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If you want to make pizza exactly like the pros, you have come to the right place because I have been studying and obsessing over the craft of pizza for the last decade. And in this video, I've condensed down what I think are the 10 most important rules you need to know if you want your pizzas at home to taste just as good as the best pizza shops in the world. Now, every good pizza you've ever had starts with an incredible dough. Considering it makes up 80% of the pizza. I was just interviewing Anthony at Pizza Una. Why was his pizza ranked number one in the world multiple years in a row? It's the uniqueness and mastery of his dough preparation that takes his pizzas into a whole different
dimension. So, the first few rules are all about dough and number one is you have to understand hydration levels. Now, I've covered this multiple times in the channel and different baking related videos because the last thing I want you to be is reliant on a certain recipe. And by understanding hydration levels of your dough, you're going to unlock a freedom in your pizza making, which will make things more fun and give you better results. So, your dough hydration is simply the amount of water to flour ratio. The lower the hydration, the more dense your crumb structure will be, but your dough will also be easier to work.
Whereas, if you increase the hydration, you're going to get a fluffier, lighter crumb structure, but it will be slightly harder to work. And if you look at the actual AVPN rules for Neapolitan pizza, they state the dough hydration percentage should be between 56 and 62.5%, which is a fairly low hydration. When you see more modern Neapolitan pizza made today, the hydration levels are much higher. Now, what I have found over just years of dough experimentation is the perfect range is between 60 and 75% hydration. Lower on this scale, of course, better for beginners. higher in this scale, slightly more advanced. This range is very allpurpose. I just did an entire video on this showing how you can
use this scale to make multiple different styles of pizza. But today, we're really focused on making perfect Neapolitan pizza. Now, there is another key variable that needs to be accounted for when understanding dough hydration, which is that different flowers are going to hydrate differently. And the best way to show you that is with a real life test. So, I have three different flowers I'm going to weigh out at 100 g each. One is whole wheat flour from the store. Another is a whole wheat flour that I mil myself. And then finally, a white bread flour. To every flour, I'm then going to add 100 g of water, which means they all have a 100% hydration level. Now, I'll mix each of them up
evenly with a chopstick to make sure all of that flour is fully hydrated with the water. And I'll let them sit for about 15 minutes. Now, look how the whole wheat flour just soaks up that water and creates almost more of a dense dough even at 100% hydrated. Then moving over to the homemilled flour. Still pretty dense because it's whole wheat, but not quite as dense as the store-bought whole wheat. And finally, this bread flour, since it's not whole wheat, hydrates much thinner, almost more of a paste. Now, the goal of this experiment was to show you that just picking a certain hydration level isn't always going to give you the dough that you want.
Depending on the flowers you use, your dough might hydrate to be a little more dense or a little bit more loose. So, at the end of the day, hydration levels and percentages are a great place to start, but you also want to use your senses. You want to feel how that dough is hydrating because different flowers will hydrate at different levels. So, what I'm going to be using today is my overnight pizza dough recipe, which is very standardized. It's very easy to follow. It's very easy to shift around depending on your skill level, depending on the flowers you're using. And it starts with 900 g of allpurpose organic bread flour and 100 g of whole wheat, which I mainly add in for just a little
bit of flavor, which gives me a grand total of 1,000 g of flour. Making that hydration calculation very easy. For this Neapolitan pizza, I'm making a dough at 70% hydration, which to me with these flowers is the perfect level. So, I'm going to add 700 g of water. And then to flavor the dough, I go anywhere from 1.5 to 2% salt. So I'm adding in just around 15 g of salt, which takes me right into rule number two, which is longer fermentation times. Now, when I first started making pizza about 15 years ago, I knew very little. So what did I do? Take that square yeast packet, dump the whole thing into that dough, knead everything together, and basically an hour later, that thing was a balloon
and had doubled in size. This is a great way to create a dough that lacks any bit of character. Now, if you're using a sourdough starter, if you're naturally fermenting your pizza dough, which I'll do from time to time, you don't have to worry about slowing down fermentation because natural yeast ferments at a much slower pace than a commercial dryactive or instant yeast. This stuff is very powerful. So, what I do for 1,000 g of flour is add one to two teaspoon of instant yeast. In this case, I'm adding just 1 teaspoon of instant yeast, which will give me the ability to create a longer, slower fermentation. So, now I have all my ingredients in my bowl, and I'll send it through my mixer for 10
minutes to get things started. So, after 10 minutes of mixing, I'll transfer the dough to my work surface. I'll give it a few stretch and folds and just let it sit for another 20 minutes. Then I'll do one final folding. And you can see here the dough is looking strong. It's looking nice and smooth. So I'll pop it in my fourcourt camro container so I can track exactly when this dough has doubled in volume. Now with just one teaspoon of yeast, this will generally take around 3 to 4 hours
at room temperature. Or you can slow things down even more and put it in the fridge, which will take around 12 to 24 hours. And by slowing down the fermentation, that gluten network is actually going to build on its own without you even doing anything. So, not only do we get some more interesting flavors, but we're also going to get a stronger dough. And you can see after a cool bulk rise in the fridge for about 16 hours, that volume has doubled. So, it's time to form our dough balls, which brings me into rule three. Now, most beginner pizza makers who don't have a lot of experience with dough, especially doughs that are slightly more hydrated like this one at 70%, they get a little bit nervous because the dough is sticky
and they start adding a ton of flour at this stage. But guess what? Your dough is going to do with all that flour. It's going to soak it up. It's going to absorb it, which will then alter change that hydration level that you work so hard to tune into. Now, there's two different options that I recommend. You can use just a little bowl of water and a bench scraper, which will help you work that dough without it sticking. Or, in this case, I'm just going to use a light dusting of flour and my bench scraper, which will do the same thing. I personally like using a mix of fine semolina and allpurpose flour for this dusting. trying to create a non-stick workability of this dough. And I'll be
forming 250 gram dough balls here, which is pretty standard for Neapolitan pizza. Now, once those dough balls are formed, I'm going to place them in my proofing bin. Again, either a little bit of oil on the bottom or just a light dusting of flour. And now we have another decision. We can pop those dough balls in the fridge, let them cold proof for another 12 to 24 hours. I usually don't like going too far past that where your dough becomes overproofed and much harder to work. Or if you're ready to make pizza,
you can just let them sit at room temperature for about an hour or two until they are fully proofed. So basically, the range for good pizza will be anywhere from a full day of fermentation to up to three days. All right, the dough is done and we're moving into what I think is the next most important element of pizza making, the sauce. Which brings me right into rule number four. Keep your sauce simple. Now, when I started making pizza, the term pizza sauce kind of confused me. Because it was its own term, I felt like it was something different, like it needed to be more complicated. Now, as I started trying the best pizza in New York and talking to the professionals, one thing they all had in common was that their sauce was
extremely simple. Generally, just the best canned Roma or San Marzano tomatoes they could find plus salt. That was it. It's all about finding the highest quality, best tomato product and just letting it speak for itself. Which is why every year I grow a ton of tomatoes and I can them and most of them are used for making pizza all year long. Now, I grow a ton of different heirloom varieties, but I always make sure to grow some Roma and San Marzano varieties, which have a lower water level, which makes them ideal for crushing and throwing on a pizza. Now, I find peeling the skin first is not necessary for great sauce, but to go the extra mile for perfect sauce. I first blanch the tomatoes and the skin peels
off real easy. Then, they get funneled right into a clean jar with just a few basil leaves. And then I pop the jars into a hot water bath so they can properly seal for shelf storage. So then when I'm ready to make pizza, I just pop the top. You can see these still had a good bit of water. So I'll scoop out just the tomatoes, leaving that excess water behind. I'll hit them with a little bit of salt and just crush them with my hand. As simple as it gets, just the highest quality tomato product, so you can really taste that tomato when you bite into it. Now, just tomato and salt is more traditional for Neapolitan pizza, but of course it's not a law of pizza making. You can add aromatics. You
can add spices. You can customize if you want. For instance, with these cans, this is just a mix of my heirloom tomatoes, but you can see they're slightly more watery. So, what I'll do is I'll get a pan on a medium heat, throw in some olive oil, and I just showed you my garlic preservation short how to make these little frozen chopped garlic cubes. I'll throw one of those in the oil. Get some color on that. And then dump in the canned tomatoes. And really, what I'm doing is just cooking this sauce down until I think it hits a good consistency to sauce a pizza. Now, if you want to make a professional level of pizza, of course, you have to have a pizza oven capable of doing that. And unfortunately, that really was not
accessible when I started making pizza about 15 years ago. I was stuck with the classic pizza stone in my oven that maxed out around 500°. And you can get decent results that way. I would suggest a pizza steel if you're going to go the home oven route and just crank your oven to max. But there's just no way to make a Neapolitan style pizza without a really high heat. So, it wasn't until I got my first Ooni, which is the sponsor of today's video, that my whole pizza game changed. I couldn't believe for just a few hundred bucks I was making pizza that actually tasted like it came from a brick oven because I could finally hit those higher temps necessary. And I actually had a flame broiling the tops and sides of the
pizza, which give it that distinctive appearance and flavor. And both of the past Unis that I had were woodf fired which were great but this is the new Uni Kota 2 Pro which is gas powered. And although I lose a little bit of flavor from the smoky wood fire I gain so much ease of use and control by having this gas powered oven. And it has a range from 320° F all the way up to 950° F which gives me a ton of flexibility in what I can actually make in this oven. So, for me, with two little kids running around, plus a baby, having a gas-powered oven has been essential for my lifestyle to continue making pizza on a weekly basis, which we're about to do right now. I've got this thing cranked
up. It's preheating. The dough balls are ready to go. So, I'm going to start slinging some pizza. I actually put the proofing bin in my new greenhouse because they just needed a little extra heat. Let's see. That's what I'm talking about. Perfect. They've gained about 30% volume. You can see here they just slightly spring back but leave a little indent. So they're ready to go. All right. So I could probably do an entire video just on techniques for forming shaping pizza. I'm not going to do that. I've tried to condense it into what I think are the three most important rules for great pizza. But I
might throw in some additional tips here and there like this thing. Any type of dough spatula will work, but this is specifically formed for scooping out your dough. Boom. This is really looking perfectly proof. And rule number six is now we can introduce heavy flour. Again, this is my semolina flour mixture. Boom. Plop it in. If you go to any pizza shop, what do you see? These perfect dough balls coming out of fermentation and they're always then getting hit with a ton of flour. I was a stickler before so we could preserve our hydration level. But at this point, the dough isn't necessarily going to absorb that flour since we're about to bake it. But what it's going to do is use it as a
beautiful non-stick coating. Look at that. It's not sticking at all. You can go really as heavy as you want. The last thing you want to do is make this beautiful pizza and you go to pop it in the oven and it gets stuck to the peel or half of it flips off. I've been there many times. It's not worth it. Excess flour at this point isn't necessarily going to burn on the pizza, will burn on the actual pizza stone, which you can just brush off. So, always go heavy at this point. Now, moving right into rule number seven. When we start rolling this out, this is a classic veto tip that really changed the game for me.
Get the air to the crust. You see there? We need to lock in that crust first, just like I'm doing right there. See that air is being locked in? And what I'll do is I'll just go around and I'll form my crust first. That's the very first thing you're going to do when you're forming your pizza. You can push out the middle. You don't care about preserving the air there, but we want that nice fluffy crust. You can see we already have an air pocket there. That is gas. We've built in fermentation and a strong gluten network that has trapped it and it gives us that lovely crust. Then once the crust is locked in, that's when you can use any type of technique to expand your pizza. I generally just
use gravity being very gentle with my knuckles. Oops. Even like that. If it falls in half because it has that coating, it's not going to stick together. We get that inside nice and thin. Now, to make things easier for me, I prefer to just go on the peel first before I top it. And again, going in with a good amount of that dusting of semolina and flour. Oh, just screwed up my crust with the peel. Sorry. It's pizza making. Things happen. And now I've got all my ingredients. We have to top the pizza, which brings me into rule number eight, balancing flavors. The more pizza Ias I talk to, the more incredible pizza I taste. There's one thing in common, which is none of them overdo the topping. Pizza is about
finding that perfect balance where every single element of the pizza can be tasted and really can stand on its own. So, we can appreciate the dough, we can appreciate the sauce, and of course, the cheese. So, I make pizzas much differently than I used to make pizzas where I would just throw the whole kitchen sink on them. There's a time and a place for that, but real like authentic delicious pizza is so simple. So, these are just my crushed Roma and Samarzano tomatoes. Smell incredible. And I'm not going super heavy. I can still see some of those pale spots, which I like. I personally like going on with a layer of Parmesan cheese. It melts into the sauce, creates a really
nice salty, umami flavor. And then I have the freshest, best tasting mozzarella that I can find. And I just cubed it up. And I sprinkle that around. And it's not like an insane amount of cheese. You don't want the cheese to overpower the other ingredients. Put one for the chef. And then I just went into my garden and I picked some fresh basil, which I like cooking right into the pizza. So I'll just kind of sprinkle that around. Good bit of that. And then another great veto trick, hit the basil with olive oil so it doesn't burn. Finally, you can do this after before. Just a little hit of salt.
Take that baby out to the oven. All right. So, the oven is preheated, but rule number nine is understanding this piece of technology. A lot of people don't quite get how their pizza oven works, and it holds them back from making perfect pizza. So, right here we have the Uni Connect digital hub. This is our ambient temperature. That gives us the overall temperature inside the oven, which is important. But we need another temperature, which is the temp of the stone, and it's why I have one of these heat guns, which I suggest every pizza maker should have, because we are going to measure the temperature of our pizza stone. So, you can see we're about 750° inside. Our stone is reading about
750°. So, these are pretty spot-on together. And one reason I love this oven is this tapered flame technology. It tapers off towards the back where it's hotter, so you have a nice even temperature all the way through, eliminating hot spots. Now, you're also allowed to control the temperature while you cook pizza. So, I've preheated to the point we want to get to, but I'm just going to lower that flame a little bit and off. So, you can see it's puffing up right away. Proper AVPN temps want you to cook Neapolitan at like 900°, which will cook your pizza in like 90 seconds, but it's very difficult to cook at that high of a temperature. So, I'm going just a little bit lower. We'll still cook in probably 3 minutes or so. Just going to give it a
little turn. And again, if it's starting to brown too fast, what can I do? Lower that flame. Now, we're starting to broil in there. You can give it a little look see under since this is a pretty big stone. If it's not dark enough, you can move it to a hotter spot. And let's see what we have here. Not too bad for a first pizza. I'm going to turn the oven back up high to make sure the stone is hot for the next pizza. And that first pizza of the day, it's never going to be your best. It's like when you're making pancakes. You got to feel things out.
Feel how your oven is cooking, how the dough is performing. There's a lot of variables. So, I'm going to take this inside. We'll investigate and I'll roll out another pizza. Slide this on. Let's see that crust. Oh yeah. Very happy with that under crust. Pretty even cooking. I think for round two I could get a thicker and fluffier crust. Really depends on what you like. I'm happy with the broiling of the toppings though. Most importantly, let's see how the taste is. You can see that nice gluten structure in there. M ah never gets old. I dip that crust in more tomato sauce. That's my personal style. This is the garlic tomato sauce that I made. That's a lot of garlic and
I like it. It actually makes a great bread dipper. Whereas I really like the pure tomato on the pizza. And that brings me into my final rule of pizza making which is you can always improve your pizza skills. I mean I just interviewed Anthony who's got the best pizzeria in the world. He's been making pizzas for like four decades. There's days where I'm here and people see us and I'm just like, I just want to be done with this and go home and pretend tonight never happened and tomorrow will be better. Still isn't always confident. Still always seeking perfection. And that's what pizza brings out of me and why I think I love it so much. And I'm still obsessed with pizza many years later. It really just brings out this
quest to improve and to get that perfect bite. And when I taste this one, I mean, the flavors are perfect. I think I can improve a little bit on the forming of it and the baking of it. So, I'm going to give it another go. I'm going to try higher temps, closer to 800. Lower that flame. This one final habadoo. And quicker release. Oh yeah. Look at that pop. Oh my god. Oh yeah. Look at that thing. Now that's what I'm talking about. So there you go. I definitely improved what I wasn't happy with. Probably because I wasn't focused on filming so much.
Oh yeah, the crispiness is insane. I just got a much better crust. I actually like the cheese slightly less broiled on this one. I mean, that's what I'm talking about with the crumb. We've improved. Rule number 10 accomplished. Keep getting better. Keep making more pizza. and I'll see you in the next one.
