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- So today we're going to be making Roman style pizza,
but what exactly does Roman style mean?
In Rome, there are two basic styles
of pizza that I'm at least aware of,
and one of them is called pizza al taglio.
It's a thicker style pizza, and I think in the States,
people often refer to it as Sicilian sometimes.
It's not exactly the same as you see it here,
but it's basically a square pizza
that's baked in pans and has a higher rise to it.
And then there's the second kind called pizza tonda,
which basically means the round pizza,
and we're going to be making that style today.
It's a round thin crust-style pizza
that you actually take a rolling pin to.
And I think a lot of people in the pizza world
would see that almost as a sacrilege,
that you've done all this work to a dough
and made it nice and airy and then you're
popping out all that air, but to be quite honest with you,
it's a style that I really like.
So all you need to know to make good pizza,
whether you're doing Roman pizza, Sicilian pizza
or Neapolitan pizza, is three things.
Water, flour, and some form of yeast.
And what makes it special or unique is the ways
in which you combine those things in terms of the ratio,
and that's the one secret I can't give away today
but I'm going to show you how you can
come up with your own recipe.
So for my money, I think there are two basic steps
to making a good pizza dough,
and one of my tricks is that I like to make
what I call a preferment, and what that means
is that I take my pizza ingredients
and I mix them one day prior to making the pizza
and let them sit out at room temperature
for the entire evening, hopefully for a full 24 hours
but I'd say at least 12 hours, so 12 to 24 hours
you want to make this preferment.
All of this is done with just your hands.
All you need is hands and ingredients and nothing else.
So you're taking flour, you're taking water.
That was my bread flour.
this is the water.
This is the whole wheat flour that's going in.
And then I'm going to opt to use
this mother yeast that we make here.
And like I said, if you don't have the mother yeast,
you can always use commercial yeast.
So when you're mixing the flour and water together,
all you want to make sure of is that there's no dry clumps.
So I'm getting into the corners,
onto the bottom of the container,
and just moving around the edges to make sure
that all that flour's incorporated.
It's not rocket science,
it's just making sure that there's no dry flour,
that everything is fully incorporated.
And I know at this point it doesn't look like much.
It just looks like a sloppy slurry in here
but over time and overnight, what you're going to see
is this thing is going to bubble up a little bit.
It's going to increase in volume.
It's going to start to look airy and then it looks
like you've done something pretty significant.
So this is the process by which you're
introducing a lot of flavor to your pizza though,
and you're also making it more digestible
because it's breaking down all the sugars in that flour
and it's going to make it delicious
and digestible at the same time.
So you want to rest this
at room temperature overnight and by room temperature,
I mean roughly 60 to 80 degrees.
Anywhere in that window will be fine.
If you're a few degrees lower than 60,
a few degrees higher than 80, then you're okay.
You just don't want to have it in a very hot area,
so don't put it right next to an oven or a heater
and don't put it right next to an air conditioner
or definitely don't put it in the refrigerator.
So as you can seem this is the preferment
that we just made, and then this is
what it looks like the next day.
As I said, it starts to bubble up, it almost triples
in volume so long as your yeast is doing its job,
and so that's why I recommend that you try to use
commercial yeast at home first, because I don't want you
to be discouraged by, hey, my mother yeast
wasn't doing it's work.
We've been working with mother yeast for a long time,
so we know how to feed it, when to feed it,
and making sure that it's constantly bubbling
and constantly alive, but this is what you want
and you'll end up with this if you just use
the dry powdered yeast that you buy in the store.
This right now, as you can see, is very alive
and if you smell it, it's got a kind of funky sour aroma
and that's a good thing.
this is kind of the basis of making sourdough bread,
so I often tell people that if you know
how to make pizza dough,
you also know how to make sourdough bread,
'cause that's essentially what it is.
So we're going to take this now and we're going to mix it
with some more flour.
So this was just the process that we administered
to give the dough some really good, nuanced flavor
and to make it super digestible.
Now we're going to finish the process
of actually making the dough itself.
So we're going to take this beautiful living creature
that's been sitting on our counter overnight,
and we're just going to use our hands here
as much as possible and get it all out into a bowl.
And the whole process of making pizza dough
can be done easily by hand, as you're about to see.
And we're just going to feed this now
with some more water, some salt,
and some more of that bread flour.
And what you're looking for here is a pretty wet dough
and contrary to what you might think,
it's a little bit counterintuitive
that if you want a crispy pizza
and something that's going to have a good crunch to it,
the wetter the dough, the the more crispy it's going to be,
because if you're cooking pizza in a pizza oven
or at home on a pizza steel, you need to have the dough
wet enough so that it can spend a lot of time
on that oven floor before it burns,
and that's how you achieve a crispy dough.
So once this mass is starting to come together,
it doesn't need to be fully incorporated.
You turn it all out onto a deck,
and that's just the word that we use for tabletop.
If you don't have a fancy marble tabletop at home,
this'll work on stainless steel.
It'll work well on a nice big butcher block as well,
but really, any flat dry surface.
The key is to have it nice and dry,
so you're not introducing any foreign moisture to it.
So at this point, what I'm doing is I'm just
trying to bring it all together,
and as you can see, it's very sticky.
It's sticking to my hands a lot.
That's a good thing.
It's going to look like a mess for quite a while
until it starts to look like something
that looks more like pizza dough,
and that's perfectly fine.
Now as sort of a speed scratch,
if you wanted to make this process go a lot faster,
you can use a KitchenAid mixer
if you have one of these mixers at home,
with a dough hook and you throw it in there,
put it on high speed for about 10 minutes
and you can accomplish this in about half the time.
But I'd say that if you want to use your hands
and I think it's fun to use your hands
especially if you're making pizza for the first time,
that you do it this way and you work it for 20 minutes,
'cause it's going to give you a sense of how this dough feels
and what you're looking for in terms of moisture content.
And you'll notice that as it gets worked, it's going to dry up.
It's not really drying up, but what's going to happen
is that it's absorbing the flour and it's getting worked.
The gluten is being developed and you'll end up
with a smooth texture on the outside.
So at this point in the kneading process,
while it's really still very wet and not completely formed,
there's really no way you can mess this up.
You just want to keep attacking it
and keep working it in and out,
and I generally like to use the palms of my hands
because you get the most force there.
You can see how it's now pulling away easier
from my fingers, right?
It's much less messy.
And what you have is a much smoother exterior,
so this is kind of what you're looking for.
And when I stretch it it doesn't have those grains anymore.
It's much, much smoother.
It's beautiful, you can still see those little specks
of the whole wheat that I was talking about,
which add a lot of flavor and texture to this dough.
And from here, we're pretty much ready
to to portion up our dough,
and I think that one of the important things
about making pizza or any kind of dough product at home
is to know the size of the portions
that you're working with, and with pizza in particular,
you want to make sure if you're having some friends over
and you want to want to cook for them,
it's okay if your pizzas are different shapes
but you don't want one person to have a tiny little pizza
and another person to have a really big pizza.
And one of the only ways you can make sure
that everybody's getting the same portion is with a scale.
And I encourage every home cook to have one of these scales
because I think it has so many uses
when you get into baking and cooking at home.
So we've discovered that working with this dough,
that if you get it to 170 grams,
that's the perfect size for a 11 to 12-inch pizza
which is, for me, a perfect personal pie.
Now, if you're eating a 12-inch pie of Neapolitan dough,
maybe you're going to be a little more full,
but the beautiful thing about these pizzas
is that they're going to be super thin crust.
And you'll see that using just 170 grams,
which in my estimation is a relatively small pizza,
you're going to have a pretty wide circumference.
I'm going to cut off a piece.
And it's okay if they're in a couple little pieces,
'cause they're all going to come together at the end.
So now that we have our portioned doughs,
we're going to take these guys
and we're going to form little balls.
And all you're doing is you're just forming your hand
like a cup so that it's not flying away from you,
and then just rolling it around.
And by doing that, you've accomplished a nice round ball.
And then you just want to tighten up that skin
a little bit by taking your hand
and you're going to have your pinky on the bottom,
always in contact with the countertop, and just pulling.
And you want to make sure that as you're pulling,
that you're going quickly because if you go too slowly
on the pulling technique, then you're going to stick
to the dough because it's very, very moist.
So the great thing about this dough
the way that we've made it is that since we've done
that beautiful preferment, we've gotten a head start
on flavor and fermentation.
So now we can use this dough today if we wanted to,
and if that were the case, we'd just leave these
at room temperature lightly covered for about
another hour or so until they have a chance to proof,
and then we're ready to work with the dough and make pizza.
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- [Narrator] Thanks for watching.
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