Ingre­di­ents — The Dough:

Yields one 12″ pizza from a mod­i­fied Lehmann NY-style dough for­mu­la­tion.
Total dough weight = 11.88 oz. (336.66 g.)
Thick­ness fac­tor (TF) = 0.105

• 100%, King Arthur Sir Lancelot Bread Flour: 7.15 oz. (202.03 g.), (1 1/2 c. plus 2 T. plus 5/8 t.)
• 63%, Dis­tilled Water (at around 100° F): 4.50 oz. (127.65 g.), (1/2 c. plus 2 t.)
• 1%, Olive Oil: 0.07 oz. (2.03 g.), (a bit less than 1/2 t.)
• 1.75%, Salt: 0.13 oz. (3.55 g.), (a bit over 5/8 t.)
• 0.40%, Instant Dry Yeast: 0.03 oz. (0.81 g.), (a bit over 1/4 t.)

Note:

• Ingre­di­ents can be mea­sures by weight (using a scale with Baker’s per­cent­ages) or by vol­ume, which is marked BOLD.
• Mea­sure out Flour by stir­ring the flour in the flour con­tainer and then repeat­edly lift­ing the flour from the flour con­tainer into the mea­sur­ing cup(s) and lev­el­ing off the flour in the mea­sur­ing cup(s) with a flat edge (this is regarded as the “Text­book” method).
• If you have a choice, I would go with the King Arthur brand of bread flour. It is a very high qual­ity bread flour and my favorite among the acces­si­ble brands I have tried.
• To add extra crust fla­vor and chew to your fin­ished pie, pur­chase Bob’s Red Mill Vital Wheat Gluten Flour substitute/replace 2 Tbs of your bread flour with the Red Mill brand.
• The amount of yeast was increased from Lehmann’s 0.25% to 0.40%. This com­pen­sates for the cold weather in most parts of the coun­try and one way to com­pen­sate for lower kitchen tem­per­a­tures is to use more yeast (in the sum­mer, I would use 0.25%, or about 1/5 t. in the above for­mu­la­tion). The higher amount of yeast will help the dough to fer­ment a bit faster and better.
• Water tem­per­a­ture should be 100°F, water that is slightly warm to the touch.  It is best to use a ther­mome­ter to mea­sure the tem­per­a­ture. (Note: Dur­ing warmer weather, a lower water tem­per­a­ture should be used).
• The ideal thick­ness fac­tor is 0.105, which is a mea­sure of crust thick­ness that is char­ac­ter­is­tic of a NY style.  This is purely a tech­ni­cal mat­ter for pizza mak­ers who pay atten­tion to these sorts of things.
• Since most will attempt this recipe by vol­ume, it is impor­tant to mea­sure out flour as accu­rately as you can.  The text­book way to mea­sure by vol­ume is to start by stir­ring the flour in the bag of flour to loosen up the flour a bit.  Use a stan­dard table­spoon to scoop flour out of the bag into the mea­sur­ing cup(s).  Don’t shake the mea­sur­ing cup or tamp it.  Level off the top of the mea­sur­ing cup using a flat edge, such as the flat back edge of a knife.  It is also wise to level off mea­sur­ing spoons as well. When mea­sur­ing out water, check the water level mark­ing on the mea­sur­ing cup at eye level.

Ingre­di­ents — The Sauce:

Yields sauce for one 12″ pizza and extra as dip­ping sauce for crust and/or side of gar­lic bread.

• 14 oz. can whole-peeled/diced, Tomatoes
• 1+ clove Fresh Gar­lic minced
• 1 tsp. Dried Oregano
• ½ tsp. Basil
• ½ tsp. Sugar (to taste)
• ¼ tsp. Salt
• ¼ tsp. Black Pepper
• ¼ tsp. Minced Onion Flakes

Method — The Dough:

1. Add the Instant Dry Yeast to the Bread Flour in a bowl and stir to dis­perse the yeast into the flour.
2. Put the Dis­tilled Water into the bowl of the stand mixer, add the Salt, and stir for one minute to dis­solve the salt in the water.
3. Using the stir or 1 speed of the mixer, grad­u­ally add the flour mix­ture to the water mix­ture. If you’d like, you can use a spoon and mix as much of the flour with the water as you can before turn­ing on the machine.  Once the machine is turned on, I usu­ally use a spat­ula to help direct the flour/dough into the path of the dough hook so that the flour bet­ter incor­po­rates the water (this is essen­tially the def­i­n­i­tion of “hydra­tion”).  You can use the spat­ula while the machine is run­ning, if you are care­ful, or you can stop the machine from time to time to do it.  Some peo­ple use the pad­dle attach­ment for this step and later switch to the dough hook for the more heavy duty knead­ing.  This approach is per­fectly fine.  It will also often help to spray or coat the dough hook in advance with a bit of cook­ing spray to keep the dough from cling­ing too much to the dough hook.  The ini­tial mixing/kneading step will usu­ally take a minute or two in a stan­dard home stand mixer.
4. Once the flour has been taken up by the water and has formed a rough dough ball, add the Olive Oil and knead that in, at the 1 speed, until it has been fully incor­po­rated into the dough.  Since the amount of dough involved is fairly small (about 3/4 lb.), don’t be afraid to stop the mixer from time to time, espe­cially if the oil is not being fully taken up into the dough, and help the dough along by doing some hand knead­ing to get every­thing to come together bet­ter.  Stand mix­ers are just not that great at knead­ing small amounts of dough.
5. Once the dough has incor­po­rated the oil, con­tinue knead­ing the dough, at 1 or 2 speed, until the dough takes on a smooth tex­ture and con­sis­tency and is elas­tic.  It should be a bit tacky—not wet or dry. Don’t be too con­cerned about elapsed times.  The con­di­tion of the dough is more impor­tant than the elapsed times.  At this point, and espe­cially because you will be work­ing in vol­umes rather than weight, it may be nec­es­sary to add a bit more flour or a bit more water to achieve the desired fin­ished con­di­tion.  When mak­ing such adjust­ments, only add flour or water a 1/2-teaspoon at a time.
6. Once the dough looks just about right, remove it from the mixer bowl and knead it by hand for about 30 sec­onds to a minute.  This will give you a good “feel” for the dough and allow you to shape it a bit before it goes into the con­tainer where it will spend one or more days to fer­ment.  If the dough feels a lit­tle bit sticky at this point, the final hand knead­ing will also usu­ally cause the stick­i­ness to dis­ap­pear, so don’t be tempted to over­come it by adding more flour.  You should lightly coat the fin­ished dough ball with a bit of oil before plac­ing it into your stor­age con­tainer for cold fer­men­ta­tion.  The con­tainer itself can take many dif­fer­ent forms: a nor­mal kitchen bowl (which will have to be cov­ered dur­ing fer­men­ta­tion), a zip-type plas­tic stor­age bag, a metal con­tainer, plas­tic con­tain­ers (e.g., Rub­ber­maid), glass bowls (e.g., Pyrex), or even an empty bread bag with the end twisted and folded under.  To get the dough ball to cool down fast and remain cool, a metal stor­age tin with a tight fit­ting lid is ideal.  A zip-type con­tainer has the advan­tage of being com­pact and requir­ing lit­tle stor­age space.  Whichever form of con­tainer you elect to use, it should be placed in the refrig­er­a­tor, prefer­ably toward the back or near the bot­tom away from the door.  For this Lehmann NY style dough recipe, the time in the refrig­er­a­tor can range from about 16 hours to up to about 3 days.  One to two days is ideal for proper crust consistency.
7. When the time comes to make the pizza, you should remove the dough from the refrig­er­a­tor and set it on your coun­ter­top or work sur­face to warm up.  Dust the dough with a bit of bench flour and cover it with a sheet of plas­tic wrap to pre­vent a skin from form­ing at the outer sur­face of the dough.  In most cases, it will take about an hour or two for the dough to get to the tem­per­a­ture (around 60 degrees F or higher) where it can be prop­erly shaped and stretched.  In the win­ter months, it could take even longer to warm up.  Con­versely, in the sum­mer, it can take less time.  For these rea­sons, it is best to take the tem­per­a­ture of the dough to be sure that it is at the proper tem­per­a­ture to safely pro­ceed.  If the tem­per­a­ture is too low at the time of shap­ing, the crust can develop large bub­bles and blis­ters dur­ing bak­ing.  Some actu­ally pre­fer this, but pro­fes­sional pizza oper­a­tors detest it.  Once the dough reaches the desired tem­per­a­ture, it can be safely used for 3 to 4 hours there­after in most cases with­out over-fermenting (Note: Dough made with high-gluten flour will have a some­what big­ger win­dow at this point than one made with a weaker flour).

Method — The Sauce:

1. Add sev­eral chucks of whole-peeled/diced toma­toes with juice to blender.  Hold back ¾ of tomato chunks for later blending.
2. Add minced Gar­lic, Oregano, Basil, Salt, Black Pep­per, Sugar, and Onion Flakes to blender.
3. Blend at low­est set­ting for 5 sec­onds to allow toma­toes and juice to mix with spices.
4. Add rest of tomato chunks and pulse blend only 4–5 pulses to chop toma­toes into a crushed mix­ture. For this sauce recipe, the sauce con­sis­tency should not be smooth or whipped, but blended with crushed tomato chunks.
5. Refrig­er­ate sauce until use or up to one day stor­age.  Note that truly authen­tic pizza sauce should never be cooked before it lands on the pizza, as all cook­ing should occur in the oven.

Method — Mak­ing the Pizza:

1. At this time, it is good to turn on the oven about an hour (yes, you read correct…an hour) before the dough is be ready to shape and stretch into a dough round (i.e. “skin”).  Place a pizza stone (ide­ally using a 1/2″ thick unglazed and nat­ural red-clay quarry tile) on the low­est oven rack posi­tion and let it pre­heat at the high­est oven tem­per­a­ture my oven can deliver (typ­i­cally around 500–550 degrees F), for about an hour.  Cook­ing a pizza on a hot stone (ver­sus a typ­i­cal metal pan) allows you to “shock the dough” once it hits the stone…drawing the mois­ture out of the crust and mak­ing the dough rise with air, which essen­tially cre­ates that authen­tic New York Style Pizza texture…crisp and slightly charred on the out­side, yet remain­ing soft, chewy, airy and bread-like on the inside.
2. To shape and stretch the dough in prepa­ra­tion for dress­ing and bak­ing, gen­tly flat­ten the dough using your fin­gers while avoid­ing flat­ten­ing the outer edge which is to become the rim or forc­ing the gases out of the dough.  Once the dough round is around 10 inches in diam­e­ter, lift it, drap­ing it over closed fists, stretch­ing it out to its final diam­e­ter (12 inches) while rotat­ing the dough around by one-quarter turns.  Turn the dough over and repeat these steps.  Try to work more toward the outer edges so that thin spots don’t form near the cen­ter.  A 12″ dough round is fairly easy to han­dle and to toss, so you may want to try doing this once you gain expe­ri­ence and feel com­fort­able in han­dling pizza dough.  It isn’t absolutely nec­es­sary to do this, even though it is believed that toss­ing a dough helps the shap­ing and stretch­ing of the dough.Note:  For those who would like to see how to shape and stretch dough into a dough round, a good video is the one at YouTube fea­tur­ing the famous dough impres­sario Tony Gemignani, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjYqw1CLZsA.
3. Once the dough skin has reached the proper diam­e­ter, it should be placed on a pizza peel (prefer­ably a wooden peel, but I use an alu­minum peel) that has been lightly dusted with a bit of flour or semolina (rice flour can also be used).  Corn­meal can also be used as a release agent, but it can burn and be messy in the oven, and require peri­odic clean­ings.  The pizza can now be dressed.
4. Try to dress the pizza top­pings fast at this stage so that the dough doesn’t decide it wants to stick to the peel.  Try to line up every­thing that is to go onto the pizza in advance, from sauce, cheeses, and all the other top­pings you intend to use.  A quick note about dress­ing a proper pizza…often the best pizza is a pizza that is not over­loaded with top­pings.  You lose the fla­vor of the NY-Style crust, the sauce, the cheese, and the whole dynamic nature of pizza when you add on a pile of meats, veg­gies, or what­ever.  This recipe assumes that you are look­ing to make NY Style Pizza, which tra­di­tion­ally keeps the top­pings under rel­a­tive con­trol.  If you do want a vari­ety of top­pings, then use each spar­ingly.  Also, I highly rec­om­mend adding adding on your mozzerella in 1/4″ slices instead of grated clumps.  The rea­son for this is it allows the cheese to keep its com­po­sure while cook­ing.  Often grated cheeses, espe­cially cheap grated cheeses, will cook too fast (due to less sur­face area) or melt into the sauce creating/releasing orange ponds of oil.  I know it is shown in the movies and at a lot of restaurants…but trust me, apply­ing thin slices of mozzerella is the way to go if you want to be a pro.
5. Once the pizza has been dressed and the pizza stone is up to proper tem­per­a­ture, it can be loaded onto the pre­heated pizza stone by a sim­ple for­ward jerk­ing action that allows the dressed pizza to slide off of the peel onto the pizza stone.  Your first attempt of deliv­er­ing a pie into the oven will put the fear into you, but once you mas­ter the maneu­ver, you will be in good shape there­after (although there will always be a nag­ging fear that your work will end up as an art sculp­ture in the back of your scorch­ing oven).
6. A pizza with this dough recipe will typ­i­cally take about 7 min­utes to bake, although the exact time will vary from oven to oven.  You will there­fore have to exper­i­ment with oven tem­per­a­tures and bake times, and even dif­fer­ent posi­tion­ing of your pizza stone (I place the stone on the low­est rack, as that is where the heat orig­i­nates from with my oven), to get the com­bi­na­tion that works best.  I would rec­om­mend against using the broiler as the pri­mary heat source as that method may end up over-cooking your top­pings and leav­ing your crust undercooked.
7. Lastly, when the pizza appears done, remove from the oven, place on a pizza tray and let it rest/cool for a minute or so.  Cut into slices with a pizza cut­ter and serve it up.  Enjoy!!

Nutri­tion:

C’mon, this is pizza…Live a little!!

Notes from the Trenches:

• 31 Days of Pizza (www.31daysofpizza.blogspot.com)
• Totonno’s Pizza — NYC (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQCqR8rt2PI)
• Grimaldi’s — NYC (www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCcbzSMFUUc)
• Lombardi’s — NYC (www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNu7RoJgsd4)

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