How to Make New York Style Pizza At Home
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My favorite aged mozzarellas for New York Pizza are Grande’s whole milk low-moisture mozzarella and Caputo Brothers Creamery’s Fior di Pizza. I’ve found that both cheeses melt as well as I could hope for New York-style pizza. The Fior di Pizza is fairly expensive at $11 per pound, but I really love its buttery flavor.
Though he plans to continue experimenting, he shared his best tips to date on how to make a near-perfect pie at home. Lucky American folk have access to ‘cuppin’ Roni’, a type of pepperoni that naturally cups as it cooks but, apparently, the processes used to make this stuff aren’t allowed in the UK. This disappointed me, as I wanted the little pools of fat in the charred cups of meat. I’d decided on pepperoni when I started this project - it reminded me of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and pretty much every pizza I’d seen on the big screen at the cinema so it felt kind of glamorously New York-ish. You want some chew and a slice should be able to hold its own weight - a little droop is important but you don’t want toppings falling all over the place.
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And really, everything I’ve had from them stands as the best of that offering; the guanciale is especially excellent, too. But if you order the pepperoni from Salumeria Biellese online, due to its relatively large diameter, it can be tricky to slice at a uniform thickness with a knife, and I strongly prefer using a deli slicer. Larger diameter pepperoni like this are difficult slice well with a knife. I never liked ricotta until Abby started making Smitten Kitchen’s ricotta recipe, which is based on Salvatore Bklyn’s ricotta. It’s a whole milk ricotta made with an added acid rather than a ricotta made from leftover whey and rennet, which some may sound blasphemous to some, but I truly believe it’s better than any whey-based ricotta I’ve had.
When people find out that I make my own pizza, I’m often asked if I “even make my own sauce.” The answer is yes; it makes a monumental difference, and it’s barely more complicated than opening up a can. Each flour has a hydration level that maximizes dough stability and strength. This value is known as the peak absorption or the farinograph water absorption of a flour. The most basic form of glutenin, glutenin monomers, bind together and elongate to form chains known as polymers. The polymerization of glutenin increases dough viscosity, and an increase in large glutenin polymers is directly related to dough strength and rise.
Wheat
I couldn’t even comprehend making dough circular—I was tearing nearly every dough that I touched. I’d often have to ask Abby to stretch the dough and save our dinner, and against all odds, they often could turn my arbitrary blob of dough into a pizza. But my stress was caused by my belief that stretching pizza was difficult, and it truly isn’t. Using a bench scraper and scale, start cutting off sections of the dough and weigh to your desired amount .
Whole grain flour, flour which has the bran, endosperm and germ intact, is wildly inappropriate for New York pizza. If you have no regard for aesthetics and taste, then you should recall that the extra fiber from the bran has a deleterious effect on gluten formation in a way that more than negates the extra protein in whole grain flour. 00 describes how refined the flour is, that is, how finely milled and how little bran and germ remain in the flour, but it gives no indication of the flour's protein content. Seek out high-protein 00 flour, or 00 pizza flour, if want to experiment with 00 flour in pizza, and you will need to add diastatic malt for New York-style pizza. Note that non-diastatic malt powder is heat treated, and it will not contribute to the enzymatic breakdown of flour.
New York-Style Pizza Tips
Crunchy, tough, or cracker-like arenotadjectives that can ever accurately describe a great New York pizza. The slice mustcrackle and givegently as you fold it, never crack or split. All three of those thickness values are within the realm of New York-style pizza. If you need to store pepperoni long-term, be sure to store it unsliced, if possible.
Just lower the pizza stone or take it to the extreme and place it directly on the floor of the oven. Even forming them into balls showed a superior structure. The barely-kneaded stand mixer version tore as I formed it, ending up with a rough surface that translated into a risen ball of dough that was far more fragile as I tried to stretch it before topping. The well-kneaded stand mixer dough and the food processor dough, on the other hand, were a dream to work with. Smooth, supple and elastic, they were easily shaped and just as easily stretched for topping. When I first started out, I practiced launching pizzas in the oven by taking a dough, launching it onto my lightly floured counter, and then picking it up again and repeating the process over and over.
Balling and Proofing
As far as the scales go, you need the capability of accurately measuring about five pounds of dough, and for this recipe you’ll also want to be able to measure with 0.1g granularity. Finding both of those things in one scale can prove expensive, and my recommendation is to go with two scales to fill each niche. I’ve moved farther and farther away from New York since I started dating Abby, whom I’ve since married. Their career has taken me to Pittsburgh, and now the Twin Cities, where I’ll live, possibly, for the rest of my life. I’ve been marooned on New York-style pizza desert islands, and it became clear that if I ever wanted to eat a legitimate New York slice where I live, it would have to be made by my hand.
Get a pizza serving pan ready so you have a place to put your finished pie. Oil the surface of your proofing container and spread it thin with a paper towel or cloth . If you’re using a metal container, err on the side of very slightly more oil, since metal is more likely to stick. Pizza with aged mozzarella, tomato sauce, and fried eggplant.
If your yield is particularly bad, and you’ve lost a bit of dough, make slightly more dough next time and measure off the exact amounts that you need. If you’re nervous about launching pizzas, make an extra dough or two for your first run, and practice this way. Your comfort level will rapidly improve through low-stakes practice like this. At the very least, I suggest starting with launching bare dough over and over on your counter until you get the mechanics down. The tension on the pepperoni casing is a major contributor to a pepperoni’s ability to cup. Small cupping pepperoni are great, too, and I use them for Sicilian pizzas and bar pizzas, but I think the pepperoni aren’t the ideal type for New York-style pizza.
It would take more salt than you’d normally see in a yeasted dough to have a substantive negative impact on your yeast. If you want to withhold salt from your dough for the initial mix, the main impact will be a mixing time speed-up, which can be a boon in a commercial setting. Mixing without salt can lead to the mix occurring as much as twice as quickly. Sodium chloride increases dough stability and thereby dough strength.
Nearly every major New York pizzeria with cupping pepperoni is using either Ezzo pepperoni or Hormel’s Rosa Grande pepperoni. And if you truly only have dark mattes surfaces to measure but need hotter temperatures, there are also cheap fixed-emissivity IR thermometers that can measure up to 1022°F. Abraham Maslow once said that when all you have is a fixed emissivity IR thermometer, everything begins to look like a dark matte surface. It’s worth looking at adjustable emissivity thermometers if you’re trying to measure other types of surfaces.
This recipe makes 1 large or 2 medium-sized pizzas depending on the size pan you use. Finish it off with your favorite sauce and toppings, and, as New Yorkers call pizza, make a delicious "pizza pie." When dough has risen, flatten it out on a lightly floured surface. Roll or stretch out into a 12-inch circle, and place on a baking pan. If you are using a pizza stone, you may place it on a piece of parchment while preheating the stone in the oven.
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