Sourdough New York-Style Pizza (in Your Home Oven)

This video will show you how to make sourdough New York style pizza at home. It is possible to make this style of pizza in your home oven, as long as you're fine with the pizza being a little bit smaller than what you would get in New York City. I'll show you the two high quality cheeses I use for good flavor and texture, I'll show you how to make a homemade New York style pizza sauce, and I'll show you how to get a thin and crispy no flop crust on your pizza. Here's how to make it. Start off with 255 grams of water. Add that directly to your mixing bowl on top of your digital scale. This is going to be a 61% hydration dough when everything is added together. Next add 100 grams of active and risen sourdough starter to your mixing bowl. I took 25 grams of starter out of the fridge the night before, I fed it 50 grams of bread flour and 50 grams of water, and now it's ready to use. So just add 100 total grams of starter to your mixing bowl, then follow that with 13 grams of salt. This is a little bit saltier than a standard sourdough bread recipe might be, but New York style pizza dough is a little bit saltier than bread dough. Next add 5 grams of regular white sugar. This is a standard ingredient for New York style pizza dough. It's going to help the dough brown a little bit in the oven. Then add 10 grams of extra virgin olive oil. This is another standard ingredient for New York style pizza doughs, and it's also going to help the dough brown up a little bit in the oven as it bakes. Now stir all these ingredients together just to dissolve the starter and the salt into the water, and then get out your bread flour. I'm using the blue bag of King Arthur bread flour. You can use any kind of bread flour that's similar to this, and it's going to give you a nice thin and crispy but still chewy crust. Add 450 grams of bread flour to your liquid ingredients. Then mix the dough together with a fork or a wooden spoon or something for about 1-2 minutes. You just want to keep mixing until all of the liquid is absorbed into the flour, and you're going to end up with a relatively dry dough. This is just 61% hydration, which is relatively dry if you're used to making sourdough bread. Now once your dough looks something like this, it's time to knead. So pour out your dough onto your kitchen counter. No need to add any flour to the counter or else it's going to change the hydration of the dough as the flour gets absorbed. So just unfloured counter and knead the dough by hand for about 8-10 minutes. If you're looking for the gluten to develop in the dough, the dough should feel a lot stronger by the end of the 8 minutes, and the dough should be fairly smooth on the surface. These are all signs that you've kneaded your dough for long enough. If you've been kneading your dough for 8 minutes and your dough still feels a little bit too sticky and it's not quite as smooth as you want it to be, just shape the dough into a ball, cover it up, and let it rest on the counter for 5 minutes. After 5 minutes, your dough should be holding together a lot better than before. It should even be a little bit smoother on top. If you knead it a few times and then check for smoothness, it should look something like this. This dough ball is ready for bulk fermentation, or the first rise. To prepare your dough for the first rise, ball up the dough into a ball, and then get out a glass bowl with a lid. Something airtight would be great, and glass is great because you can see through the sides and see how much your dough is rising. Grease the glass bowl with a little bit of olive oil, and then transfer the dough into the bowl. You can press it down flat if you wish. This will help you see how much it's actually rising during the bulk fermentation. Pop the lid onto the bowl, and then put this somewhere on your kitchen counter where your dough can rise at room temperature for 4 to 6 hours, or until it's roughly doubled in size. After 4 hours, my dough had risen to almost the top of the bowl, and that's when I know it's about doubled in size. Once your dough is doubled in size, it's ready to be divided and shaped into individual dough balls. This batch of dough is enough to make 3 individual dough balls, so go ahead and take the dough out of the glass bowl and place it onto your kitchen counter. Stretch out the dough and flatten it a little bit with your fingertips, then using a bench scraper or a chef's knife, cut the dough into 3 equally sized pieces. If you want to weigh them out precisely using a digital scale, they That will be the perfect size to make 3 thin and crispy 12-inch pizzas. Now to shape a piece of dough into a dough ball, flip it over, and then stretch and fold the dough, keeping each edge of the dough under your thumb. Go around the dough, stretching and folding, stretching and folding, until you're left with a nice smooth ball of dough. Flip the dough ball over so the seam side is down against your counter, and then round the dough ball out with your hands to smooth out the edges. Then repeat that exact same shaping process with each of the 3 individual dough balls. Now it's time for the second rise, or the final proof. I like to do the final proof in a 9x13 pan with a lid. Anything airtight will work really well because you don't want these doughs to dry out while they're proofing, but if your pan doesn't have an airtight lid, you can always use a sheet of plastic wrap. Dust the inside of your 9x13 pan or container with just a little bit of bread flour to make a little bit of a non-stick barrier on the bottom, and then arrange the doughs in the pan with a few inches of space in between each dough ball. They'll be rising quite a bit during the final proof, so you want to leave them spaced so the dough balls don't stick together. Before letting them rise, sprinkle the tops of the pizza doughs with a little bit more bread flour, and now they're ready for their final proof. Then cover the dough up with plastic wrap or an airtight lid, and let them rise at room temperature for 1.5 to 3 hours, however long it takes them to double in size. While the doughs are proofing, it's the perfect time to prepare your fairly simple New York style pizza sauce. Pizza sauce recipes can vary from restaurant to restaurant in New York. I am basically copying Luigi's Pizza in Brooklyn for this recipe. I am using the Mutti brand crushed tomatoes, which taste very good on their own, and I'm going to be adding a little bit of salt and a little bit of fresh basil. So to a 28 ounce can of crushed tomatoes, add one teaspoon of kosher salt or sea salt, and then take about five leaves of fresh basil and tear them up directly into the sauce. Stir the sauce together to distribute the basil and salt throughout the tomato sauce, and that is it. This is a great tasting, really easy to make New York style pizza sauce. Store this in the fridge until you're ready to use it. Now for the cheese. You'll need some whole milk, low moisture mozzarella cheese. This Galbani brand is a really good one to use for New York style pizza. Just make sure you're getting a low moisture, whole milk mozzarella. The fat in the whole milk will make this cheese really stretchy and creamy and delicious on top of your pizza. If you just want to use one cheese, use this one, but I like to use a 50-50 blend of whole milk, low moisture mozzarella, and part skim, low moisture mozzarella. These cheeses are basically the same thing, except this one on the right is made with some skim milk and the one on the left is just made with whole milk. If you use just whole milk mozzarella, that's completely fine. You'll have a great pizza, but if you mix them 50-50, the part skim cheese tends to brown a bit more in the oven and it does give a good result as well. So if I was just going to use one of these cheeses, I would definitely use the whole milk, low moisture mozzarella. I would shred it up and just top my pizza that way, but I'm actually going to shred both of these cheeses and then mix them together to create a 50-50 blend of part skim and whole milk mozzarella. That'll give me a good balance between a creamy and melty cheese and one that browns a little bit more in the oven. That's the same thing I did with my Chicago thin crust pizza recipe. I'll leave a link to that recipe down in the description box below. Then just like the sauce, the cheese goes into the fridge until you're ready to use it. Then the last couple of toppings you'll need are some dried oregano, which I didn't film, but it's just dried oregano, and then a hard grating cheese. I'm using Parmigiano-Reggiano. This is a very flavorful, savory, a little bit tangy cheese that I'm going to grate directly on top of the pizza right before I bake it. If you want a tangier cheese, use Pecorino Romano. If you want a cheaper one, use Grana Padano. 30 minutes before you're ready to bake your pizza, preheat your oven to 550 degrees Fahrenheit, or as high as your oven will go, and then have a baking steel or a pizza stone on the bottom rack of your oven. Then above that, put something else that's heavy and can radiate heat. I'm using a cast iron pan. You can use a second pizza stone if you have one, or just anything made of cast iron works well. This is one of the best ways that I know for how to imitate a higher temperature New York-style pizza oven in your home oven. You've got a hot baking steel underneath, and then something to radiate heat right above the pizza cast iron. So let these two things preheat inside of your oven for 30 minutes, and then you're ready to bake. It's been about an hour and a half, and my dough balls have risen to almost double in size. Not quite there, but they're very puffy, light, and full of air. At this point, you can move the dough to the fridge to keep fermenting for 24 to 48 hours. It can really go a long time in the fridge, and you can still use it to make great pizza, or you can make the pizza right away. Let's do that. To assemble your pizzas, get ready your pizza preparing station. I've got here a pizza peel. It's good to have either a metal or wooden pizza peel. Then a bowl of flour, just regular bread flour will work. That's for dusting the ball of dough before you stretch it out. And then, of course, you've got your dough balls. If they've been cold proofing in the fridge, bring them up to room temperature. They'll be a little bit easier to stretch that way. Then the last ingredient I like to have is semolina flour. I use this for sprinkling on the pizza peel. It really helps the pizza slide off the peel very well. If you don't have semolina flour, you could definitely use regular bread flour. You might just need to use a little bit more of it and shake it around on the peel a few more times to make sure it's not sticking. Now to stretch out the pizza, take one dough out of the container and place it into your bowl of flour. Dip it around in the flour so that each side has flour on it, as well as the edges. You want total coverage with some bread flour around the dough ball. Then place the dough on an unfloured part of your counter and start pressing. What we're going to do here is maintain a little bit of an edge around the dough that's going to be the final crust. You don't need to leave as much of a crust as you do for, say, Neapolitan pizza, but leave a little bit of crust on the edge and then start pressing out the rest of the dough. You'll notice I'm pressing the air out of most of the dough, except right in the middle. It's really easy to accidentally make the middle of the dough too thin and then you end up with a pizza that has a floppy tip or the middle of the pizza is thinner than the rest of it. So as you're pressing out your dough at this point, just focus on the edges and then go into the center later. So once the edges of the dough are the right thickness, just slightly press down the middle and it'll match the rest of the dough and then it won't be too thin in the middle. Once that's done, start stretching out the dough, trying to get it to reach 11 to 12 inches in diameter. Once it's about 11 to 12 inches, that's when I like to transfer it on to the pizza peel. So you can stretch it out on the kitchen counter with your hands a few times and then you can lift it up and let gravity do the work. Just grab the dough very gently by the crust, lift it up in the air, and then kind of do a steering wheel motion. This will let gravity pull on the dough evenly as you turn it around in a circular fashion that'll keep the dough as a circle, and then once it seems like the dough is almost 11 to 12 inches in diameter, you can place it on the counter, measure it with a measuring tape if you'd like, and there we go, I got between 11 and 12 inches, so I'm gonna transfer this to my pizza peel. Like I said before, make sure you dust your pizza peel with a little bit of semolina flour or some bread flour or all-purpose flour. The dough might curl up on itself a little bit as you're transferring it, so you can just pull it out to a full 11 to 12 inches and then give it a little shake on the There we go, your pizza is now ready to top. This is how I top a plain 12-inch cheese pizza. I'll include some instructions in the written recipe for how you can get a saucier or a cheesier pizza, but this is just my plain cheese pizza. Start by adding a third cup or 85 grams of your prepared New York-style pizza sauce, and then just with the back of a spoon, spread out the sauce in an even layer, almost all the way to the edges. You want to leave a little bit of crust exposed on the end, not too much. This might seem like not enough sauce to you, but I find that it's better to put a little bit less sauce than you think you need. That seems to be the way to get a nice thin and crispy pizza that stays thin and crispy and it doesn't get too soggy from excess moisture from the sauce. So a third cup is perfect. Now it's time for the mozzarella cheese. I'm adding three quarters cup of mozzarella cheese or 75 grams of that 50-50 cheese blend that I created before. This is half low moisture part skim mozzarella and half low moisture whole milk mozzarella that I shredded myself. Again, if you're going to use just one of those cheeses, stick with the shredded low moisture whole milk mozzarella. And similar to the sauce, this might not seem like enough cheese to you, but I just like to spread it out as much as I can in an even layer. And 75 grams of cheese or three quarters cup really gives me a nice result. But if you want a cheesier pizza, I would use somewhere around 90 to 100 grams of cheese. I'll include instructions in the written recipe for how to get a cheesier or a saucier pizza. So just check there on grantbakes.com for all those variations. Next, add one tablespoon or six grams of grated parmesan cheese. This is that Parmigiano-Reggiano that I grated myself. I decided to grate this into a bowl just so I could measure it accurately, but normally I would just grate this directly on top of the pizza and go by eye. Now it's been a while since I gave this a shake, so just give your pizza a shake every once in a while to make sure it's not sticking to the peel. If it is sticking, you can give it a few adjustments on the peel, see if that works. You can even slide some flour under the dough with your bench scraper. That's helped me in the past. But once your dough is not sticking, you can add the final ingredient, which is just an eighth teaspoon of dried oregano. Again, normally I would just shake oregano right on top of the pizza, but I wanted to be precise today, so I measured it out to an exact eighth teaspoon. Now the pizza might have curled up a little bit as you're shaking it and stretching it, so the last thing you do before it goes in the oven is just give it a stretch to make sure you've got a full 12 inches in diameter, or as close as you can get to 12 inches. Then give the pizza one last shake to make sure it's not sticking, and to the oven it goes. Slide it carefully onto your preheated pizza stone or baking steel, which should have been preheating for at or as hot as your oven will go. So now we've got the really high heat coming from the baking steel underneath the pizza. We've also got heat radiating off of the cast iron pan on the rack above the pizza. As far as New York style goes, I think this is the best home oven setup. Now let your pizza bake for six to seven minutes at 550 degrees Fahrenheit. About four to five minutes into the baking time, this is what your pizza should look like. The cheese is starting to bubble, the crust has fully puffed up, but the crust is still a little bit pale. Then after six or seven minutes, maybe eight minutes depending on your oven, this is what your pizza should look like. The cheese should be bubbling and just starting to brown, and the crust should start gaining some golden brown color. Slide your pizza peel under the pizza to remove it, and you can admire your handiwork. Then the best way to keep your pizza thin and crispy without getting soggy is to transfer it onto a wire rack or a cooling rack, and let it cool for at least one minute before slicing into it. If you let the pizza rest on a cutting board or a plate, the steam might actually make the crust go a little bit soggy. Now this is optional, but before slicing the pizza, I like to finish it with even more parmesan cheese or whatever hard grating cheese you like to use, and then check. This pizza definitely didn't get soggy. It's gonna be a thin and crispy, no flop pizza. Now I can't bake a full 18 or 20 inch pizza in my home oven, but to get the most New York experience that I can possibly get, I'm cutting this smaller pizza into four slices so that the slices are still relatively large. I love how the mozzarella and the hard grating cheese kind of fuse and meld together on top of the pizza, but the sauce still really shines through in other parts as well. And since we cooked this on a baking steel, we've got that nice charred bottom, that undercarriage, and the pizza really has no flop. It's maintained some thinness and crispiness and general sturdiness. We've also got a lot of little fermentation bubbles throughout this pizza. It's definitely a well-fermented sourdough crust. Now for the taste test. I love that the mozzarella cheese on this pizza is melty, creamy, and delicious, but it's not falling off as I bite into the pizza. It's a well-balanced pizza. It's the perfect amount of cheese, the perfect amount of sauce. You get tanginess from the fresh homemade pizza sauce and an extra boost of flavor from the parmesan cheese. I definitely wouldn't skip that Now some people think the best way to enjoy a New York style slice of pizza is to enjoy it reheated, just like they would warm up your slice in the pizza oven in many New York pizza shops right before they serve it to you. So if you want to try this, place a slightly cooled down slice of pizza on a sheet of parchment paper and then transfer that into your oven onto the preheated baking steel or pizza stone. Let the pizza reheat for one to two minutes at 550 degrees Fahrenheit, or as high as your oven will go, and then when you take the pizza out of the oven, it should be warmed back up to serving temperature. The cheese should have started to melt again and it's ready to serve. You can add more parmesan cheese on top of the pizza at this point, as if I haven't done that enough already. Add oregano, red pepper flakes, whatever you want. This pizza is ready to eat. You can even fold this pizza if you want to, although I wouldn't really recommend it. The 12-inch diameter pizza is kind of too small to do the folding technique properly, but eat the pizza however you want to. So whether you prefer a reheated slice or a pizza that's fresh from the oven, I know you're going to love this sourdough New York-style pizza recipe. I'm making 52 different sourdough recipes this year as a part of my 52 Weeks of Sourdough. Check them out at grantbakes.com slash 52.