Pizza Basics: The Four Things That Decide Whether It's Good

Bad pizza tends to fail in the same handful of places, and toppings are almost never one of them. It's the dough, the heat, how much got piled on, and how long the thing sat before anybody ate it.

Four things. Here's what each one is doing.

1. Dough is mostly water and time

There's one dough number worth learning, and it's hydration: the weight of the water divided by the weight of the flour. A kilo of flour with 600 grams of water is 60 percent hydration. Start there if you've never weighed dough before.

Push the water up and the dough turns slack and sticky and bakes with a more open, bubbled rim. Pull it down and the dough handles like clay and bakes denser and crisper. Home ovens usually land best between 60 and 70 percent. Shops running a 900°F stone floor can go wetter, because they have the heat to set a soaking dough before it slumps. Your oven doesn't, so don't copy their number off a video.

Time is the half people skip. Yeast eats the sugars in flour and hands back carbon dioxide plus a long list of aromatic compounds, and the aromatic part is slow. Dough mixed and baked the same afternoon tastes like bread with tomato on it. The same flour and water held two or three days in the fridge tastes like pizza. There's no substitute and no shortcut, and good mozzarella won't paper over its absence.

Flour grade matters less than either of those at the start. A bag of 00 will not rescue a dough you mixed an hour ago.

2. Heat, and specifically heat from underneath

A pizza is cooked from below. The first ninety seconds on a hot surface set the base, and everything you want from a crust happens in that window: the rim springs, the underside spots, the bottom goes rigid enough to hold its own weight.

If the surface is lukewarm, none of that happens. The base dries out slowly instead of setting fast, and you get the pale, biscuity disc that is the single most common home-pizza outcome.

So the cheap fix, in order:

• Get a stone or a steel, and give it a solid 45 minutes to an hour at your oven's maximum. The stone needs to be hot, not the air.
• Put it high in the oven, close enough to the top element that the cheese finishes about when the base does.
• Bake hot and short. A long bake in a moderate oven is how you dry a crust out instead of baking it.

Wood-fired shops around the Inland Northwest run fruit wood from the Yakima Valley and hit something near 1,000°F, which is why their pies cook in ninety seconds. You're not matching that at home. You can get much closer than most people do.

3. Restraint is a technique

The instinct is to load a pizza up. Resist it.

Sauce doesn't need cooking. Good crushed tomatoes and salt, used raw, taste more like tomato than anything you simmered, and they'll cook plenty in the oven. Simmering it first means cooking the sauce twice.

Everything you add puts water on the dough, and water is what stops a base from crisping. Fresh mozzarella is the usual offender: tear it, sit it on a towel for twenty minutes, and use less than feels right. Vegetables with a lot of moisture are better cooked down first or scattered on after the bake.

Three toppings is generous. Two is usually better. A pizza is a bread product with some things on it, not a salad on a crust.

4. The fifteen minutes after it leaves the oven

A pizza is at its best almost immediately and then it declines, and the decline is faster than anyone expects.

The mechanism is steam. A hot pie gives off water, and if that water can't escape it goes straight back into the base and softens it. This is the whole reason a box has holes in it, why a slice held under a lamp turns leathery, and why pizza eaten standing in the kitchen is better than the same pizza eaten twenty minutes later.

Nothing about the recipe fixes it. Cut it, don't stack it, and eat it.

Baking pizza in Spokane

Spokane sits in the rain shadow of the Cascades, which gets us about 16 and a half inches of precipitation a year and summer humidity down around 38 to 42 percent. Recipes written in Seattle or Brooklyn assume wetter air than we have.

Two adjustments:

• Keep dough covered, always. Dry air skins a resting dough ball within minutes, and a skinned ball tears instead of opening. A lid, a damp towel, a box with a lid on it. Anything.
• Add a little water. A few percent over what the recipe says, because the air will take some back during a long ferment.

The city is also around 1,870 feet, high enough to matter a little and not enough to rewrite a recipe over. Watch the dough rather than the clock and you've covered it.

Where to go next

Crust matters is the longer argument for spending time on dough. When you want a recipe, the overnight pizza dough is the forgiving place to start and the 28-hour Caputo 00 dough is what we use ourselves. If you'd rather practice the handling without the stakes, bread flour focaccia with poolish uses the same thinking and is much harder to ruin.

Our current menu is what the oven is working on this week.