High-Hydration Pizza Dough

Hello,

Welcome to Day 3 of Pizza School!

OK, let's review: to make great pizza at home, a high-hydration dough made with four good-quality ingredients is best. Now let's talk about how to combine these ingredients into a dough and how to manage the wet dough come shaping time.

Mixing the Dough

As always, for best results with bread and pizza recipes, use a digital scale to measure. I cannot emphasize the importance of this enough. Measuring by weight is the only way to truly measure your ingredients accurately. It also, in turn, allows you to make meaningful adjustments to a recipe — i.e. reducing the water quantity — to make it work best given the flour you are using and your environment.

In this post, you will find video guidance for mixing your pizza dough. In sum, you'll whisk together the flour, salt, and instant yeast. Then you'll add water and stir with a spatula until the water is absorbed and you have a wet, sticky dough ball. That's it. That is the beauty of a no-knead dough.

Shaping the Dough

Super wet doughs are easy to mix together thanks to the high percentage of water. They are, however, a little trickier to handle and require a gentle hand during the shaping process.

This quote from Jim Lahey profoundly impacted how I stretch my pizza dough into a round:

"As soon as I began really paying attention to how I shaped my pizza rounds by taking care to use a gentle hand, I noticed a difference in the finished product. The air pockets pervading the unbaked round really affect the texture of the baked pizza."

During the shaping process, it is important to use a light touch. When you handle the dough gently, you preserve the bubbles created during the rising. See these bubbles? …