Basic Pizza Dough

Pretty much every Saturday at my house, we make pizza. The reasons for this ritual are varied: I’m an American and want to preserve the foods that were usual and typical when I was growing up. My children are young, but old enough to help with some aspects of assembling a pizza. What I make generally turns out better than 90% of what I could pay for at a pizza place in Spain. All good reasons I think.

We have our go-to pizza types now. Whether it be our use of chorizo de Pamplona for a classic pepperoni pie, since that particularly American sausage is not available anywhere near me, or we make a pizza bianca with local requexón instead of ricotta cheese. And then we make what I have been calling “Asturian pizza” with cecina and cabrales cheese.

Asturian Pizza?

What makes a pizza Asturian? Isn’t it Italian? Isn’t real pizza Italian? Despite what some misguided ultra-conservative Italian defenders; pizza is now, has been for almost a century, and always will be, a universal, cosmopolitan food.¹ Whether it be American, Romanian, Japanese, Brazilian, or Spanish style – pizza adapts to anywhere and any topping.

Spain most definitely has it’s own style of pizza. Thick bread, very sweet sauce, and additional, contrasting sauces on top of the finished pizza are the general hallmarks. And like everywhere else, “national” ingredients are added as toppings. I first ran across a variation on this pizza at a small pizzeria run by a young Italian immigrant not long after I moved to Asturias. Ever since I have been refining the idea: I have switched up the cheeses. I started making my own sauce from the excellent canned San Marzano tomatoes I can get locally. And I’ve been trying different brands of cecina with different levels of smokiness and saltiness…

This is the basic pizza dough I use for all of our pizza nights. It is an integral part of my Asturian pizza. A few things might stand out to you in this recipe if you’ve made pizza dough with other recipes:

• There is no olive oil in the dough. I feel that olive oil in pizza dough too often results in thick, leaden crust.
• The dough is relatively wet. The higher hydration (standard for pizza dough is 60-65%) combined with the lack of olive oil allows the crust to stay super crispy while also allowing the rim to puff up really nicely.

A good pizza needs a good base. Pizza dough should be crispy and chewy, structurally sound enough to hold up the toppings, but not overwhelming. For me, this is the perfect pizza dough. It has flavor, it has style, and it bakes up thin and crispy, like a NYC style pizza. (It also makes a fantastic focaccia-style dough for things like my Pan de Cecina.)

Ingredients

• 800 g Pastry Flour #45. See here for flour equivalents. Italian 00 Flour is also perfect.
• 150 g Rye flour.
• 50 g Spelt flour.
• 720 g warm water. 32-35C (90-95F)
• 22 g Fine sea salt.
• 3 g active dry yeast.

Instructions

1. Prepare your flour mix:
   1. Mix your flours together well, either sifting twice or using a wire whisk.
   2. Weight out your salt in a small container.
   3. Measure out your warm water.
   4. Combine a small amount of your warm water and yeast in a container.
2. Autolyse:Combine the mixed flour with the remaining warm water and mix until just barely combined. Let sit for 20 minutes.
3. Add your yeast mixture and sprinkle your salt over the top of the dough. Wet your hands and start mixing the dough, picking it up from your container and folding it back on itself. Stretch and turn the dough over and over. Fold, fold, fold. Then, once it is all well mixed and looks like a ball of dough instead of a shaggy mess, let it rest for 30 minutes.
4. Repeat your mixing a second time, bringing the dough back into a tight ball shape by the end. Cover the container tightly and allow the dough to rise until it is doubled in size. This will take close to 6 hours.
5. Once the dough has doubled in size, you need to start turning it into pizza-sized pieces. This recipe makes either 5 pizzas or 3 pizzas and a pan of foccacia.
6. Clear off a nice-sized counter space and dust it with the same white flour you used in making the dough.
7. Gently ease the dough out onto the counter and dust the top with flour.
8. Cut into fifths if you want to make 5 pizzas, or cut off 2/5 and hold for foccacia, and split the remainder into three pieces, for pizzas. Each pizza piece should weigh around 340 grams, and the foccacia piece if you are making it should weigh around 680 grams.
9. Shape each of the balls you intend to make pizza with into a nice tight ball by slowly pushing a bit of the dough underneath the rest as you turn the ball with your hands.
10. Foccacia does not need to be shaped like this and can go directly into your recipe.
11. Place the dough balls on floured silicone mat or baking sheet. Be sure to leave space between them for expansion. Flour the top, cover with plastic wrap, and stick them in the refrigerator.
    1. You can refrigerate these dough balls for anywhere from 1 hour to two days. The longer you hold them like this, the better the flavor of your final pizza dough will be. I find overnight to be a very happy medium.