You know when you’re just working on autopilot in the kitchen? When your hands just do a thing with minimal involvement from your brain? This happened to me on Thursday as I was making dough for our weekly Friday pizza night.

I make pizza dough the night before because letting the dough rest overnight gives a stronger and more easily stretched dough. I also do the same for sourdough bread, which I usually make one or two times a week.

Normally when I make pizza dough I consult a spreadsheet that helps me scale the recipe quickly and make adjustments to things like the amount of starter and the dough hydration. For bread, I just have the recipe memorized: 25-50g of starter (depending on ambient temperature in the kitchen — less in the summer, more in the winter), 500g bread flour (up from 475 due to a recent change in my flour of choice), 25g rye flour, 360g water and about 10g salt.

On Thursday, as soon as I had the bread-mixing bowl down I just started going through the bread dough measurements and steps. I didn’t even realize my mistake until after I had it fully mixed.

Rather than start over, I just made pizza with the bread dough — and it worked. The recipes are not actually that different; the main differences are that the bread dough has some rye flour (or whole wheat) and that the recipe makes about 900g of dough total, or 450g for two loaves. For pizza, I usually use 350-400g per pie. But the larger amount of dough meant the pizza crust was not quite as thin in the middle while stretching close to the full 14″ width of my peel.

Maybe one dough recipe is all I need.

No comments | Pizza, Sourdough, Technique

This entry was posted by Tom on Sunday, September 22nd, 2024 at 3:21 pm and is filed under Food + Drink, Pizza. You can subscribe to responses to this entry via RSS.