Turn Your Home Oven into an NYC Pizza Machine

The first step of this entire process is making the pizza dough, which when it comes to New York pizza is by far the most important part. The good news is though, we don't need a stand mixer for this. Anybody with a medium bowl can play along here. So to make this pizza dough, I'm going to grab 575 grams of water that is at a very specific temperature. The water for this dough should be 68 to 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Now I'm going to grab 10 grams of instant yeast and add that in with the water and then just kind of stir that in to dissolve it real quick. Next thing is going to go 20 grams of extra virgin olive oil, then 25 grams of sugar and 20 grams of salt. All right, next I'm going to add in 450 grams of all purpose flour and 450 grams of bread flour. Then I'm going to grab a sturdy spoon and jump into the bowl and stir until it comes together into a bit of a shaggy mess. Now the flour blend matters a lot when it comes to this pizza. A lot of New York pizzerias use this flour blend called all trumps, which is a strong bread flour. It's about 14 and a half percent protein, which means high gluten. Now that's like a really good flour for a commercial context where you're making hundreds of pounds of pizza and you need it to be very, very strong over the course of like that whole mix or whatever. But at home working at a small scale actually works to our advantage because it's easier to develop strength. And this 50 50 blend gives us a best of both worlds where we get a pizza dough with enough strength where any amateur pizza maker could easily shape it, but it's not so strong that it's a nightmare to chew. Okay. At this point, the pizza dough is come together into a shaggy mess that I can't stir anymore. So to continue making it into pizza dough, I'm going to get a wet hand to go in here and jump into the bowl and use a claw grip to squish it and work out some of those drier lumps. And after two minutes of giving it the claw, we've got something that is homogenous, but hideous. This is not even close to pizza dough at this point. So from here, I'm just going to kind of need it a little bit in the dough to get just a tiny bit of gluten developed. Any effort that you put into this dough is going to lead to more gluten. You definitely don't have to have some special chefy artisanal maneuver. Just put some work into it. That's going to link up some gluten proteins and you're going to get the dough a little bit stronger. Okay. After about a minute or so of doing that, I've got something that you could call pizza dough. It's not strong enough to be shaped yet, but we're one step closer. Once you've got the dough mix at this point, the last thing that I want to do is check the dough temperature. And I want to be in the ballpark of 76 to 78 degrees Fahrenheit. Nailing down the dough temperature like this might seem a little bit nitpicky, but I assure you it's one of the main differentiators between professional level pizza and bread and crappy stuff that people make at home. I'm prescribing a specific temperature because if the dough is too hot, it's going to get really gassy and be hard to handle. And it's not going to get enough flavor. If the dough is too cold, it's going to ferment really slow. It's going to be really tight and it's going to be really hard to shape. At this point, the dough's in the right temperature zone. It's got enough gluten for this stage. So I'm going to put a lid on it and ferment it for 20 minutes. Okay. 20 minutes later, I'm going to pop the top off and the dough is gassed up by maybe 5% and it's hydrated a little bit more, which means that it's gotten a little bit stronger. Those two things kind of go together. The more you hydrate a dough, the more natural gluten is being developed from here. I needed to do something called a stretch and fold, which you guys have seen me doing a lot of other videos in the past, mainly bread videos, some pizza videos, and it's a professional technique where we're layering the gluten inside of the dough to make it stronger. So to do that, I'm going to grab a grip of the dough and pull it out until I meet some tension or the dough starts to tear. And then I'll fold it back over. I'm going to repeat that four or five times where I pull the dough out until it starts to tear or I meet some tension and I'll fold it back over. And you can already see at this point, the dough is looking so much better. At this point, I've got my dough pulled into a knotty type thing. So I'm going to flip it over in the bowl now, and then I'm going to round and tuck it back into a tidy little ball. At this point, we've basically doubled the amount of gluten in this dough. It's a significantly stronger now, but we need to fold it one more time to get it up to that New York pizza level of strength, but we need to give it a little bit more time to relax. We can't fold all the strength into the dough at the same time. So the lid's going to go back on. I'm going to check back in 20 more minutes. All right. At this point, we've been fermenting the dough for 40 minutes and I'm just going to give it one more stretch and fold exactly the same as we did before. So the dough is ready to go at this point, but I can't quite divide it because it's really tight from being stretch and folded. So I'm just going to pop on the lid for about 15 more minutes and let it relax. All right. After 60 minutes of fermentation, the dough's looking really good. It's gassed up. It's nice and strong. And now we can divide it into pizza dough balls. For that, I'm just going to lightly dust my cutting board. I don't want too much because that'll keep the dough balls from sticking to themselves. Then I'll flip out my dough and grab a scale and then I'm going to cut this down into four 385 gram pieces. Right now, a lot of you guys are probably thinking, Hey bro, that's a gigantic pizza ball. That's true. New York style pizza for me inherently is a very large pizza. Most of, if not all the recipes that I've seen for New York style pizza on the internet make like 10 inch pizzas. And for me, that's just not it. The size of the pizza has a huge impact on the aesthetic eating quality. You'll see later on, but you want large pieces of pizza. And for that, we need a very large dough ball. Okay. Once I've got four 385 gram balls, I'm just going to shape them real quick. So I'm just going to fold over the wings, turn it 90 degrees, fold over the wings. And now I've got a little package folded up. Then I'll flip it onto those folds and then very loosely use my hands and roll it up into a ball. When it comes to shaping pizza balls, you're not trying to get as much tension and strength brought in as you would for a loaf of bread. If you make these too strong, they're going to be hard to shape. They're going to be really, really tight and we just don't need it. This dough is more than strong enough at this point. We're really just making it into a circle so that it's easy to shape it into a circle. We're just getting these brought into uniform pieces. And once I've got four dough balls rolled out into tidy little balls like this, I'm going to transfer them over two by two onto half sheet trays that are lined with parchment and lightly sprayed with olive oil. I've also hit these dough balls with a tiny little spray of olive oil so they don't stick to these things, which are half sheet tray plastic lids. And they're just awesome. They keep the dough nice and protected. And most importantly, they allow the doughs to be stacked on top of each other. This means that this is the amount of space that it's going to take up in the fridge overnight. Plastic wrap in general can work, but it gets stuck to the doughs and it doesn't protect them as well as these. These are awesome. I'll link to them on Amazon down below if you're interested. And since I got them, I haven't made cold fermented pizza dough without them. From here, I need to move this pizza dough over to the fridge to ferment overnight for 24 hours. A lot of people watching this are going to be wondering if you can use this dough straight away. And theoretically, yes, but what you're making is not going to be aesthetically close to New York style pizza. The cold fermentation process is baked in for me. It's totally part of it. It gives you the texture that you're looking for. It gives you the flavor that you're looking for. And if you want to make something that is close to what you're going to have in New York city, you would just have to ferment it in the fridge covered for at least 24 hours. So we'll come back and check on this tomorrow. The next day or 45 minutes before you want to make pizza, pull your doughs out of the fridge and let them come up to room temperature. Room temperature dough is way more pliable, way more elastic than cold dough. And it's significantly easier to turn into a uniform round. So I'm going to let these warm up for about 45 minutes. Then I'm going to move over to the oven and turn it up to its highest setting, which for me is 550F. This is definitely above average for a home oven. If yours goes up to let's say 500, that would be the lower limit of what I think you'd get away with in terms of temperature. If your oven only goes up to like 475 though, that's just not going to cook the pizza fast enough. And you should probably make a different style. I'll link to my easiest ever pizza dough down in the description. That one's pretty forgiving and can be made with pretty much any oven. Okay. I'm gonna let these pizza doughs come up to room temp. And in the meantime, I'm going to set up the inside of the oven, which is a really important part of this entire process. First things first, I'm going to put my primary pizza steel on the bottom rack, which is about halfway up. And then I'm going to take a second pizza steel and put that on a rack above the other one. I want about six inches, eight inches maximum. If you're wondering, Hey dude, why is there $150 worth of pizza steels in your oven right now? Well, the two layers of steel simulate or approximate the thermal mass in a New York style pizza oven. You're getting heat from above and below and this transfers more energy into the pizza, which makes it cook about 20% faster. And it traps a little bit of steam around the pizza. Both of these come together to make a more dynamic result. That's juicier, less dried out. And most importantly, the cheese doesn't overcook into a tough oily mess. When I added this second steel, the quality of my New York style pizzas at home went up significantly. Now, I know that not everybody is going to be able to buy two of these steels, which if you want them, by the way, I'll throw a link down in the description. Of course, you can still make this pizza with one of these steels, but just like the 550 versus 500 F, if you only go with one steel, you are going to be losing some quality. So if you combine a lower temperature with only one pizza steel, you're only going to get about 75% of the way to the promised land. That's totally fine though. It's still going to be a delicious, fresh New York adjacent pizza. It's just not going to be as world-class as what you can make with two steels and a 550 oven. Now, while these pizza steels heat up, I quickly want to bust out my pizza sauce and pizza cheese. But first, I want to thank made in for sponsoring this vid. Now, I'm not using any pots or pans for this pizza recipe, but if you guys have been watching this channel for a little while, you know that made in stainless pans make up about 95% of the cookware that I use. I used made in before they were a sponsor on this channel because they just make professional quality pans. Literally like these are the exact same stainless pans that you'll find in Michelin starred restaurants like Alinea and LaBerna Dan, but their cookware is also designed for home cooks to use too, which means that you don't need a Michelin star yourself to use them. In fact, I actually gifted a huge set of these pans to my sister last year, who is a really talented home cook and makes most of my recipes. The real difference maker for me when it comes to made in stainless pans, other than how beautiful they look, is their five ply stainless steel. That five layer build is what gives you even heating, great heat retention, and tons of control over what you're cooking. So if you've been looking to upgrade your cookware, I highly, highly recommend made in. I'll drop a link in the description below where you can check out their entire stainless clad collection and all of my other favorite pieces of cookware that they make. Now let's create some cheese for this pizza. For that, I'm going to grate about a half pound each or two 25 grams each of part skim mozzarella and full fat mozzarella. The part skim is just from the generic cheese section at the grocery store and the full fat, you're going to have to go over to the deli counter and ask the nice ladies over there to cut you a big chunk. Also, I'm grading my own cheese because store-bought shred melts weird in my experience because there's a bunch of anti-caking stuff put on there so it doesn't stick together in the bag. And usually the shred size is a little bit too small. I don't know. I just like doing it myself. I find I get a much better melt quality. I'm using a blended cheeses here because they work together synergistically. You get some structure from the part skim that holds the whole cheese melt together and it stops the pizza from being too oily because it's a leaner cheese. And then the full fat brings just delicious, creamy milk flavor. It melts really nicely and it gives you that classic cheese pull. But if you were to use only full fat mozzarella, your pizza would be too brown and too oily. And there we go. Dude, my arm is nuked after that. That's enough cheese for two big New York style pizzas. Obviously if you're making four pizzas, you're going to want to double this amount. Once the cheese is grated, I'm going to set that off to the side with my tempering doughs. Then I'm going to quickly make the sauce for that. I've got one 800 gram, 28 ounce can of Bianco DiNapoli crushed tomatoes and into it, I'm gonna add 15 grams of sugar and eight grams of salt. Then I'll just jump in and stir to dissolve that. Once that's dissolved, I'm going to take about half of it and just throw it into another container like this. Then I'm going to grab an immersion blender and drop it in and give that a quick spin. This is going to give me the best possible texture of sauce. We're going to have the coarse chunkiness from the crushed tomatoes, and then we're going to have that puree in there. That's going to unify with the cheese and give us that distinctive New York orange melty cheese sauce combination. That's really, really special. Crushed tomatoes alone are good, but it makes the pizza just a little bit too rustico. Guys, it's just so tomato flavored. It's got the acidity that you want without being too sour. And like I said, it just tastes like pure field, ripened, sun kissed tomatoes. This right here is very, very close to what you're going to find in New York city. And it's probably the best possible sauce you can make at home. 45 minutes later, my oven is up to a rip at 550 F and the doughs are looking good. The room temperature, they've gassed up just a little bit and they look nice and alive. Next, I've got the top of this dough lightly floured and I'm going to drop it skin side down. So the part that was touching the parchment is now facing up from here. I'm going to hit the inside with just a little bit of flour and give it a nice pat. This will make some big bubbles come up. We want to degas those so that the pizza doesn't collapse or we don't get any holes in it. From here I'm going to use the tips of my fingers to press around the outside of the pizza to kind of establish where the crust is going to be for a New York style pizza. You want the middle part to be relatively thin and then taper into a bit more of a thicker crust on the outside that's more or less an inch tall. So we're going to do that by pressing the middle until it's relatively flat. I like to use the back of my hand for that too. And once I've got the dough pushed into a flat circle with a one inch crust that's about eight inches, I'm going to hit it with a little bit more flour. Then I'm going to flip it over and do a little bit more pressing on the other side to get it from eight inches to about 10 inches. Okay, we're about 10 inches now. So now I'm going to get into the actual stretching part. So I'm going to take my right hand, put it on the pizza on the flat part and get my fingertips up against the crust here. Then I'm gonna take my left hand, pull the crust out until I meet resistance. Then I'm going to fold it over my right and flip it back. That is more or less the entire movement of stretching out a pizza. So again, I'm just got the pizza flipped over my right wrist as I'm pinning it to the cutting board with my right hand here. As I'm going, you can start to see that the middle of this pizza is starting to get nice and thin. I can almost see the cutting board through it. And now I've got a 12 to 13 inch round, which is exactly what we're looking for from here. I'm going to flip this pizza dough up onto my wrist. Then I'm going to grab my pizza peel for this style. You need a pizza peel that is at least 12 inches wide. This one I think is closer to 13 and then I'm going to hit it with a very generous dose of semolina flour. Then lay the dough back down. The biggest thing right now is if the pizza dough is sticking to the peel, which this corner is, you just want to make sure that it is liberally dusted with semolina flour so that it slides off the peel super easily. When we go to load this into the oven and that looks good. Next, I'm going to take one heaping ladle full of sauce and drop it on the pizza. This is a four ounce scoop. So when it's heaping, that means that I'm putting a maybe about five ounces and I'm just using the bottom of this ladle to push it out to the edges. Just like the boys in New York do. Next, I'm going to take two big grips of cheese and drop that on the pizza. A lot of people go way too heavy on cheese for this style. Too much cheese makes a pizza that's super heavy and it ends up being kind of like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pizza and that's okay. It's its own thing though. It's not New York style pizza. All right. And once I got the cheese down, now is where we're really going to take this pizza and turn it into that New York aesthetic. I'm going to use the tips of my fingers to stretch it out that much more. We're going to take it from 12 inches to 14 plus and that means that I want to stretch this pizza all the way out to the edges of this peel and beyond. This is going to max out my pizza steel too, but that's okay. We need a large pizza. The last touch is a small but impactful one. I'm taking just a little bit of Maldon salt, which is like flake crunch salt that I'm adding a little bit on top. For me, salt just enhances the overall flavor of the pizza. Now I'm going to give this one more shimmy just to make sure nothing is stuck and any little parts where the cheese is not covering the tomato. I'm going to add just a little bit more so I don't have any bare spots. Okay, it's looking good. Now I'm going to turn around to my 550 F oven and scoot this all the way to the back. Sneak off the first inch or two. I'm going to pull back towards myself and slide it right off very carefully. From here, I'm going to bake this pizza for about six to seven minutes in total, but I'm going to check back halfway so that I can rotate it to make sure the pizza is cooking evenly. After three minutes, I'm just going to slide my turning peel under, make sure it's not stuck. And then I'm going to give it a very simple 180 turn. And then I'm going to close the oven really quickly because this isn't a pizza oven and it's not designed to hold insanely high temps for long periods of time. And it can easily drop from 550 to 300 in about 15 seconds. So get in and get out. From here, I'm going to cook this pizza for another two to three minutes depending on how the color looks. And after about seven total minutes of baking, I'm going to pull this out and throw it right onto a wire rack so that the crust doesn't get steamed from underneath. Man. Oh my God, dude. 550 is something else, guys. It really cooks the bottom of this pizza thoroughly. So it's nice and crispy and it's got a really beautiful golden brown color. The cheese is also melted perfectly in some places it's creamy and silky looking and like partially melted. And then in others, it's really hard cooked and you get these little bits of broken cheese oil that combine with the sauce to make little drips of orange here and there. Yeah. This just looks fricking insane. Like it looks insane. It's big too. This is the biggest pizza I've made at my house. This is at least 14 inches wide. I'm so happy with this. It looks awesome. The story doesn't end here though. If we want the absolute peak experience that is humanly possible for New York pizza at home, we need to steal a trick from the New York slice shop for that. I've got a slice of pizza here that I pulled off of a pizza that we cooked a couple of minutes ago and I've loaded it onto a piece of parchment paper and I'm just going to turn around and drop this individual slice right on my pizza steel and refresh it for about 90 to 120 seconds. You probably recognize this move from places like Joe's or any other classic slice shop in New York where they've got big pizzas sitting out at room temperature and then when you order them, they put the slices back in the pizza oven. This gives you that S tier unforgettable crispiness right on the bottom of the pizza and it also re-gooey-fies the cheese. Like it kind of gets it more melty again and then it brings the whole thing up to this mountaintop of pleasure that can only be experienced when the slice is refired. Fresh pizza, good. Refired pizza, very, very, very good. Okay. 90 seconds in, maybe two minutes. We've got the cheese partially re-melted. The crust on the bottom has had just a second to get re-crisped and now we've got an extremely lively, extremely beautiful piece of pizza. Oh my God. The undercarriage of this pizza just has so much finesse. It's very lightly crispy for like a millimeter and then it goes into this chewy dough thing. The sauce is perfectly sweet. It's got the right amount of tomato flavor. It's right in your face and there's enough acidity to balance out all the fat from that cheese. The two steals just come through. This pizza is so dynamic. It's so fresh and it is so alive. It may not be the exact same pizza that you're going to get in New York, but it is the closest that I've ever gotten and I've tried a lot of time. Anyways, let me know down in the comments what you guys thought about this recipe and what you thought about this style of video. This is a little bit different from the videos that we normally make because it's not as dense and it's a little bit more free form. Some people are going to hate it. Some people are going to like it. Either way, I want to know what you thought. See you in the next one.