I found a website here with the best pizza base recipe I’ve read and I refer to it every few weeks when I make my own pizza bases.
Varasanos recipe has a lot of theory about what makes a good base. It is a lot to wade through, so I have taken the key parts I use and reproduced them here, while adding my own specific method.
I use cheap flour. ALDI 79c flour with 10.2g protein per 100g is fine. The sourdough I have been feeding since Jan 2016. Instructions for getting your own will not be included here. I use normal Melbourne tap water.
Ingredients
This recipe will make 3 medium sized pizzas. 1.5 of these would make a nice dinner for me.
| Ingredient | quantity |
|---|---|
| Water | 330g |
| Flour | 510g |
| Starter | 1/4 cup |
| Salt | 20g |
Start the day before
Take 250g of the flour, and all of the water. Mix in a bowl until like pancake batter then stir through the starter. Leave this for let’s say 8-12 hrs on a bench or cupboard out of sunlight.
Combine to make dough
Then add the remaining flour, salt and mix until mostly combined. Let it sit there for 20-40 minutes. This is called the autolyse stage, and makes the kneading easier.
Knead
The ALDI flour with this water combination will be extremely sticky. You can use a mixer if you like, but I’ve gotten used to kneading with my hands. I knead it for a good 10-15 minutes. Until it is nice and stretchy and doesn’t tear as much when you really pull it out and apart.
Let it rest
At this point, you can put into some lightly oiled containers and pop into the fridge until the day you are ready to cook. I’ve kept dough in the fridge for a whole week and it was delicious.
On the day you want pizza give the dough 2-3
hours of bench time to rise and shake off the fridge coldness.
Making the pie
Just take your ball of dough and with your hands stretch it out into a pizza shape. Don’t use a rolling pin, since that would knock out the air bubbles. Make the base really really thin, thin enough to see light through it is OK. Make your crust areas nice and plump. They’ll puff up and form the pie around your pizza.
Oven as hot as it will go.
I warm my oven up for 1 hr on its highest setting - 250C with a pizza stone inside the entire time. Then I do 5-10 minutes baking the bare base, top it with toppings and bake for another while longer, until you can see everything is cooked, 10-15 minutes perhaps.
