NYT Article: Jim Lahey's Recipe for No-Knead Pizza Dough (1/21/09)

[big_anemone]

Hi - first time poster, long time lurker here.

I've been experimenting with variations on Lahey's no-knead bread dough for something like a year; I bounce back and forth between it and more traditional NY-style doughs (usually drawn from Peter Reinhart).

My experience is that it produces a light and airy crust (especially if you give it a full-length second rise), which is flavorful but not as flavorful as some.  I also use it to make a pseudo-sicilian pizza, where the dough is sitting in olive oil spread out in a cast iron skillet for the second rise.  I assure doubters that one <i>can</i>, indeed, work with this dough - you just need to move fast.  I put lots of semolina flour on a peel, toss flour on the dough, pick it up, give it a few stretches with rotation, then throw it on the peel, where I finish stretching it.

I'm very happy with my latest modification of the dough, which is an attempt to apply what I've learned from Reinhart's book and this forum, while keeping the idea of a very moist, no-knead dough.  Unfortunately, I have a crowded kitchen, so no baker's percentages.  I scoop and shake for all my measurements.

Dry Ingredients
1.5 cups whole wheat flour
1.5 cups bread flour
1 tablespoon vital wheat gluten
1.5-2 teaspoons kosher salt
1/2 tablespoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon instant yeast

Wet Ingredients
1.75 cups cool water (yes, really; the whole wheat soaks it up)
1 tablespoon olive oil

Mix dry ingredients thoroughly; add wet ingredients and mix until it forms a shaggy dough.  Let rest at room temperature for 15 minutes.  Divide into dough balls (I do 2, for roughly 13-14 inch pies; other might prefer more), which are coated with oil and go in plastic bags.  After 1-4 days (or more, probably), remove dough ball, let rest for 3 or so hours (at least in my cold kitchen!  I'm sure I'll halve that for the summer), then use shape into a pie -- quickly, using lots of flour and lots of semolina flour on the peel.

It makes a flavorful, chewy, healthy NY style crust with minimal effort.

[Pete-zza]

big_anemone,

We have quite a few members who like to use whole wheat and other flours in their pizza doughs. I think it would be helpful to have a version of your recipe for the Specialty Grains board at http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/board,61.0.html, where members who use whole wheat flour are sure to see it. If you don't mind re-posting or revising your post maybe you could entitle the new topic something like "Modified Lahey No-Knead Pizza Dough With Whole Wheat Flour" (or whatever you feel would be a better description).

Thanks.

Peter
(Moderator)

[grapejelly]

I wonder what a Pan D'ancienne type treatment would yield --> use icewater, refrigerate immediately, and cold ferment over a few days.

Then it might be easier to spread because it is cold, and may taste even better....

[widespreadpizza]

grapejelly,  you could try that ,  but I do not think that the flour would ever absorb the water completely enough to work out.  But who knows give it a shot -marc

[Pete-zza]

Marc,

When you made the Lahey no-knead pizza dough, how long did you let the dough ferment and at what room temperature? And how did the dough behave from an expansion standpoint during the period of fermentation?

Peter

[widespreadpizza]

Peter,  The fermentation period was about 20 hours at roughly 70 degres before the folding and and rise period.  During the 20 hours I would estimate there is a ~50-75% gain in volume,  that looks every bit like a poolish.  If I remember the bread version of the recipe well it comments on seeing tons of little bubbles on top of the dough, and that points to a safe time to execute the final steps of the recipe.  The the dough is very much like a poolish after a while,  say 4-5 hours, but before that it is kind of a shaggy mess for lack of a better term.  I always find the transformation from shaggy to "poolish looking" pretty crazy when using the no knead method.  I almost always make all of my doughs in a glass bowl to help judge the state of the dough.  On another note,  I just baked off the the baguette recipe that was linked by koala,  which was almost a no knead dough and 75% hydration with excellent results.  The bakers fold never ceases to amaze me.  If you have any more specific questions about the no knead,  let me know and I will try to answer them. -marc

[beaunehead]

Made it last night; admit to using a rolling pin on a couple and not on the third. The third was better; more interesting. Good crust; crisp and tasty and not floppy, cooked on a stone (kitchen hearth) at 550 or so, for a short time. Next time, I will add some oil to make it easier to work with. Frankly, after all the different dough concoctions, I've tried, this was more pleasing than any...and less effort.

Used cornmeal as the ball-barings to slide the pie into the oven from the peel. And, pushed some into the bottom of the crust, too, for extra crunch.

And, Peter, though not Delorenzo's, this seemed closer than almost anything I've tried. I did make it with a bit less water than the recipe calls for. I used 2/3 bread flour and 1/3 ap flour.

My whole family thought it was the best I've ever made...and their standard of excellence is Delorenzo's, too (with some nods to Federici's in Freehold, NJ). IMO, the pies were somewhere in between the two, which is a great place to be.

 

[Pete-zza]

Stuart,

Do you recall how much water you ended up using?

Peter

[beaunehead]

Yes, Peter, about 1 1/4 cups of water.

[mmarston]

High fiber variation from King Arthur,

http://www.kingarthurflour.com/shop/RecipeDisplay?RID=340

No-Knead Pizza Crust

No-knead yeast bread is a trend with legs. No longer a revolution, it's morphed into evolution: from a simple loaf baked in a Dutch oven, we now have access to recipes for no-knead brioche, cinnamon buns... and pizza crust. Our thanks to Jim Lahey, of New York City's Sullivan St. Bakery, for the inspiration for this version of no-knead pizza.

We add Hi-maize natural fiber to up the fiber in this pizza "invisibly;" no one will ever know they're eating a high-fiber pizza. But leave it out if you like, substituting bread flour for the 1/2 cup of Hi-maize.

Finally, this is not your typical thin-crisp or soft-chewy crust. It's somewhere in between; thin in spots, thicker in others, with crackly-hard edges and lots of chew. this is definitely crust you have to "grip and rip;" an adult-type crust, probably not suitable for little kids.

Read our blog about this pizza, with additional photos, at Bakers' Banter.
Ingredients View by: Volume Weight
Crust

    * 2 1/2 cups King Arthur Bread Flour
    * 1/2 cup Hi-maize Natural Fiber
    * 1/4 teaspoon instant yeast
    * 1 1/2 teaspoons salt
    * 1 1/2 cups water, barely lukewarm (about 78°F)

Toppings

    * your favorite pizza toppings

Crust

    * 10 1/2 ounces King Arthur Bread Flour
    * 2 1/2 ounces Hi-maize Natural Fiber
    * 1/4 teaspoon instant yeast
    * 1 1/2 teaspoons salt
    * 12 ounces water, barely lukewarm (about 78°F)

Toppings

    * your favorite pizza toppings

Directions

1) Combine all of the dough ingredients in a large bowl, stirring just to combine. The dough will be very loose and sticky, almost like cottage cheese in texture.

2) Cover the bowl and let the dough rest at cool room temperature (preferably not above 72°F) overnight, anywhere from 12 to 24 hours. We prefer a rest of about 16 hours. The dough will rise and develop lots of bubbles.

3) Heavily flour a silicone kneading mat or clean work surface, and pour/scoop the dough out of the bowl. Sprinkle more flour on top. Turn the dough over on itself a few times; a bowl scraper or spatula is a help here. Start preheating the oven to 450°F. If you have a pizza stone, put it on the middle shelf of the oven.

4) Divide the dough in half. Cut a sheet of parchment in half; you should have two pieces of parchment, each about 8" x 12".

5) Gently pat each piece of dough into an oval about 1/4" (or less) thick, right on the parchment. You may also choose to leave the dough in one piece, and pat it into a large (14" to 16") circle, but the larger size makes it more difficult to move around. If you're not using a pizza stone, slide the pizza crusts, with their parchment, onto a baking sheet.

6) Spray the crusts with water. Bake them for about 12 minutes on a pizza stone, or about 16 minutes on a baking sheet. If the crusts puff up, prick them with a cake tester or toothpick. Remove them from the oven when they're just beginning to brown on top.

7) Add toppings. They should be pre-cooked; e.g., no raw meat, no crunchy onions, etc. We like to lay down a bed of cheese first, then toppings, then more cheese.

Bake for an additional 4 to 8 minutes, or until the toppings are hot and the cheese is melted.

9) Serve immediately.
   
Recipe summary

Hands-on time:
    10 mins. to 15 mins.
Baking time:
    15 mins. to 20 mins.
Total time:
    12 hrs 25 mins. to 1 days 35 mins.
Yield:
    2 medium oval pizzas or 1 14" round pizza
*Overnight

[Pete-zza]

I found a review today (2/25/09) of Jim Lahey's new pizzeria, Co., which I posted at http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,8047.msg69237.html#msg69237. I don't know if Lahey is using a version of the no-knead dough recipe at Co. posted earlier in this thread, which would come as a surprise to me if he does use that precise recipe, given the very wet dough that the recipe produces, but the menu for Co., at http://www.co-pane.com/pdf/co_company_menu.pdf, indicates that the pizzas are not always round. That would suggest a high hydration.

Peter

[Pete-zza]

Recently, I have been experimenting with the Lahey No-Knead pizza dough recipe posted earlier in this thread. In all cases, I used the upper end of the fermentation range—around 24 hours, plus 15 minutes and 2 more hours, all as called for in the recipe. In each instance, even when I lowered the hydration value (from about 82% to 75%), used less yeast and a larger thickness factor (more on this combination below), I found that the dough was so wet and difficult to shape and stretch after about 26 hours of room temperature fermentation (at around 70 degrees F) that I had to use parchment paper to be able to load the pizza onto my pizza stone in my oven. Having worked with very high hydration doughs before and very long room-temperature fermented doughs before and knowing what they feel like, I wouldn’t have dared to build the pizza on a pizza peel. I would have had to use an awful lot of bench flour, which I almost always refrain from doing because the finished crust is likely to end up with a bitter taste because of the baked raw bench flour.

In the final experiment, I also increased the pizza size to 14”, mainly to get more pizza (the 12” pizza is more like a snack) but also to see whether 14” was a viable size given the difficulties handling the earlier doughs. I concluded that, absent modifications to the dough formulation and dough management, such as using a much shorter fermentation time and possibly a thicker skin (increased thickness factor), it is perhaps not a good idea to try to make a no-knead pizza dough skin in a size greater than 14”.

I might add that when I used the parchment paper approach, I did not remove the parchment paper sheets from the oven as the pizzas baked. This did not hurt the bottom crust browning. I also found toward the end of my series of experiments that I liked putting some semolina flour on the parchment paper in order to insure that the dough wouldn’t stick to the parchment paper but also to add a bit more flavor and crunchiness to the finished crust, which it did rather nicely.

I also found that the thin dough skins would not support much in the way of sauce, cheese and toppings. I made mainly basic pizzas with a simple San Marzano (non-DOP) sauce (in both chunky and pureed form), slices of fresh mozzarella cheese and a bit of high quality olive oil, and, even then, I had to be careful as not to use too much of those items. Otherwise, the pizza would have been on the soggy side by the time the crust was baked. Moreover, because of the extreme thinness of the skin, if too much sauce were to be used, there would be increased risk that the sauce would seep into the skin at any thin spots, of which I found were many, and cause the pizza to stick to the pizza stone. That is another reason to use parchment paper.

One of the interesting side experiments I conducted with the no-knead pizza dough was to use the poppy seed method as described at http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,6914.0.html. This is a method that I use these days for most of my pizza doughs but this was the first time I used it for a dough that was poolish-like. Interestingly, it seemed to work. Based on the changes in spacing of the poppy seeds during the long fermentation period, the poolish-like no-knead dough doubled on average somewhere around the 14-16 hour mark. By about the 20-hour mark, the doughs ended up tripling or better. This suggests that it is perhaps a good idea not to go beyond about 14 hours of room temperature fermentation. Unfortunately, timing the preparation of a dough to be used 14 hours later may not be particularly convenient for many from a scheduling standpoint. 

The dough formulation that I ended up using, for the 14” pizza, was the following one, as prepared using the expanded dough calculating tool at http://www.pizzamaking.com/expanded_calculator.html:

King Arthur Bread Flour (100%): Water (75%): IDY (0.14%): Salt (1.95%): Total (177.09%):

189.13 g  |  6.67 oz | 0.42 lbs 141.85 g  |  5 oz | 0.31 lbs 0.26 g | 0.01 oz | 0 lbs | 0.09 tsp | 0.03 tbsp 3.69 g | 0.13 oz | 0.01 lbs | 0.66 tsp | 0.22 tbsp 334.93 g | 11.81 oz | 0.74 lbs | TF = 0.0767463

Note: For 14" pizza; nominal thickness factor = 0.074511; bowl residue compensation = 3%

Overall, I found that the pizzas I made tasted quite good, with a delicate crust flavor that one might expect of a crust that is made from only flour (I used King Arthur bread flour), water, yeast and salt, and also with a degree of chewiness at the rim and a crispy bottom crust. The photos below show the 14" pizza I made using the no-knead dough method.

Peter

[Pete-zza]

Another pic...

Peter