Homemade Pizza Dough, Two Ways (Same-Day + Overnight Ferment)

Ingredients

• 500g (about 4 cups) 00 pizza flour or bread flour
• 325g (about 1 1/3 cups) water, lukewarm for same-day or cool for overnight
• 12g (2 teaspoons) fine sea salt
• 2g (3/4 teaspoon) instant yeast, for the same-day dough
• 0.5g (a scant 1/8 teaspoon) instant yeast, for the overnight dough
• 10g (2 teaspoons) olive oil
• Semolina flour or fine cornmeal, for the peel

Method

1. Weigh everything on a scale. A cup of flour can swing 20 percent depending on how you scoop it, and dough is the one place where guessing shows up in the finished product every single time.
2. Whisk the flour and salt together in a large bowl. In a separate cup, stir the yeast into the water — 2g if you are baking today, 0.5g if you are fermenting overnight. Less yeast plus more time is what buys flavor. That is the entire trade, in one number.
3. Pour the water into the flour and mix with a stiff spatula or your hand until no dry flour remains. Work in the olive oil. Cover and rest 20 minutes. That rest is an autolyse — the flour hydrates on its own and cuts your kneading roughly in half.
4. Knead 8 to 10 minutes by hand, or 6 minutes on medium-low with a dough hook, until the dough is smooth and passes the windowpane test: stretch a piece thin enough to see light through without it tearing. Shape into a tight ball and put it in a lightly oiled container.
5. SAME-DAY METHOD: Bulk ferment covered at room temperature, 70°F to 75°F (21°C to 24°C), for 2 hours, until roughly doubled and domed. Divide into 4 pieces of about 210g, shape each into a tight ball, cover, and proof 1 1/2 to 2 hours more until puffy and slack.
6. OVERNIGHT METHOD: Bulk ferment at room temperature for 1 hour, then refrigerate 24 to 72 hours. Cold slows the yeast to a crawl while enzymes keep breaking starch down into sugar. That is where the browning and the deeper, faintly sour flavor come from, and there is no additive that fakes it. Forty-eight hours is the sweet spot.
7. OVERNIGHT METHOD, CONTINUED: Four to five hours before you bake, divide the cold dough into 4 balls, cover them, and leave them at room temperature until fully relaxed and back to about 70°F (21°C). Cold dough will not stretch. Rushing this step is exactly how you end up with a thick rim and a torn center.
8. Put a pizza steel or stone on an upper rack and preheat the oven as high as it goes, 500°F to 550°F (260°C to 290°C), for a full hour. Not twenty minutes. The stone has to soak the heat all the way through, not just have hot air around it.
9. Shape one ball at a time: flour it generously, then press from the center outward with your fingertips, leaving the outer 3/4 inch completely untouched. That undisturbed rim holds the gas that becomes the puffed cornicione. Lift the round and stretch it over the backs of your knuckles, rotating as you go.
10. Never use a rolling pin. It crushes out every bit of gas the fermentation spent hours building, and you cannot put it back.
11. Move the round to a peel dusted with semolina and shake it once to confirm it slides free before you top it. Top fast and top light — a heavy, wet pizza glues itself to the peel.
12. Launch onto the hot steel and bake 5 to 8 minutes, until the rim is puffed and blistered with dark spots. For more color, switch on the broiler for the last 60 to 90 seconds and watch it.
13. Rest the pizza on a wire rack for 2 minutes before cutting so steam escapes and the bottom stays crisp. Extra dough balls freeze up to 3 months — thaw overnight in the refrigerator, then bring fully to room temperature before shaping.