Hi all,
I've recently joined the ranks of DLX mixer owners, and I've been tinkering with my original New York-style recipe to try to take advantage of its kneading technique and high capacity. I've improved things enough that I can now share it with the community. Some of you may be familiar with my old NY style recipe...this new recipe is a
significant improvement and upgrade.
Note that it is specifically designed for the DLX's capacity and technique; if someone without a DLX wants to take a stab at converting it, feel free.
Thanks go to many people on this board, especially to Pete (who I'm still not quite convinced is human) and Jeff Varasano, whose website (
http://jvpizza.sliceny.com) was an invaluable resource—this recipe builds on many of his ideas and is in fact very similar to his.
So, without further ado, here goes:
CANADAVE'S AUTHENTIC NEW YORK STYLE PIZZA RECIPE(and I am an actual New Yorker, so believe me when I say that I know of what I speak and eat)
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YIELD: Eight 16-inch pizzas
INGREDIENTS:
- 9½ cups cold tap water (exact temp not important; use the coldest water that your tap will naturally produce)
- approximately 8 pounds of QUALITY high-gluten flour (more on the “quality” later)
- 2 Tablespoons instant dry yeast (IDY)
- 1½ Tablespoons fine sea salt
- 2½ Tablespoons sugar
- 6 Tablespoons regular olive oil (I use Philippo Berio brand)
BEFORE YOU BEGIN:
- Make sure you have a smooth, floured work surface handy BEFORE you start, on which you can handle a large dough mass. Have some extra flour handy just in case.
- It also REALLY helps to have a dough cutter/scraper ready (cheap to buy if you don't have one already).
- Set up your DLX with its scraper and dough hook—not the roller (thanks to scott r for that tip).
- Have eight containers ready. I use both Tupperware and cookie tins—as long as it's a sealed container that's big enough, it doesn't seem to matter too much what it's made of.
- Unless your refrigerator's freezer is quite large and/or quite empty, you'll probably need an outside chest freezer to store this many doughs.
- This dough is designed to be baked at high heat on unglazed quarry tiles or the equivalent (i.e. a baking stone). Remember that the tiles need to be at least 16” in diameter or 16” square.
STEPS:
1. Pour all the water into the DLX bowl. Weigh out about four pounds of flour separately (no need to be precise at all here), start the DLX on lowest speed, and add the flour to the bowl.
2. Mix on lowest speed until the mixture is smooth and relatively non-lumpy. You may need to unhook the dough hook and manually pivot it back and forth to achieve this. It should take about three minutes or so, but don't go by time—go by the observed texture. Stop when it's fairly smooth and creamy-looking.
3. Turn off the DLX and let the mixture rest no less than 20 minutes.
4. After 20 minutes, make sure the dough hook is secure to the armature pin, turn the DLX back on to lowest speed, and add the yeast, sugar, salt, and olive oil (the order isn't really important, but I recommend the oil last to prevent sticking of ingredients).
5. Gradually add flour. The dough should start to bulk up.
Add flour until the dough is dry enough to handle, but still slightly wet. NOTE: There is no exact magic amount of flour here. Go by your eye and feel. Poke the dough if you're not sure how wet it is. You want the dough to wind up being as wet as possible, but not so wet that you can't work without it sticking all over the place. Trust me—you'll know when that is. There's no hurry in adding the flour—just slowly add until you feel it's right. It may take 10 minutes; it may take 15. There's no time limit, and no set amount of flour you need to add. Just keep adding flour until you think you can start working with the dough on your countertop.
6. If the mixer starts to slow down under the bulk of the dough, slightly increase the speed.
7. When the dough is dry enough to handle, stop. You will be able to tell when it's there. Try to handle the dough when it's still a bit on the wet side; if it's too wet, just add some more flour. Remember, you can always add more flour if the dough is too wet; it's harder to take flour away or add water if it's too dry. Yes, your hands will get sticky with gooey dough! Do this near a sink so you can quickly clean off your hands a bit...it's going to be a bit of a messy process. But it's worth it.
8. Once the dough is ready, take the bowl off the DLX and dump the dough (as best you can) onto the floured work surface. The dough will be LARGE. Knead it a bit with your hands to get any unabsorbed flour into the dough, and then just sort of shape it a bit with your hands into a nice slightly-domed circle on the table.
9. With your dough scraper/cutter, cut the dough into eight equal portions.
10. Place each portion in a container. Put one container in the fridge, put the rest in the freezer.
11. Let the fridge dough sit for AT LEAST 24 hours. Ideally it should sit for 48-72 hours, but it should be at least 24 hours.
12. With unglazed quarry tiles in the oven or a baking stone, preheat your oven to 550 degrees or as high as it will go for at least 45 minutes. At the same time that you start the oven, take the dough out of the fridge. I like to place the dough near the oven so that it warms up nicely and gets that last little yeast rise.
13. On a floured pizza peel, spread out the dough until it's about a 16” circle, add sauce/cheese/whatever, and then carefully put the pizza in the oven. I used to have to dock my dough with a fork, and I used to pre-bake the bare dough in the oven for a couple of minutes before adding sauce and cheese. No more! Just lay the dough out and go.
14. Bake for as long as necessary, until the cheese is bubbling and the crust is starting to brown a little on top. You can experiment with switching to top-down broiling midway through, like I do. Don't let the cheese burn and brown though!
15. Cut the finished pizza pie into 8 slices and serve. Enjoy! I sure did...I just finished eating the best pizza I've ever made.
A note about flour:
Jeff believes that the type and quality of flour used doesn't make much of a difference. I'll respectfully disagree with Jeff on this point. I used cheap no-name flours for a long time, and then switched to a quality Robin Hood flour available here in Western Canada, and the difference I tasted in the final product was like night and day. My advice is to use a quality high-gluten flour like General Mills' All-Trumps, King Arthur's “Sir Lancelot,” or the like. Many people on the Pizzamaking.com forum seem to have recently recommended some Harvest King flour varieties.
Now, on to my sauce discovery!
AN AUTHENTIC-TASTING NEW YORK PIZZA SAUCE===================================
YIELD: About nine portions of 13 ounces each (13 ounces is enough to easily cover a 16" pizza with just a tiny bit of leftover; it's a perfect-sized portion).
INGREDIENTS:
- One #10 can of Stanislaus “Full Red” (or “Concentrated Crushed” as it's known here) Tomatoes
- Enough water to make the sauce the consistency you desire--probably around 3 cups or so.
- 1 Tablespoon fine-ground oregano
- 2 Tablespoons fine sea salt
- 1 Tbsp dehydrated basil leaves
- 1/3 cup pizza seasoning (use more or less depending on how strong your particular brand of pizza seasoning is. I used a cheap “dollar store” bottle of pizza seasoning that's a bit on the weak side, so I use more of it.)
STEPS:
Mix it all together!
That's all there is to it. No pre-cooking, simmering, etc. Just mix it all together, then apportion the sauce into tupperware and freeze them along with the dough. The night before you want a pizza, retrieve a frozen sauce and put it in the fridge; it'll be ready by the next day.
