We pizza makers immerse ourselves into the science, craft and business of perfecting pizzas every day. The basis for any great pizza is usually milled wheat of some type mixed with water and a fermentative vehicle that, with the help of time and temperature, produces gases. These gases produce carbon dioxide, whose carbonic acids taste slightly sour when they hit the receptors of the tongue. Other flavors depend on additive elements in the dough such as flavorful liquids. This is the cliff face I want to geek out on, without doing a Wile E. Coyote swan-dive into the desert floor. Let’s start with the rules of the past, then drive fast to the future.

“When it comes to the rules of cooking, the one that supersedes them all is what I call ‘The Flavor Rule.’ That is, flavor rules! And one way to infuse flavor in dough is through liquids that already carry flavor.” – Peter Reinhart Baker, Educator and James Beard Award-winning author of “Pizza Quest,” “Perfect Pan Pizza” and “American Pie”

Foreign Influence

Many great minds have created categorical definitions for bread and pizza dough that have formed over years of human history. These different doughs formed slowly in cultures depending upon location, weather, soil, history and resources. For instance, the traditional Tuscan bread named Pane Sciocco, meaning “simple bread,” does not contain any salt. This is because in the Middle Ages the city of Pisa controlled the salt trade and taxed salt. Here are some traditional bread dough categories:

Stiff, Standard and Rustic: These are made according to hydration, from very firm to tacky and sticky, accordingly.

Lean: Made with little or no fat or sugar – a very hard dough.

Enriched: Medium-soft dough made with less than 20 percent fat – can also include sugar, eggs and milk.

Rich: Over 20 percent fat, may also include eggs, sugar and milk.

Flat: This is baked thinly and is soft and crisp. It may or may not include yeast.

Mixed Blessing

Mixing doughs is just as important as every other step in your baking routine, and what liquids you use can make all aspects of any pizza or bread react differently. But first, a word on absorption.

Absorption is defined as the amount of liquid your flour can suck up and hold while being made into a simple dough. This is often expressed as a percentage of the weight of the flour itself, usually known as Bakers’ Percentage. So, if you add 40 pounds of water to 100 pounds of flour, your absorption ratio is 40 percent. Because starch is the largest volume of any flour, it absorbs most of the liquid, but only up to ¼ to ½ of its weight. Proteins absorb up to twice their weight in water, so variations in protein levels in your flour can make a big difference in absorption. As an example, a high-protein flour with 80-percent absorption will, under the proper circumstances, produce a dynamic oven-spring (the initial rise when the dough hits the hot oven stones) because of the steam in the dough. It also will produce a crisp, blistered crust and large, waxy alveoli in the cornicione, or crust, if aged properly.

Fluid Situation

There are many examples of infusing bread with flavorful liquids with or without water.

Beer

It is fermented with different yeasts – Saccharomyces cerevisiae, known as “Brewers Yeast,” is in ales, and Saccharomyces pastorianus in lagers. You may get a different outcome in your pizza dough for each of these. For instance, ale yeast ferments better in hotter temperatures and lager in colder temps. Hops, heat, alcohol and acidity in beer all can affect any dough that is risen from freshly brewed beer. This is why a lot of bakers boost beer doughs with sourdough starter, baking powder, pre-ferments and/or instant-rise flour. The magical quality that beer adds to a pizza dough is flavor. IPA beer will add a hoppy, bitter taste, while lagers will add a malty flavor, and porters, stouts and brown ales will add a rich chocolate or coffee flavor.

Malt

This addition to pizza dough has an enzyme named amylase that breaks starch into sugars that the yeasties love. This results in a deeper brown crust and a more vigorous rise. The two malts are diastatic and non-diastatic. Non-diastatic adds color and sweet, malty flavor, while diastatic malt helps when a fast bake time is looming; it bakes to a higher volume and a more tender cell structure.

Honey

More pizza makers are using honey in their pizza dough because it is a natural sweet vehicle for yeasts to feed upon. Honey also is a natural humectant that draws in moisture and will make for softer dough. It does help with the maillard* reaction in crust by having a lot of simple sugars that create a richer color and deeper flavor. (** A reaction when amino acids and sugars in food are heated to create browning.)

Porridge

It is ironic that historically the precursor to bread was porridge, and there are many instances of whole peoples being mocked as “porridge eaters.” The procedure of adding porridge to dough is now on the cutting edge of creativity in the artisan baking community. It is born of the popularity of whole and alternative grains, which are practically devoid of gluten, in breads and pizzas without producing a brick-like texture. By cooking or soaking whole grains with water before mixing, a fermentation produces a mild cheesy aroma. Adding over 50 percent of this porridge to each batch adds digestibility and longevity to the bread or pizza dough. Because the porridge is barely cooked, it needs lower baking temperatures, par-baking stages and extra time to set up before slicing.

Curry

There is no better statement of your innovative creativity than a curry-crusted pizza! This mix starts with roasting onions with curry powder and extra virgin olive oil, grinding them into a liquid and adding it to any dough mix. Sometimes, raisins or walnuts will multiply the flavor bomb but may inhibit some forming techniques. I’ve done this for years with great results!

Matcha Tea

This addition provides a nice earthy, sweet, vegetal taste to pizza dough. The biggest attribute being the bright green color like in Japanese Milk Bread. This pizza dough needs to be baked at 500 F or below because you may get a brown crusting on the color at higher temps.

Maple Syrup

Because I have access to many friends who make maple syrup, I’ve spent years trying to perfect the best maple bread and pizza dough around. The deep sweetness of maple infused in bread is a real crowd pleaser and best partnered with spelt and whole wheat. Like Matcha, maple syrup must be watched or baked on a parchment-covered pan in lower heat because the sugars may caramelize too much.

JOHN GUTEKANST owns Avalanche Pizza in Athens, Ohio.

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John Updike famously said, “The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.” In my lifetime of visiting New York City, and the 14 years that I have I called the city home, I think I can safely say that your average New Yorker feels that people eating pizza anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.

Anthony Falco, International Pizza Consultant and former “pizza czar,” Roberta’s, Brooklyn

There is a confidence and braggadocio about all things New York City —  and pizza is no exception. It’s indisputable that there are thousands of pizzerias in the five boroughs. It’s also true that there is a culture of pizza here unique to the world, but what is true New York-style pizza? It’s a difficult question, really, but one I have given much thought to. You could say pizza by the slice is the true New York pizza, but what about the famous coal-fired oven pizzerias that only do whole pies? You could say it’s the stone-lined gas deck oven, but today some of New York’s best pizza is coming out of electric or even wood-fired ovens.

So where is the common ground? What defines NY-style pizza? While not everyone will agree, and since I wasn’t born in the city I’m sure certain people will leave my opinions on the sidewalk with piles of ubiquitous garbage, I’ll state my opinion after years of making pizza in New York, and making New York-style pizza around the world.

What is New York Style Pizza?

First things first, like the skyscrapers and personalities of the city, it is big. NY-style pizza tends to be 16 to 20 inches with the classic NY slice being cut from an 18-inch pie. Anything less just won’t look right on a paper plate. And speaking of paper plates, NY pizza is for people on the go, that means eating it quick, with your hands, almost always standing up.

It’s thin, but not paper thin like the cracker style crust found across the Hudson in New Jersey. And it’s crisp, but with some pliability — it shouldn’t shatter when you take a bite. The sauce should be simple, fresh and slightly sweet with a balance of acidity, my choice for achieving this is the California tomato.

The mozzarella should be stringy, but not too wet, and it should form a cohesive unit with the sauce. This amalgamation of sauce and cheese adheres to the dough, and it doesn’t slip off when it’s lifted to the mouth like its Neapolitan cousin. In practice this means a “low moisture” mozzarella, essentially a more aged version of fresh mozzarella (sometimes it’s whole milk, sometimes part skim, or sometimes a blend). Fresh mozzarella is totally acceptable too, just less prevalent than low moisture.

Toppings should be judiciously applied and not overloaded like they do in certain windy cities. In fact, one could say that the most true example of the New York pizza is the humble “plain slice”: tomato, mozzarella, oregano, and maybe a little pecorino or Parmesan.

So let’s summarize; a NY-style pizza is big, it’s thin but not paper thin, crispy but still flexible enough to fold without cracking, and the toppings should be a cohesive amalgamation and applied with restraint and simplicity. It shouldn’t be too fancy, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use quality ingredients. It should always be cooked directly on the stones of the oven floor, be that gas, wood, electric or coal.

How to Make New York-style Pizza

So now that we have defined what New York Pizza is, how do we make it? Well, I’m going to be completely honest … I have no idea how to make a proper NY-style pizza. I have never trained or worked at a proper old school New York style pizzeria. I came up cooking in wood-fired ovens, I was cooking small, new-school Neapolitan-ish pizzas fast and hot and topped with globs of fresh mozzarella, definitely the same galaxy but still worlds apart. About five years ago I started playing with NY-style pizza. I thought I would just come in with what I knew, crank the oven all the way up and start kicking butt. That is not what happened. I learned very quickly that NY-style pizza is actually one of the most difficult styles to master. I knew what I wanted the pizza to be like, but I wasn’t sure how to get there. I went into the laboratory, aka my kitchen in Brooklyn, and I started playing around with different flours, temperatures, cheese blends and so on. Eventually I got something I liked, and since then I have helped open NY-style pizzerias as a consultant in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Bangkok, Miami and Bali, with more in the works. Every one of these takes on NY-style pizza has been a different approach, from all naturally leavened, a hybrid of sourdough and commercial yeast, and even all commercial yeast. The reception has been great and these are some of my favorite pizzas to eat anywhere.

In the last few years a growing number of pizza consulting inquiries want to do NY-style pizza. And in the last year, the pandemic has proven this style to be built for durability. It holds up well for takeout, delivery, people on a budget, as well as people looking to splurge on a meal they wouldn’t normally make at home.

Anthony Falco’s New York-style Pizza Dough Recipe

So let me share with you a recipe that you can try if you are interested in bringing New York-style pizza to your pizzeria. The ingredients are important for this pizza. I prefer a high-protein American bread flour. You can add in small amounts of semolina (durum wheat) at 5 to 10 percent if you want to up the crisp levels on a flour with less protein.

For the water, it’s true that New York has great tap water, but so does Palm Springs, California! If you have great tap water in your town use that, otherwise a well filtered or spring water from a delivery service should do just fine. New York City tap water is low in total dissolved solids with very little chlorine, and just the right minerality, but it’s not magic, so don’t go crazy thinking about it. If it tastes good as drinking water it will taste good in the pizza.

For olive oil, I highly recommended a California extra virgin olive oil. It’s fresh and clean and really works well with this style of pizza. Also, I like sea salt for my pizza and I think it makes a huge difference, but kosher salt will also work. If you only have iodized table salt you need to get rid of it and upgrade your salt game.

The recipe will call for a starter. If you don’t have a sourdough starter you can use a commercial yeast pre-ferment (aka poolish, biga or sponge). Some people don’t like sourdough in NY-style pizza. That’s their opinion, but mine is that it is delicious. Do whatever you want to do and never listen to the haters. These are all just guidelines — follow your dreams.

When topping the pizza you should always start by making a classic plain pie. I recommend a tomato sauce of uncooked California tomatoes, seasoned simply with sea salt and extra virgin olive oil. For mozzarella a blend of low moisture whole milk and part skim mozzarella is great, but if you want to use fresh mozzarella, that can work too. I’m a big fan of the mozzarella down first method, splotching the tomato on top with a little space between, and finally some oregano (wild Sicilian is always my first choice) and a little hard cheese (a pecorino or grana works great). The key is a balance between the toppings so that they all come together on the pie in a cohesive way, clinging onto rather than easily slipping off of the dough.

And for my final thoughts before you try the recipe is that it is my interpretation of NY style, it’s not authentic or the ultimate or anything like that, it comes from loving this style of pizza and trying to make it through my lens as a pizza maker. I hope you enjoy it and add this style to your repertoire. Go to the recipe now. 

Anthony Falco is an international pizza consultant.

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The easiest way to express a dough formula is in what is referred to as baker’s percentage. The amount of each ingredient is expressed as a percent of total flour weight used in the dough formulation. This allows for easy checking to make sure all ingredients are in correct balance, regardless of batch size, and it also allows you to adjust the batch/dough size up or down while keeping all ingredients in correct balance. To find the correct weight for each ingredient, you first must decide how much flour to use. The total flour weight is always equal to 100 percent. Here is a typical dough formula in baker’s percent:

• Flour: 100 percent
• Salt: 1.75 percent
• Sugar: 1.5 percent
• Instant Dry Yeast: 0.375 percent
• Oil: 2 percent
• Water: 58 percent

Let’s say we want to use 35 pounds of flour. To find the amount of each ingredient, enter the flour weight into a calculator, multiply the ingredient percent and press the “%” key. Then, read the ingredient weight in the display window. Remember, the ingredient weight will be in the same weight units that the flour weight is expressed. To manipulate the size of your dough, simply plug in the new flour weight and repeat the above calculator entries. It really is that easy.

If you already know the ingredient weights and you want to put the formula into baker’s percent, start out by putting 100 percent next to the flour weight. Flour is always equal to 100 percent. Then, divide each ingredient weight by the flour weight and multiply by 100 to get the baker’s percent for each of the ingredients.

Here are a couple of neat things that you can use baker’s percent for:

If you add up all of the percentages, in the example formula above, we get 163.625 percent. Divide this by 100, and you get 1.63625 (call it 1.63). How much dough will this formula make? To answer that question just multiply the flour weight by 1.63. If we are using 35 pounds of flour, we will get 1.63 x 35 = 57.05 (call it 57 pounds) of dough. If I were to increase the dough weight to 40 pounds, we would get 1.63 x 40 = 65.2 (call it 65 pounds) of dough. If you have an order for 30 large pizzas tomorrow, and your dough weight for each large pizza is 17½ ounces, how much dough would you need to make just for this order? Here is how you do it:

30 x 17.5-ounces = 525-ounces of dough will be needed. Divide the total dough weight (525 ounces) by 1.63 to find the total flour weight needed to make a dough weighing 525-ounces. 525 divided by 1.63 = 322.08 (call it 321ounces/20 pounds) of flour would be needed to make the dough for this order.

As you can see, baker’s percent can be a pretty handy tool to work with.

Tom Lehmann is a director at the American Institute of Baking in Manhattan, Kansas.

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