New York style pizza dough is a lean, moderately hydrated dough with a little oil and sugar in it, cold fermented for two to three days and stretched thin enough to fold. This version uses sourdough starter instead of commercial yeast. If you would rather use instant yeast, there is a conversion further down.
I have been making Neapolitan pizza for years and got comfortable there. New York is a different animal. Bigger, thinner, baked cooler and slower, and much less forgiving of a dough that has gone soft. It took me a few tries to get right, and the thing that finally fixed it was not the flour or the hydration. It was when I shaped the dough balls.
Ingredients
Equipment
Method
- Five to eight hours before you mix, build your levain. Combine 15 g of mature starter with 25 g of flour and 25 g of water. Use it when it has domed and is just starting to flatten out, not once it has collapsed.
- Put the 362 g of water in a bowl, break in the ripe starter and whisk until it is milky with no lumps left. Make sure it is fully dispersed before you go further, because once the oil is in you cannot see a stray lump. Then whisk in the olive oil.
- In a second bowl, whisk the flour, salt and sugar together.
- Pour the wet into the dry and work it with your hands for three or four minutes until there is no dry flour left. It will feel rough and short. That is normal.
- Cover and rest 15 minutes, then mix another two minutes. It comes together noticeably in that second mix.
- Transfer to a straight sided container. Put a rubber band around the outside at the level of the dough, and a second band a fifth of the way higher. That second band is your target.
- Bulk ferment two hours at room temperature with three sets of folds, 30 minutes apart, all in the first half. Wet one hand, reach down the side of the container to the bottom, pull the dough up and out until it resists, then fold it over the top. Rotate 90 degrees and repeat. Four pulls is one set.
- After the third set, leave it alone. You are looking for about 20 percent rise, which is your second rubber band. That is a much smaller rise than you would take a bread dough to, and it is meant to be. The dough keeps fermenting for hours after it goes into the fridge.
- At two hours, put the whole thing in the fridge as one mass. Do not divide it into balls yet.
- At around 48 hours, divide into three pieces of 350 g and ball them up tight, sealing the seam underneath. Rest on the counter 20 to 30 minutes, then back into the fridge in individual sealed containers. Shaping them 24 hours before you bake is what gives you lift. Ball them on day one and they spread flat.
- At 72 hours, take the balls out two hours before you want to bake. Check the middle of the ball, not the surface. If it still feels cool in the centre it is not ready. One hour is not enough, three hours is too much.
- Press out from the centre with your fingertips and leave the outer half inch alone. Drape it over the backs of both fists and rotate, letting gravity do the stretching, out to 14 inches. If it springs back, rest it ten minutes and come back to it.
- Bake, then rest the pizza on a wire rack for a minute before slicing. Steam coming off the bottom has nowhere to go on a solid board and will soften a base that came out of the oven crisp.
Notes
Baking in a pizza oven
New York style wants a cooler oven than Neapolitan and a longer bake. Resist the urge to run at maximum. At 900F the sugar in this dough burns before the middle is cooked. Aim for a floor temperature around 700 to 750F and a bake of three to five minutes. Measure the floor with an infrared thermometer rather than guessing, because the stone and the air are not the same temperature and it is the stone that cooks your base. Turn the pizza every 90 seconds.Baking in a home oven
Put a steel or stone on an upper middle rack and preheat at maximum, usually 500 to 550F, for a full 45 minutes to an hour. The bake will take eight to twelve minutes. A steel gets you a better base than a stone because it moves heat into the dough faster.Adjusting the starter for a different schedule
The longer the cold ferment, the less starter you need. This three day version uses 6.9%. A two day ferment wants closer to 9%, and overnight is closer to 14%. The pizza dough calculator works out the exact figure.What makes it New York style
The two things that separate this from a Neapolitan dough are oil and sugar, and neither is optional.
Neapolitan bakes in about 90 seconds at 900°F. That heat does the browning for you. New York bakes cooler and longer, somewhere between three and six minutes, and without sugar the crust comes out pale and dull. The oil does the other half of the job, keeping the crumb tender across a longer bake instead of drying out.
The other difference is thickness. My usual Neapolitan is 280 g stretched to 12 inches. This is 350 g stretched to 14, which sounds heavier but works out thinner across the whole pie. That is what gives you a slice you can fold.
The mistake that cost me the puff
My first go at this came out flat. Not inedible, and the flavour was good, but the rim had no lift at all. I assumed I had over fermented it.
I had not. The crust browned beautifully with proper leopard spotting, and dough that has over fermented goes pale, because the yeast has eaten the sugars that do the browning. The ferment was fine. The problem was that I had balled the dough on day one and left it as balls for three full days.
That is what they looked like coming out. Spread flat and wide, no height to them at all.
Here is the same recipe with one thing changed, balled at 48 hours instead of day one, so they had only 24 hours as balls before baking.
Same flour, same hydration, same everything else. The only difference is when I shaped them.
What is happening is that gluten keeps relaxing in the fridge even while fermentation slows right down. Three days is long enough for a ball to lose all the surface tension you built when you shaped it, and a relaxed ball spreads sideways in the oven instead of rising. Twenty four hours is long enough for the dough to soften so it opens easily, but not so long that it goes flat.
Ball it about 24 hours before you bake. That is the whole tip, and it is the difference between the two photos above.
Using instant yeast instead
If you do not keep a starter, this works with instant dry yeast. Swap the 43 g of starter for yeast and add back the flour and water the starter was contributing.
| Ingredient | Weight |
|---|---|
| Bread flour | 619 g |
| Water | 384 g |
| Instant dry yeast | about 1.5 g for a 3 day ferment, 2 g for 2 days |
| Salt | 15 g |
| Sugar | 12 g |
| Olive oil | 20 g |
That is the conventional range for a cold ferment of this length and it is where I would start, but treat it as a starting point rather than a final number. Yeast quantity depends a lot on how cold your fridge actually runs, and most fridges are warmer than people think. Mine measures 35°F, which is colder than average and ferments noticeably slower. Worth checking yours with a thermometer before you commit three days to a dough.
Everything else, including balling at 24 hours, stays the same.
Opening the dough
Press out from the centre with your fingertips and leave the outer half inch alone. Everything you press out of that rim is lift you do not get back.
Once it is roughly flattened, drape it over the backs of both fists and rotate it, letting gravity do most of the stretching. If it starts springing back and fighting you, stop, cover it and walk away for ten minutes. It will relax and open with almost no resistance. Nobody does this and everybody should.
Get it onto the peel and into the oven quickly. A stretched skin sitting around loses gas and dries out.
Scale the recipe
This makes three 350 g balls. If you want a different number, or different sized balls, or a different fermentation schedule, run it through my pizza dough calculator. It works out the starter percentage for whatever schedule you pick, which matters more than people expect. A two day ferment wants closer to 9% and overnight is closer to 14%, where this three day version only needs 6.9%.
Questions people ask
Can I go longer than three days?
Up to about four days, if your fridge is genuinely cold and you drop the starter to around 5.5%. Past that the gluten starts breaking down and the dough gets sticky and hard to handle no matter what you do.
My dough keeps tearing when I stretch it
Usually one of two things. Either it is still cold in the middle, in which case give it another 30 minutes on the counter, or it has over fermented, in which case it will also feel slack and smell strongly of alcohol. Cold is much more common.
Why 14 inches and not 16?
Mostly because I am still getting better at stretching. A 14 inch round is easier to open evenly than a 16, and it turns more easily in a pizza oven. The same 350 g ball stretched to 16 inches gives you a thinner, more classic New York slice if you want to push it.
Do I really need the sugar?
For this style, yes. Without it the crust comes out pale at New York bake temperatures. It is not there to make the dough sweet, and at under 2% you will not taste it.
More pizza
- Pizza dough calculator for scaling this to any number of pizzas or any schedule
- Neapolitan pizza dough if you want the higher hydration, higher heat version
- Simple pizza sauce, which is what goes on all of these
