pizzanyc,
As someone who has not lived in the NYC area, I will never be able to call myself an expert on NY style pizza. But I have looked at an awful lot of NY style dough recipes, and I have studied them in detail and tried making several of them. Based on my experience, which seems to be confirmed on this forum, there are essentially two NY style doughs—the “street” NY style and the so-called “elite” NY style (Grimaldi’s, Patsy’s, Totonno’s, etc.). The dough formulations can be similar but they also have differences. In the types of pizzas most commonly sold by the independent mom-and-pop operators, the finished crusts can be sweet or not, with or without big rims, “thin” to “medium” thickness, chewy or crispy, or soft and billowy. If you can describe the Lucia’s crust in detail, or identify a particular style you have seen on this forum or seen in a pizza cookbook, I think we might be able to find or modify an existing dough formulation to get you headed in the right direction. Whether you choose to use fresh yeast is not a big deal. Once you have the recipe, it is easy to convert from a dry form to the fresh yeast form if the recipe specifies a dry form. The volume of dough balls should also not be a problem, especially if the selected recipe is specified in weights and baker’s percents.
I hadn’t planned on doing this at this point but since Fio mentioned the Lehmann case before I could post this reply, I will save you a lot of searching by directing you to some potential choices for the Lehmann style for you to consider, at this thread:
http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,1453.msg13193.html#msg13193. But I think you should also look at Canadave’s NY style dough formulation at
http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,2175.msg19124.html#msg19124. I would also scan the index for the NY style to see if anything strikes your fancy that might be adapted to your purposes. For example, you might look at steveit’s thread at
http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,2930.msg25066.html#msg25066. The recipe discussed there is a variation of the NY style dough formulation posted on the recipe page of the forum. Using the index will also turn up Peter Reinhart, Morgan-Gemignani and other versions that I and other members have attempted.
Peter
