Homemade Pizza Dough

Homemade Pizza Dough

A bowl of flour, water, yeast, salt, and olive oil can take you surprisingly far.

Pizza may be one of the most familiar foods in America, but its foundation is still the same elemental dough that made the food practical in the first place. Long before pizza was delivered in cardboard boxes or sold by the slice beneath fluorescent lights, Naples had built a food culture around rounds of fermented dough baked at intense heat and eaten fresh from the oven. By the late eighteenth century, pizza was becoming firmly associated with the streets of that city, where inexpensive flatbreads topped with readily available ingredients fed working people throughout Naples.

Tomatoes, brought to Europe from the Americas centuries earlier, eventually became closely tied to Neapolitan pizza. By the nineteenth century, combinations of tomato, cheese, herbs, oil, and bread had developed into the recognizable ancestor of the pizzas we know today. The famous story of the Pizza Margherita dates to 1889, when pizzaiolo Raffaele Esposito is traditionally credited with preparing a pizza of tomato, mozzarella, and basil for Queen Margherita of Savoy.

The combination itself was already known in Naples decades earlier. Like many beloved food histories, the royal episode has accumulated a fair amount of legend, but Naples remains central to the development of modern pizza. In 2017, UNESCO added the art of the Neapolitan pizzaiuolo to its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

Pizza traveled particularly well.

Between the 1880s and 1920, more than four million Italians arrived in the United States, establishing communities in cities and towns across the country. Pizza followed Italian families and businesses into those neighborhoods. Early American pizza history is more complicated than the oft-repeated claim that a single New York pizzeria started everything. Researchers have found evidence of pizza being sold in the United States before the famous 1905 date usually attached to Lombardi’s in Manhattan. Pizza remained strongly associated with Italian American communities for decades, then spread much more widely after World War II.

America eventually made pizza thoroughly its own. New York developed its broad, foldable slices. Chicago built deep-dish pies with tall, buttery crusts. Detroit became known for rectangular pizza baked in steel pans, with crisp cheese reaching all the way to the edges. New Haven produced its thin, blistered apizza. California cooks piled pizza with the produce, cheeses, and combinations associated with West Coast cooking.

That history is part of what makes homemade pizza dough worth knowing. Once you can make the dough, pizza stops being a fixed dish and becomes one of the most useful preparations in the kitchen.

This dough uses all-purpose flour, active dry yeast, water, salt, a little sugar, and olive oil. It is designed for an American home kitchen and a conventional oven, so there is no reason to imitate an 800 to 900 degree Neapolitan wood-fired oven to make a good pizza at home. What you are looking for is a dough that becomes smooth and elastic during kneading, rises until visibly doubled, and can be stretched or rolled without immediately snapping back into a ball.