How I Made the Perfect NYC Pizza (Full Documentary)

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🔪 OTHER EQUIPMENT USED IN THIS VIDEO
Wooden Pizza Peel (mine is 16″x18″x26”) : https://amzn.to/3BgNpkj
Cake Pans: https://amzn.to/3fvB5ov
Biodegradable Dough Covers: https://challengerbreadware.com/product/challenger-dough-covers/?ref=Theregularchef
Dough Whisk: https://amzn.to/3QR6dMy
Cooling Rack: https://amzn.to/3PEb2aR

🍅 INGREDIENTS USED/MENTIONED IN THIS VIDEO
Flours:
High-Gluten Flour: https://amzn.to/3SBr5rN
Bread Flour: https://amzn.to/3EhxT9y
Vital Wheat Gluten: https://amzn.to/3Z1G0if
Spelt Flour: https://amzn.to/3YGPS1a
Rye Flour: https://amzn.to/3IuBUcb
Semola Flour: https://amzn.to/3xxbfpW
Tomatoes (in order of preference):
Redpack – Commercial #10 Cans (Not available for purchase online): https://redgoldfoodservice.com/products/detail/10-redpack-concentrated-crushed-tomatoes
Cento All-In-One Crushed: https://shop.cento.com/products/cento-all-in-one-crushed-tomatoes-28-oz
Bianco DiNapoli Whole-Peeled: https://amzn.to/3TSfDJc
Redpack – Retail 28oz Cans (Use the store locator function to find them in-store): https://www.redgoldtomatoes.com/redpack/products/detail/redpack/crushed-tomatoes-in-puree-28-oz
Cheese:
Grande at Gordon Food Service (Local Pickup Only): https://gfsstore.com/products/698661/
GFS Whole-Milk Low-Moisture Mozzarella: https://gfsstore.com/products/281514/
If you do not live near a food service store, I would recommend looking for any whole-milk, low-moisture mozzarella that your grocery store carries. Grande cheese can also be purchased online here but with shipping and handling, it is very expensive: https://www.vernscheese.com/?s=grande+cheese&post_type=product

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📝 FULL WRITTEN RECIPE ON MY WEBSITE
https://www.charlieandersoncooking.com/recipes/authentic-new-york-style-pizza

📃 TABLE OF CONTENTS
0:00 – Episode 1 – I Tested the Internet’s Best New York Pizza Recipes
12:49 – Episode 2 – The real secret to NY-Style pizza (It’s not NYC water)
26:22 – Episode 3 – What’s the Best Cheese for NY-Style Pizza?
34:29 – Episode 4 – How I Bake NY-Style Pizza Without a Pizza Oven
48:47 – Episode 5 – Making a “NY-Style” Sauce That’s ACTUALLY Authentic
1:04:24 – Episode 6 – I Tried 9 NYC Slices in a Day: Here’s What I Found
1:18:14 – Episode 7 – How to Make a REAL New York Slice at Home

Written and Filmed by: Charlie Anderson
Edited by: Van Clements and Charlie Anderson

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So if you’re like me you’ve probably always had an image that comes to mind when you think of New York style pizza but what actually defines a proper New York slice well depending on who you ask you may get different answers but the large thin crust slices that we’re all

Familiar with actually stemm from the Neapolitan style pizza because when Italian immigrants in New York City open the country’s first pizza shops that’s basically what they were selling but over time the pizza evolved to better suit its environment as Pizzeria started using things like low moisture mozzarella cheese and canned tomatoes

And started selling pizza by the slice to accommodate the lifestyles of busy New York yers so today New York style pizza is defined by those slices which are made up of a chewy crisp crust a sweet and tangy sauce with just a few herbs added and a cheese that’s gooey

Stretchy and usually a little bit greasy and as Ken forish describes in his book The Elements of pizza the ideal New York slice should be just sturdy enough to maintain a bit of tip sag so as to make the slice easily foldable so I like to learn from books

Whenever possible and this is one that I’ve actually been wanting for for quite a while now so I figured it was the perfect excuse to get it you see the four basic ingredients that alos need are flour water salt and yeast and a ton of Breads and pizzas are made using just

Those four ingredients but when it comes to a New York style pizza dough it typically includes two more additions sugar and olive oil sugar to help the crust Brown evenly all over and olive oil to provide tenderness to the dough so that it ends up crispy without being

Overly chewy but Ken’s dough just includes the four basic ingredients so I’m very curious to see how that’ll work as a New York Pizza all right so in addition to Ken’s recipe from the book I wanted to go with a couple other recipes that were a bit more I guess traditional

For a New York style pizza meaning that they also include olive oil and sugar so the first is going to be Kenji Lopez alz recipe from siries seeds.com and the next was from YouTube’s New York style pizza legend himself Adam rusia now both of these recipes contain the same basic

Ingredients it’s really just the ratios that are different so it doesn’t really make sense for me to try to make a recipe from scratch I mean these ones are already battled tested and between the two more traditional recipes plus the more Bare Bones recipe from the book

I should have all of my bases covered so to make the dough I’m following a very simple process which I’m keeping the same for all three recipes I’m simply mixing all of the ingredients in a bowl using my dough whisk to bring them together and by the way I’m using bread

Flour here just to give the dough that little bit of extra structure that we’re looking for for a New York style pizza then I’ll knead each dough by hand until they develop some decent stretch which will take about 5 minutes each they don’t need to be perfectly smooth and

Extensible yet because I’m going to using a very long fermentation period which will give the dough plenty of time to develop gluten so after the kneading I’ll just let each dough rise in an oiled container for 1 to 2 hours until about doubled in size then I’ll cut off

A small piece of each one to use for testing purposes before tossing all of the containers into the fridge for the long cold fermentation period all right so it’s been about 3 days since I put these D’s in the fridge and it’s time for the taste test first thing I noticed

Is that the amount the those Rose seems to be proportional to the amount of sugar that was in them for example this one had the most sugar this one had no sugar and then this was somewhere in the middle and in terms of the smell the

Sugar seems to be affecting that as well so kenji’s dough has by far the most sort of fermente alcoho Aroma whereas Ken’s dough is much more sort of mild and sweet smelly so what I’m going to do here is just coat them with a bit of uncooked tomato sauce because really I’m

Just trying to judge the crust so I don’t care too much about perfecting the rest of the pizza quite yet you know I could test just the dough itself but I feel like I’m not really going to get the full effect unless I have some sauce

And cheese on there normally I like to stretch them out a bit more but it’s proving to be a little difficult with these tiny pizzas so we’ll just slide them off into the oven like this all right so I’m basically looking for a few things here number one I’m

Going to test the crispiness number two the chewi and of course number three is going to be the flavor in a good New York Pizza it should have a little bit of crisp and crackle to it but it shouldn’t be crunchy or brittle so before the taste test I don’t really

Notice any major differences between the three they all have some pretty nice charring on the bottom without being too burnt crispiness seems pretty similar ilar if anything the Adam marusia dough is slightly less crispy than the other two but ultimately it’s all going to come down to flavor immediately I do prefer the

Texture of the Kenji dough I think due to the addition of the olive oil it makes the dough just a little bit more tender this one’s a little bit chewier reminding me a little bit more of a neopolitan style pizza which makes sense given that the dough is essentially the

Same so overall I definitely think these two dos which had olive oil and sugar added fit the bill a little bit better for a New York style pizza this one’s definitely a great dough but again I think it’s just a little bit too chewy and bready for this type of pizza now

It’s pretty hard to discern between each of these two so I’ll probably save my official judgment until I bake the entire pies but just off of first impression I do think I like the Kenji dough the best just because it does have a little bit of a nicer crunch to it not

To mention the dough is a little bit easier to handle due to the lower hydration so that’s a nice Bonus one thing I am noticing is I’m getting a little bit of cheese separation meaning that the cheese is getting too hot before the crust really gets fully Brown so that’s something I’ll need to work out but I’ll deal with that one later for now let’s compare these two

Crusts pretty decent foldability not as crispy as I would like again pretty solid crust on the bottom it seems to have a little better crispiness to it so in terms of flavor the two doughs are pretty much exactly the same but because kenji’s dough is a bit crispier

And more structured I think it’s the best representation of the true New York style and so from this point forward that’s the recipe I’ll be using but there is still one more thing I want to test all right so this right here is known as a Bea and it’s basically just a

Mixture of flour water and ye which I’ve left out to rise for about 12 hours so it’s similar to a sourdough starter in the sense that you can add it to any dough to serve as a source of leavening and to add some extra complexity and flavor to the bread the difference of

Course is just that this is made using commercial yeast where a sourdough starter is made using naturally cultivated yeast allegedly it also helps improve the texture of the dough but I’ll be the judge of That so the first thing I noticed is that the version with the Bea definitely has a much stronger smell a little more ferment alcoholic and tangy I also noticed as I was shaping the do the Bea do seem to be a lot easier to handle despite them being the same hydration so

I could see the Bea being a good way to sort of work with higher hydration dos without making them harder to handle but of course what I really care about is what they taste like when they’re baked all right Bea no Bea again I am getting a bit of Separation here between

The fat and the cheese that’s something I definitely need to fix but for now let’s focus on the crust looking at the bottoms of the pizza they both look pretty much exactly the same little bit of charring but not too Brown I’d say that’s just about perfect crispiness test

Seems like the NOA version had just a little bit more crispiness to it but let’s give them a taste and see what we think it is hot that’s for sure very interesting so the Bea definitely adds some more complexity of flavor to the dough I mean it almost

Makes it more sourdough like but this is what I didn’t really expect I actually think I prefer just the straight dough I think for this New York slice it’s all about simp licity and the fact that this dough is already fermented for between 48 to 72 hours I think that gives it

Plenty of flavor but for some reason I just don’t think this is quite it I mean don’t get me wrong it is good pizza but I just don’t know if it’s hitting the mark on that classic New York slice but hold on let me try one more

Thing not this this is what we need to do so one of the defining characteristics of a New York pizza is that slight tip sag you get when you lift up the slice this is an example of a pizza that does not suffer from extreme tip sag it’s still crisp on the

Bottom the cheese isn’t coming off even though it dips it’s not completely flaccid but when you’re cooking in a home oven you usually don’t end up with slices big enough to get a true accurate Judgment of that so what I’ve done I’ve cut myself a nice Big Slice so I can

Give it a try look at that we’re talking 90° angle right there it’s not what we want it’s not it so what’s the problem I mean is it the hydration I don’t think so it had plenty of oil in the recipe I don’t think it’s the olive oil the sugar shouldn’t have any

Impact I got it let’s go back to the drawing board New York style pizza neopolitan all right check this out New York style neopolitan I think I know what we need to do Neapolitan New York you see up until this point I think my pizza resembles

More of a Neapolitan style than a New York style so the Neapolitan is lighter in color with just a few Char bits it has a very soft and chewy crust with only a little bit of crunch to it it’s not meant to be sliced and held in your

Hand often times Neapolitan style pizzas are eaten with a fork and knife whereas with the New York style the crust isn’t quite as light and Airy and it’s more evenly browned all over with only a little bit of Charing and on top of that the crust isn’t quite as chewy but it’s

Significantly crisper it shouldn’t be hard or crunchy but it should have a little bit of crispness to it and it should be structured enough to at least relatively support its own weight of course it’s going to Sag a little bit I mean that’s why the classic way to eat a

New York slice is to fold it in half but it shouldn’t completely flap over like what we were seeing with my slices so that’s what we need and there are basically two ways that we can achieve that the first is switching the ingredients but like I already mentioned

I don’t think I want to switch switch up the recipe you see there are primarily two ingredients that affect these aspects of the dough the olive oil and the sugar the olive oil contributing to the tenderness of the dough and the sugar contributing to the more even Browning however the recipes that I’m

Using are tried and true recipes so I think it’s unlikely that I’d really be able to improve upon them significantly instead we’re going to go with the second way which is to change our cookie method so I thought I could just worry about the cookie method at the end but

That really doesn’t make any sense I mean baking isn’t an afterthought it’s the very Foundation of this dish it’s what makes a pizza a pizza so here’s the plan in my oven I have three possible rack positions the top rack is typically used for a Neapolitan style pizza

Because with that style of pizza you want your oven to be as hot as possible in my case the highest my oven goes is 550° but professional pizza ovens get up to about 1,000° so up until this point that’s what I’ve been doing I’m throwing my pizza stone on the top rack cranking

The oven as high as it can go and once I throw the pizza in it only takes like 4 or 5 minutes to bake but New York style pizzas are typically baked for longer than that sometimes up to 12 or 15 minutes which means clearly I’m doing

Something wrong So the plan is to move my pizza steel down to the second rack of my oven and I’m going to turn the temperature down to 500° F and since the oven temperature is lower overall I shouldn’t be getting those charred bits like you see on a neopol and style pizza

The crush should instead be more evenly browned all throughout all right here we go we’re going to reverse engineer this baby and this time we’re going to do it Right let’s go But before we move on to the next episode I have a question for you do you ever struggle to handle your pizza dough maybe it sticks to your hands or your peel maybe it tears when you try to stretch it or maybe it just won’t stretch out no matter how hard you try

If you’re like I used to be you probably deal with those issues nearly every time you make pizza and while I may have been making some okay pies they just didn’t remind me of what I could get at my favorite pizzerias that is until I learned the tricks and techniques that

The pros use really it wasn’t until I started working at a pizzeria myself that I learned most of these things but now that I have I want to share these secrets with you so you can get results like this and this and this which is why I’ve recently launch my 120-minute

Workshop that’ll help you to discover the dough handling secrets to make perfect Pizza every single time in the workshop you can follow along as we make shape and stretch pizza dough together and we’ll walk through everything you need to know to make sure that your next pizza and your next is always better

Than the last and for viewers of this video I’m offering an exclusive discount so just enter the code NY Pizza 10 at checkout to get 10% off now let’s get back to the video this is a proper New York slice and after studying some of

The top pizza shops in New York I found a few secrets that I think are going to help me make it at home wow that is by far the best slice Soo made yet so this is episode two of my New York Pizza Series where the goal is to

Recreate the perfect authentic New York slice at home and where we left off last time I tested three popular New York style pizza recipes but none of them gave me exactly what I was looking for look at that it’s not it but then I had an idea we need a crisper more evenly

Browned and sturdier CRPS So the plan is to move my pizza steel down to the second rack of my oven and I’m going to turn the temperature down to 500° F so that pizza was was better but it still wasn’t quite there and honestly I was starting to get a little discouraged but

Then I realized something else largely thanks to a comment on last week’s video that would completely change the course of this challenge you see the recipes I’ve been using have called for a pretty high hydration much higher than it’s typical for a New York pizza shop and the reasoning was that since we’re

Baking in a lower temperature oven at home we need to bake the pizza for longer and therefore more of the water in the dough is going to evaporate which is of course true but I think they actually overcompensated for that effect when they were developing the recipes I

Mean in kenji’s recipe he went up full 10% higher than most New York pizza shops and Adam rusia went even higher in fact in his video he said this I really prefer wetter Do’s these days they bake up lighter and crispier but that’s a bit misleading and honestly it kind of led

Me down the wrong path for a while so here’s what actually happens when we increase the hydration in our dough we know that as a dough Rises during fermentation what it’s really doing is filling up with a bunch of tiny little gas bubbles specifically bubbles containing carbon dioxide and water

Vapor so once the starts to bake those gases rapidly heat up and expand and at the same time even more gas is being produced due to the evaporation of the water in the dough and you can imagine that the more water you use the more gas is produced and the bigger those bubbles

Can get so that’s why Adam says that higher hydration does bake up lighter but why crispier well we can see that since the higher hydration dough forms bigger bubbles the borders of those bubbles will be stretched thinner so the exteriors of the bubbles will get very crispy because the water can evaporate

Off of that thin dough very quickly but again those are just a few few bits on the exterior of the dough it still contains more water overall therefore the overall structure of the dough ends up a little bit floppier and chewier rather than the crispy and slightly

Rigid structure that we want so with this knowledge I came into the challenge with a renewed sense of direction I took my Kenji recipe which originally called for around 67% hydration and reduced it all the way down to 60% all right that is what we’re looking for this is

Definitely the best slice we’ve made yet it’s got a little bit more structure to it it is a little chewier than I would like and not quite recipy enough it is getting closer though but but the sort of realization has led me to question my

Method as a whole I mean if I have to modify these recipes so heavily just to create something slightly resembling a New York style pizza are they even the right recipes to begin with if authenticity is what I’m chasing I shouldn’t start with recipes designed

For home Cooks what I need to do is study the pros the people who have mastered the style of pizza that is New York pizza shops I’m not going to New York though as much as I would like to I did actually go a few weeks ago though and I

Had the opportunity to try one of the most iconic slice shops in the city and I recently found out that that same iconic Shop opened up a satellite location in my old college town all right here we are there it is I’m just kidding let’s keep it Moving so first impressions of the slice it’s very thin but it’s got that perfect crisp relatively sturdy crust that I’ve been looking for tip sag test it’s not nearly a 90° angle like I was seeing with my pizza and if you just give it a little crease right here it stands

Perfectly sturdy really nice Browning on the cheese here without being too greasy bottom is really nicely charred as well I don’t think I can wait any longer let’s give it a try so we’ll just talk about the crust first because that’s what we’re focusing on in this episode

But really this is exactly the crust I’ve been trying to achieve I mean the visuals tell pretty much the whole story again it’s nice and sty but it’s still got a little bit of chew to it and it’s also got a really nice crunch when you bite into

It again it’s a really thin crust but it does have a good bit of airiness to it nothing crazy though flavor-wise the crust does leave a little something to be desired I think maybe it could use a little bit more salt but texture-wise it’s 100% spoton now in terms of the

Cheese again it’s not too greasy so I think they really nail the cooking temperature there I think it could have a little bit more flavor if I had to guess honestly I don’t think that they’re using a full fat cheese it does get a little rubbery after it cools down

But I mean that’s pretty hard to avoid with any cheese two main traits I would use to describe the sauce would be sweet and tangy personally I think I like a little less sweet than this so I think that’s something we’re going to work on improving with our own recipe all right

Well I think we got what we need so it’s time to head back to the lab and work on this recipe so I think Joe’s is a great embodiment of the New York slice that I’m going for but it does definitely have its flaws namely the flavor and

Seemingly the quality of ingredients as well but that’s where our next shop comes in it’s one that makes makes it a point to maintain the tradition of the New York slice but that also tries to improve upon it primarily by using higher quality ingredients try to serve

What the people want like a good version of a New York St and the beauty of it’s not bad for you so scars is quickly becoming known as one of the best slices in New York unfortunately though I haven’t actually had the chance to try it myself that’s okay though I think

That with the help of the internet we can gain a lot of insight into how and why this pizza is so great now again there are aspects of both shops that I think I want to rep for Joe’s it’s mainly the texture of the crust which is

Going to come from the dough recipe and from the baking method and then for pretty much every other aspect of the pizza I’m going to look to scarves but since the crust is what we’re focused on right now let’s start with Joe’s Pizza recipe NYC I would imagine there’s a lot

Of Joe’s Pizza eye out there so I should probably specify New York got a few promising links here yeah that’s not right next this one claims that Joe’s revealed the secret to the recipe but nowhere in the actual article does it say that it is Joe’s recipe so

Next this is what I’m looking for this is what I’m looking for all right we struck gold folks I found this forum pizzamaking.com basically you know people can go and ask questions about pizza making as you might imagine and someone was asking for Joe’s recipe so this guy who used to

Work for Joe’s entered the chat and basically the rest is history I mean he gave us the entire recipe everything from the dough to the sauce to the cheese so honestly I think we got what we need here it ended up being a lot easier than I thought it would be now

Let’s see what we can find out about scars pizza recipe NYC so this one definitely isn’t going to be a straightforward as Joe it seems like the owner scar here he keeps his recipe pretty Under Wraps but there is one thing that I knew going into this

And it’s the thing that most people point out when they mentioned scars and we also Mill our own flour as well and so that you’re Milling from grains like this correct these are wheat faes these are hard white wheat we try to replicate New York style pizza without using what

90 something per of New York style pizzas are like you know chemically La flowers and stuff we don’t use any of that so on this pizza making Forum people are speculating about the recipe and they’re trying out different formulations SLE definitely give me a good place to start but on top of that

There are a few pretty good videos that we can get some Clues from mix of high protein and low protein flowers so you’re starting on low just to get everything Incorporated we had salt the olive oil super soft you get one rise when you’re bowling slower rise when

It’s in the fruit then you get the last rise when you pull them out and we allow to rise all day the day of use basically day of yeah this shot gives us a really good idea for the texture of the dough it definitely looks very similar to

Joe’s in terms of the structure so these videos pretty much give me all the ingredients that are included in the dough and they give me a good idea for sort of how the dough should look and feel throughout the process few things we don’t know is number one how much

Freshly milled flour he uses and he also uses a bit more salt and a slightly higher hydration which makes sense because that freshly milled flour is going to be a little bit more absorbent than a typical white flour would be so with my new found knowledge and experiences I developed three new

Recipes each one aimed at testing a different VAR varable so recipe number one is what I’m calling my Joe’s dough as we learned Joe’s uses a hydration of 57% and they bake their pizza at 625 de F so what I’ve got here is a 60% hydration Dough because again since I

Can only bake at 550° F I do think we need to add a little bit of extra water to account for that just not as much as Ken Kenji or Adam used in their recipes and by the way for all of these recipes I’m using bread flour because that’s

Generally the highest protein flour that anyone’s going to be able to find at their local grocery store all right time for the Moment of Truth look at that that’s like Joe’s that’s like Joe’s right there I mean it’s got that same crackle that is a good slice of pizza

Right there I would say it could be a little bit crispier that’s my only critique but let’s see how it tastes M wow this is by far the best slice we’ve made yet way better than any of the recipes we tested in the last episode I think we’re on the right track

Here now recipe number two is sort of an attempt to improve the basic Joe’s recipe because if you remember I did find the Joe’s dough to be a bit Bland in flavor so what I did here was bumped the salt content from 2.7 up to 3.2% and

I also used a bit more olive oil than I did in the first recipe I also bumped the hydration up to 62% which is still significantly lower than the 67% from kenji’s recipe but I just wanted to see what effect using sort of a midlevel hydration would have so this is still a

Super solid slice the one problem is I did need to bake it a little a little bit longer to get it to the same level of crispiness as recipe number one and even so I don’t think I got it quite as crispy but really the main testing point

For this slice of pizza was the flavor so it is kind of subtle but I do think I prefer the higher salt levels in dough number two it just really makes those sort of fermenti bready flavors pop a little bit more overall this slice is a little bit too salty but I think

That I can balance it out more just by using a little less salt in the sauce now finally recipe number three is my first attempt at a scar Style so we know that a lot of what makes scars dough special is his addition of some freshly

Milled flour however I don’t want to do that because it’s just not practical for most people myself included actually I don’t own a Flour Mill but what I did do was replace 10% of the bread flour in the recipe with whole wheat flour so in my mind that should be a much easier

Method one that anyone can follow to incorporate some extra flavor and nutrition into the dough all right now this is the one that I’m super curious about because I’ve never made a pizza with anything but 100% white flour maybe not not quite as rigid as recipe number

One I might have actually stretched it a little bit too thin which really I didn’t think that was going to be a problem because whole wheat flour doesn’t develop gluten as well so I thought the dough might tear if I tried to stretch it out but that really wasn’t

An issue at all so pretty nice crispiness to it pretty solid structure as well I mean I would say it’s on par with the other two recipes yeah so the whole wheat flour definitely adds a pretty nice bready weedy flavor to it it is pretty subtle

But given that the flour didn’t have any other noticeable negative impacts I don’t see any reason not to include it all right so with all that testing done it’s time to build my ultimate rest so we’re going to talk in terms of Baker percentages just so that the recipe can

Be scaled however we need it to be and if you’re not familiar with how Baker’s percentages work basically the flour is always at 100% And then the rest of the ingredients are expressed as a percentage of the total flour so for example if you have 100 G of flour and

60 G of water that’s a 60% hydration likewise 2 G of salt per 100 G of flour equates to 2% salt and so on now like I mentioned there were aspects of each of these three recipes that I liked but for all three I did keep the sugar and the

Yeast the same even though Joe’s and scars don’t seem to use sugar in their dough I think that since we’re baking at a lower temperature in our home oven the sugar does help the crust to caramelize a little bit better now for the yeast it doesn’t really matter how much you use

That’s just going to affect how quickly or how slowly the dough Rises for me though I like to air on the Lower Side just about a half% because the slower the dough Rises the more opportunity it has to develop those nice fery bready flavors and now for the flour so again

By default the baker’s percentage is going to be 100% but in recipe number three 10% of that flour was whole wheat and that’s something that I definitely want to maintain because it added a nice flavor to the dough however I think I do actually want to bump that up to 15%

Based on my research scars uses somewhere between 10 and 20% so I figured I might as well split it right down the middle and in my experience that increased whole wheek content didn’t make the dough any harder to shape so I might as well push it as high

As it can go until I see any negative impacts now for the hydration I definitely like the texture of recipe number one so I would go with the hydration of 60% but since I am using 15% whole wheat flour which absorbs much more water than bread flour I’m going to

Bump that up to 61% and that should give me about the same texture that I saw with recipe number one now for the salt both recipes 2 and three use 3.2% salt and I definitely thought that brought out the flavors of the wheat and the dough a little bit better then for olive

Oil again I did like the texture of recipe number one the best so I’m not going to mess with that I’m just going to stick with 3% olive oil so there we go I don’t think this is going to be my final final recipe just because I still

Need to rework the baking process based on some of these other new things that I’ve learned but I do think that it gets us most of the way there otherwise I’ll see you in the next episode where we’re going to figure out what’s the best

Cheese for a New York slice so thanks a lot for watching and I’ll talk to you in the next one so when it comes to New York style pizza the cheese is one thing that nearly everyone can age on New York traditionally you’re looking at a low moisture mozzarella rated low moisture

Mozzarella low moisture mozzarella low moisture mozzarella but that still leaves us with a lot of choices to make So today we’re going to figure out which cheese or combination of cheeses is going to help us make the best New York slice now this is episode three of my

New York Pizza Series where the goal is to recreate a perfect authentic New York slice at home and in the first two episodes we tackled the dough but today is all about the cheese now one thing that I definitely know going into this is to to avoid pre-shredded cheeses

Because they nearly always contain anti-caking agents that mess with the texture of the cheese so already that narrows down my options quite a bit but now I have a major decision to make so here I have two different types of low moisture mozzarella from my local grocery store this one is full fat

Otherwise known as whole milk mozzarella and this one is part skin and as the names imply the difference is really just in the fat content so what does that mean for our pizza well in the same way that whole milk is richer and more flavorful than say 2% milk the whole

Milk mozzarella is rich fattier and more flavorful than its part skim counterpart so full fat sounds like the obvious choice and it’s what I’ve been using in my testing so far but as I found out the hard way that higher fat content also leads to one pretty big issue I’m

Getting a little bit of cheese separation meaning that the cheese is getting too hot again I am getting a bit of Separation here between the fat and the cheese so in theory that greasy fat separation shouldn’t be as big of an issue with the part skin mozzarella

Simply because it contains less fat to begin with and based on my research a lot of pizza shops do use some p of part skin mozzarella primarily for that reason and Joe’s Pizza which I’m using as sort of a guideline for this challenge is one of those places for

Their classic cheese slice they only use part SK cheese but of course by doing that they are sacrificing some flavor and when I tasted their Pizza it definitely show now in terms of the cheese again it’s not too greasy so I think they really nail the cooking

Temperature there I think it could have a little bit more flavor if I had to guess honestly I don’t think that they’re using a full fat cheese it just doesn’t really have a ton of flavor to it in my opinion the cheese was the weakest part of that pizza so personally

I don’t want to use part skin mozzarella unless I absolutely have to but I definitely need to change something so next I Look to scars which is the other New York pizza shop that I’m using for guidance on this series and I found that they use a blend of three different

Cheeses unfortunately though they keep that blend to secret so I guess I’m kind of on my own here but I think I know where I can start so whole milk low mozzarella moisture that’s not right so whole milk low moisture mozzarella can be pretty hard to find and actually I looked at four

Local grocery stores and this was the only one that I could find but looking at other New York Pizza videos online I seem to be having a bigger issue with fat separation than most others and then I came across something that Adam rusia said in his original New York Pizza

Video time to think about cheese and yes I use string cheese it is ridiculous but where I live this is the only form in which I can get whole milk low moisture mozzarella so I figured it was worth a Try the original cheese is quite greasy while the string cheese is a little greasy but it’s more of like an emulsified grease if that makes sense so not very ideal not ideal at all and that’s what we’ve been working with up until this point so the string cheese

Is definitely better I mean sure quite a bit of the fat was squeezed out but the remaining cheese has a much nicer richer texture to it and you really don’t get the full effect just by looking at it I mean the minute you taste it you can

Tell a massive difference so sure enough I was able to confirm that the brand of cheese definitely makes a difference and I was happy to see that because I mean these are craft cheese sticks so they should be pretty easy for most people to find and honestly if this is all you can

Find I think you’ll be just fine but it is kind of a goofy solution I mean this isn’t Chuck E cheese we’re trying to make an authentic New York slice so I think what we need to do is find out which specific brands cheese are used by

New York pizza shops and see if we can get our hands on Something so there’s one brand of low moisture mozzarella that I saw repeatedly mentioned online and that pretty much seems to be the gold standard for pizza shops so the brand is called Grande but unfortunately it’s not really easy to get your hands on unless you’re a restaurant which obviously I’m

Not however there is a restaurant supply store near me that sounds like it might have some decent Alternatives so immediately I can see a pretty big difference I don’t know if it really comes across on camera but with my my original cheese and the cheese stick there’s almost like little holes in the

Cheese where it looks like maybe the grease kind of got squeezed out whereas the Gordon Foods cheese doesn’t really have that and it seems to be the least greasy overall as well so taste wise these cheeses are all pretty much exactly the same but when we look at the

Texture that’s when things get really interesting my original two cheeses here are a lot more sort of rubbery and stringy and I think that becomes a lot more evident once the cheese starts to cool down biting into the pizzas those original two cheeses have a much chewier again sort of rubbery stringy texture

Whereas our Gordon Food cheese maintained a nicer creamy and soft texture so it’s become pretty clear that this is going to be my best option as far as low moisture whole milk mozzarella goes but I still do want to try out the part skim unfortunately Gordon Foods also sells one of those so

I’m going to do just a bit more testing and I’ll get back with the results actually first I have one more thing I want to test you see one problem with mozzarella is that it is pretty mild tasting even the whole milk version while it does have a nice sort of

Buttery richness to it it doesn’t have a lot of that Tangy cheesy flavor so one way that a lot of New York pizzerias enhance the flavor of their Pizza is by adding some grated parmesano or pecarina cheese and for me I also picked up some of this craft Parmesan for good measure

So you know the drill by now let’s bake some pizza so honestly the differences between the three are kind of subtle they all added a noticeable saltiness to the pizza but I could definitely taste the parmesano and the peino a little bit more than the craft parmesan the craft

Parmesan pretty much just added saltiness overall I think they all did improve the pizza but if I were to pick one I would go with the pecarina I think it added just the right amount of saltiness and I could still taste the nice sort of cheesy Tangy flavors of it

But again I don’t think you could go wrong with the paragano either I just wouldn’t recommend the craft parmesan one thing I do know though is that I would use a little bit less cheese than I used during this test but of course ultimately the amount you use is just

Going to come down to personal preference now with all that figured out it’s time for our final most important test whole milk mozzarella versus part skin so I baked one pizza using entirely whole milk cheese and another Pizza using a blend of 50/50 whole milk part skin and honestly when I pulled the

Pizzas out of the oven I thought I had gotten them mixed up the 50/50 blend seemed just as greasy if not more than the full fat version so to fix this mistake I baked another Pizza this time using entirely part skim cheese but sure enough it was just as greasy and it

Tasted noticeably worse than the full fat version So based on my testing I see no reason to use any part skim cheats the flavor impact is just way too noticeable however after filming the majority of the testing for this video I did actually get my hands on some Grande

Cheese at a different Gordon Foods location I had to drive a long way to get it but given that this is a cheese that most New York Pizzeria use I don’t think this testing would have been complete without it granted it is their East Coast blend which is a 50/50 mix of

Whole milk and part skim cheese just because that was all I could find but my main takeaway is that while it is a great cheese probably the best of any of the cheeses I tested it wasn’t by a huge margin and it didn’t significantly change the flavor profile file of the

Pizza so I’d say that if you can get it you might as well but otherwise just try to find the highest quality whole milk low moisture mozzarella you can and you should be just fine you’re still going to be able to achieve that authentic New York style pizza taste but with that

Said one problem I am still having even with the Grande Cheese is that it’s ending up a bit greasier than I would like but I think that’s something we can largely fix by again tinkering with our baking method and that’s exactly what we’re going to do in the next episode

Where I’m going to try to bake my pizza exactly the way that a New York pizza shop does or at least as close as I can using my home oven other thanks a lot for watching and I’ll see you in the next one so if you’ve ever made pizza at

Home you know that one of the biggest issues is that most home ovens don’t get hot enough but recently I found a trick that might actually solve this issue so already my oven runs about 20 to 30° hot which is good at least when it comes to

Pizza making but just by pressing a few buttons I can actually calibrate it to get 35° hotter and in my experience this actually got my oven up to 70° hotter than whatever temperature I have it set to now this probe Max is out at 572

Which is why I only have my oven set to 500 but based on that my oven should be able to get all the way up to about 60° F which is right within that 600 to 625 de range that we want for a New York style pizza and this is something that

Most ovens should be able to do and actually I wasn’t even aware of it until last week when I saw this comment on my video so I appreciate that suggestion but even so the oven temperature is only one piece of the puzzle and actually there’s something that’s arguably even

More important to achieve a proper crust you need to bake Your Pizza on top of something very hot that can retain and transfer heat well so stone is what most pizza shops use in their oven but it’s not the only option and in fact I don’t

Use a stone anymore instead I use a baking steel it actually works even better than a stone at least in home ovens where you can’t reach professional Pizza Oven temperatures but despite what some people may say a steel doesn’t get hotter than a stone what it does do

Though is transfer heat much more effectively so if you think about sticking your hand into a pot of boiling water we all know that you’d burn yourself instantly but if you stick your hand into that same temperature air you’ll be just fine and that’s because water trans transfers heat much more

Quickly than air in the same way that steel transfers heat much more quickly than Stone so that’s exactly what we want we want our surface to transfer heat to the bottom of the pizza as quickly as possible to give the bottom crust that nice crispiness and Charing

So even though the steel is a bit more expensive I would highly recommend it but it actually gets even better because the other day I was on the baking steel website doing some research for this video and I noticed they had something new called the bakon steel Pro hey look

They have something new called the bakon steel Pro all right so it’s a little thicker than the other one big wood it’s also more expensive ah 16x 16 all right I’m sold all right so my original baking steel was only 14 by 16 which of course

Meant that I could only bake 14in pizzas but one of the defining characteristics of a New York style pizza is its size and even though this won’t quite get us to the full 18 to 20in Pizza it will get us a lot closer and just to be clear

This video isn’t sponsored I bought these both with my own money they’re just genuinely great products I mean just look at the difference between a pizza baked on a baking tray versus my original baking Steel versus the baking steel Pro I didn’t even think it’d be that noticeable but the differences are

Pretty clear so with that settled it’s time to make some pizza as always starting with the dough now one aspect of the pizza making process that I think is sort of overlooked by a lot of Home Cooks myself included until I started this series is the actual creation of

The dough balls because it’s the first step in creating an even uniform dough and it’s something that all of my sort of online mentors discuss the so I’m creating tension right now right right and I close it up cuz if you don’t close it up what happens is when it

Starts proofing in there a gas bubble could form in there so when you’re opening it up you get thin spotted in m so for the life of me I cannot figure out this whole closing off the seams thing that they do but I don’t think it

Really matters I just shape it the same way that I would any other loaf of bread by dragging it along the counter to create tension and it seems to work out just fine what does matter though is the container that you proof in I mean if you start with the dough

That isn’t uniform you’re never going to be able to stretch it out evenly so those Deli containers I was using before completely mess with the shape of the dough so most pizza shops use these aluminum tins but really you can use anything that’s wide enough to let the

Dough expand outward personally I had a couple of these cake pans which just so happen to be similar in size to the aluminum pizza pans but again pretty much anything would work so this works this works this works this works even this works I’m a firm believer that you

Don’t need to buy specialized equipment that only has one specific use in your kitchen now this is my pizza peel which is a piece of specialized equipment that only has one specific use in my kitchen I know nobody’s perfect but there’s a reason I bought this I mean you may have

Noticed so far that I haven’t even been using a pizza peel in this series and really that hasn’t caused any issues but now that I do have this bigger pizza steel that can make 16in pizzas I needed something that could handle that and the cookie tray that I’ve been using so far

Just physically isn’t big enough plus the pizza dough does slide off of wood a lot easier than metal so if you’re going to buy a specialized piece of equipment a wooden Pizza Peel is a pretty good one anyways with all that said I think it’s finally time to start stretching our

Dough and I found a few videos that I think are going to be a pretty big help so it seems like the process basically has four parts to it first pressing out the dough then stretching it on the table then picking it up and tossing it

Back and forth to both shake off the flower and continue stretching the dough and then finally stretching it out the rest of the way and with that last step there seems to be a couple different techniques but let’s start from the beginning so we definitely want to use

Plenty of flour press down using four fingers and by the way this is just a half siiz pizza here for practice so I’m only going to stretch it out to about 11 in total and this hand is more of a glider and this hand is a puller keeping it

Close and tight and be sure that you’re stretching the crust and not the middle of the dough not in the middle that’s right just at the edges ah so he says stretch the crust but not the middle of the dough oh yeah it’s going to take some practice but we’re getting there

Now we got to shake off the flow this part I am a little nervous about then I start clicking it back and forth knocking the flower off and it’s also opening it lay it on this one and swipe it over there we’re going to do this a

Couple of times okay so keep it moving all right not too bad wow yeah that is a lot more uniform than what we were making before I mean I’m sure there was some beginnner luck involved there but I did not think it was going to go this well for my first

Attempt I think this definitely helped I’m using SEMA flow which is sort of like semolina but a little bit finer and I’m going to use the same stuff to dust my Pizza Peel you can see how easily that slides with the combination of the wood and the semila flour now since we

Are trying to replicate a pizza shop here I’m baking on the top rack of my oven that way the pizza will be as close to the top heating element as it would be in a commercial pizza oven and that in combination with the preheated baking steel should hopefully help us to

Achieve the results that we’re looking for all right that’s a pretty good looking pizza I can already tell like even though I am getting some grease separation it’s more of an even distribution of Grease since the dough itself is more even got some nice charring on the bottom this is something

That I had a hard time achieving with my other baking steel and I definitely couldn’t do it with the pizza stone so this is a great pizza but there’s still something about it it’s just not quite bringing me back to those original slices that I had at Joe’s it just

Doesn’t have that same satisfying crispness to it and the top crust just isn’t quite caramelized enough and I know I could bake a little bit longer but that’s just going to bring us right back to the grease issue that we were seeing before and in fact I did give it

A try and that’s exactly what happened and the only other thing I can really think of that we’re doing differently is the flower Joe along with a lot of other New York pizza shops use a high gluten flour called all trumps it has a protein content of 14.2% compared to the 12.7%

In my King Arthur bread flour problem is that it only comes in these massive 25 or 50 lb bags so it wouldn’t really make a lot of sense for me to buy that much flour okay fine let’s do this so as I made my dough I could immediately tell a

Difference I made it using only High gluten flour just like they do at Joe rather than a combination of bread flour and whole wheat flour with the brand which is what I’ve been doing before based on what I learned from scars pizza so this dough is a lot softer and more

Extensible which made it quite a bit easier to stretch and shape and it also led to a subtle but noticeable Improvement in texture when baked look at that that is a very solid slice one thing I would say is the top is not quite as brown as I would like it I can

Tell it’s definitely got more chew to it and it’s also quite a bit airier than my bread flow dose so this dough is definitely an improvement and it does get us quite a bit closer to our authentic New York select but the crispiness is still lacking and actually

After I bought this giant bag of all Trump’s flour I found out about one potential pretty big issue with it so this flower has potassium bromate added which improves the rise and elasticity of the dough and reduces mixing times which sounds great but the problem is

That bromate is known to be a carcinogen and it’s actually banned as a food additive in a lot of countries and although the bromate should in theory be fully consumed during baking I always like to use a more natural product whenever possible not to mention that

This flower is is also bleached to make it appear whiter and it contains a bunch of other unnecessary ingredients as well I mean I don’t even know what most of these are for but in one of the videos I watched I noticed that at Williamsburg Pizza they use Caputo Americana flour

Which has the same protein content as all trumps but it’s unbromated and un bleach and King Arthur makes a very similar flow as well in which the only ingredient is wheat flour so I was able to find both on Amazon luckily in smaller packages this time and they both

Worked out great now with all this said bread flour is still easier to comeb by and a bit cheaper than this High gluten flour so you can certainly still use it and Achieve great results but since we are going for a true New York slice in

This series I’m going to be using the high gluten flour from here on out I may still include some portion of sifted whole wheat flour for a bit of extra flavor but that’s something I still need to figure out through some more testing like I said though this dough still

Isn’t perfect but actually during my last bake I noticed something very interesting about my oven which made me realized that I might just be approaching this whole thing wrong so since heat rises I’ve always just assumed that my oven will be the hottest at at the top and so that’s where I’ve

Been baking my pizza so far I mean after all I’m trying to replicate a real pizza oven and just visually that seems to be pretty close but this isn’t a pizza oven it’s a completely different size and shape so I think I need to approach it differently you see like most ovens it

Has both a top and a bottom heating element but it actually seems like in my oven most if not all of the heat comes from this bottom element so it’s been on for about 5 minutes top is reading about 300° F where the bottom is reading about 560 so

Let me do some more tests so I collected some data testing both the ambient oven temperatures and the baking seal temperatures on each rack of my oven and sure enough I found that my oven actually gets the hottest on the bottom rack with my baking steel getting a full

40° hotter on the bottom rack than it does on the top and when I baked a pizza using that rack well the results were interesting to say the least all right check this out but I’m not mad about that I mean I’ve literally never achieved such a

Charred crust in a home oven all we need to do now is just dial that back a little bit and that’s the easy part and on top of that it seems to have fixed a lot of the issues I was having with the Browning on the crust I’m not even

Really sure why it worked that way but can’t really complain too much so we’re definitely getting closer and I think I have a couple ideas for how we can reduce this Charing to the proper level so after a lot more research and testing I’ve come up with two best methods which

I’m going to put head-to-head for one final test the first is what I’m calling the Joe’s method because well it’s about as similar as I could get to the actual method they use at Joe’s so looking back at our pizzamaking.com thread Joe’s bakes at a temperature of 625 de F so

I’ve got that part down but here’s what might solve our issue Joe’s also uses something called a pizza screen which is basically just evented aluminum sheet and they’re super cheap I got this one at my local restaurant supply store for a whopping 375 but basically the idea is

That you can bake the pizza on top of the screen to prevent direct contact with the baking surface and therefore to prevent burning but we don’t want to prevent Charing altogether we just want to control it so what they do at Joe’s is insert the screen after about a

Minute or two of baking that way they can still get that super hard Char at the beginning but they can also prevent the pizza from burning during the rest of the bake time so for my take on the Joe’s method I preheat my oven to the highest temperature it’ll go with my

Baking Steel on the bottom rack then I bake the pizza directly on the steel for the first 2 and 1/2 minutes then I quickly Slide the screen underneath and continue to bake for another 2 and 1/2 minutes now the second method is what I’m calling the home Baker friendly

Method because it doesn’t require any additional equipment like a screen and it doesn’t require any tinkering during the baking process so I found that if I want to bake directly on my baking seel without having to use a screen my best bet is to bake on the second highest

Rack of my oven rather than on the bottom rack and I also set my oven to 525° F rather than 550 because I found that that helps the top crust to get a little more evenly Brown so with this method the pizza bakes in about 5

Minutes total and like I said it doesn’t require any maintenance during the baking process but depending on how evenly your oven Heats you may want to rotate the pizza about halfway through to ensure even charring all right so here’s my Joe’s Pizza and here’s my home

Baker version take a look at the crust the Joe’s method definitely led to some darker sort of crispier bubbles which I guess you’d expect based on the hotter steel temperature looking at the top crust though it does look like the Joe’s method led to a little bit more

Crispness there well I’ll first just say I mean these are both great pizzas definitely the best we’ve achieved so far but if I did have to choose one which I guess I do I would go with the Joe’s method with our home Baker dough it did have that nice crispiness and

Charring to it but the Joe’s dough was even crispier and it had a lot nicer contrast on the crust you get these really dark charred bits from that super hot steel but then since we move it to the screen we can still maintain that sort of nice soft chewi in between the

CH bits and with this one it’s just a little bit too hard all around and it actually didn’t seem to stay crispy for quite as long as the Joe’s method again still a great pizza but this one’s definitely the winner so next week we’re going to tackle the sauce which will

Finally be the last component of this pizza otherwise thanks a lot for watching and I’ll talk to you in the next one now during this series I was constantly learning trying to improve my stretching shaping and baking techniques and it took a lot of practice but I did

Eventually get there as you’ll see toward the end of this video but if you’re on a similar Journey working to perfect your home pizza making I don’t want you to have to struggle the same way I did which is why I created my 120 minute pizza dough Mastery Workshop

Which is designed to help you discover the dough handling secrets to make perfect pizza every single time in the workshop you’ll follow along as we make shape and stretch pizza dough together and we walk through everything you need to know to make sure your next pizza and

Your next is always better than the last and I’m also including my ultimate Pizza troubleshooting guide which is a comprehensive guide on how to fix all the most common issues with pizza dough handling absolutely free and for viewers of this video I’m offering an exclusive discount so just enter the code NY Pizza

10 checkout to get 10% off hope to see you over there so how do we make an authentic New York style pizza sauce I thought that’d be an easy question to answer but the more I looked into it the more questions I had and I actually found that almost every single New York

Style sauce recipe you’ll see online isn’t very authentic and it’s really for one main reason to replicate that authentic New York Pizza taste we need to use canned tomatoes but that’s not the part that people get wrong what most people don’t realize is that the type of canned tomatoes you use is actually

Really important you see an authentic New York style pizza sauce is made using American grown tomatoes rather than the Italian grown tomatoes that are used in a neapolitan pizza which have a completely different flavor profile but the main difference that we’re worried about is that American grown tomatoes

Tend to be sweeter and that sweetness is a defining characteristic of a New York style sauce so it’s very important that we get it right I mean some New York pizzerias even sweeten their sauce with extra sugar but often the sweetness of the tomatoes alone will be enough so

After a lot of research online trying to figure out which brands actual New York Pizzeria used I settled on eight options and I’m going to do a blind taste test to figure out which is best but actually before we can do that properly we need to answer one more very important

Question to cook or not to cook that’s the question now based on my research the vast majority of New York pizza shops don’t cook their sauce and it makes sense because when you cook a a sauce you do bring out the sort of natural sweetness of the tomatoes but

You also take away some of their brightness and acidity but there are some shops that cook their sauce so it’s definitely worth testing and even though I haven’t decided on a brand yet it doesn’t really matter because here we’re just looking at the difference between a

Raw and a cooked sauce so what I did was separate my puree into two separate containers and with one I simmered it over the stove top for about 20 minutes I found that any longer than that and you lose out on too much acidity and it

Starts to taste more like a pasta sauce than a pizza sauce so over that 20 minutes the sauce reduced by about 20% % so what I did with my other jar was just strain off a bit more liquid to make the consistencies the same between the two

And after letting the cooked sauce cool it was time for the taste test so I would say it’s pretty much exactly what I expected the cook sauce definitely isn’t quite as Tangy and acidic but it did maintain a pretty good amount of acidity which I was kind of surprised

About the raw sauce was definitely more acidic though and although it wasn’t super sweet I think by the time we add sugar to the actual pizza sauce it’s going to taste pretty good one thing I did notice though is the flavor of the cook sauce seems to be a bit more

Concentrated and I I think that’s because as we simmered the sauce down we evaporating off just the water whereas when we strained out the raw sauce that remaining liquid wasn’t pure water and so the resulting sauce isn’t quite as concentrated So based on this I can’t

Really say which one I like better I mean they both taste pretty solid I think the only way to find out for sure is to bake some pizza with them now to make this a more true comparison I also added a third variation here which is

The raw sauce with a bit of sugar added I think that since the raw sauce isn’t quite as sweet you do need to add that sugar to get a true feel for what it should taste like and again and the sauce is definitely a bit thicker than I

Would like it but that’s fine because we’re just trying to compare the flavor here all right so in addition to the plain version I also made one with cheese so I could get a true feel for what it’s going to taste like on the pizza cooked raw raw sweetened and

That’s the same on this side all right so to me there’s definitely a clear winner here it’s not the raw sauce this one was just a little bit too one-dimensional it had a nice tanginess to it but there wasn’t a lot of sweetness so that one’s out now it’s

Between our cooked sauce and our sweetened raw sauce so while they both do have a decent balance between the acidity and the sweetness the raw sauce just definitely popped a lot more with that nice tanging and acidity from the tomatoes again even with this 20 minute simmer time I think the cooked sauce

Just lost too much of that brightness and developed more of a pasta Saucy flavor and I mean looking at them you can tell a pretty big difference the cooked sauce is a much deeper darker red where the uncooked sauce was a brighter sort of Pinker red reminded me a lot

More of the sauce at Joe’s and canned tomatoes are actually cooked a little bit during the canning process so I think it actually takes away from the Flavor if you cook them beyond that point so again for me the choice is clear from here on out we’re going to go

With the raw tomatoes and of course we’ll be sure to add sugar as part of the sauce recipe to balance out those flavors but before we can work on that sauce recipe we need to decide on a brand of tomatoes so let’s get back to our taste test and the brands I’ll be

Testing are 7eleven tomato magic and full red all of which are made by the same company Stannis slous and they’re grown in California and then we’ve also got red pack which are grown in the midwest so these are all commercial grade products that only come in those

Big number 10 cans at Food Service stores which means that they are what restaurants use but they’re not quite as accessible for the everyday consumer so I’m also going to compare with a few retail brands that pretty much everybody should be able to find the first of those being Bianca denapoli which is

Actually what I noticed that scars Pizza uses they’re also grown in California and they come in both whole tomato form and crushed so I figured I’d try both then we’ve got Cento or chento whatever you call it but these seem to be the most common brand that I see at grocery

Stores even though they are grown in Italy and then I also bought a generic grocery store brand for good measure so all of the commercial grade tomato are either ground crushed or pade because your average New York slice joint isn’t going to take the time to process whole

Tomatoes themselves but there are a few higher end places that do so that’s another reason I included the Bianco Den Napoli and a couple of other whole peeled tomatoes to compare with and of course I wanted to eliminate any potential bias so I blended and strained each tomato until they were all the

Exact same consistency and I also added labels to each Bowl so that you can see which is which but I can’t now in hindsight I definitely strain these a bit more than I would for an actual pizza sauce but that’s fine because we’re just comparing the flavor here I’m

Just going to go ahead and put this one over here these two are definitely the worst this one just doesn’t have a lot of flavor this one has sort of a weird bitterness to it this one’s very sweet almost tastes like it has sugar at it

Already not bad but I think by the time that we were to cook it on a pizza it’d be a little bit too sweet this one again kind of bitter and weak tasting all right so this one was definitely my favorite it had a super bright fresh

Taste to it with just the right amount of tanginess and a little bit of sweetness as well these two though came in at a pretty close second honestly I couldn’t really distinguish between the two again they had some pretty nice acidity just not quite as much of that

Fresh tomato taste and then this one would come in not too far behind these again it had pretty much the same general flavor as these but just not quite as potent so let’s see what we’re working with number one red pack I’m actually kind of surprised about that it

Comes in at a super good price and it was actually the only one that had a pretty good consistency without even having to blend it at all now tied at second we have the 7eleven and the Bianca denapoli whole tomatoes so again the 7-Eleven was one that came in those

Number 10 cans so they may not be available to everyone if you don’t have a restaurant supply store near you but these biano denapoli Tomatoes can be found at Whole Foods and you can even buy them on Amazon the disadvantage of these being they are a little bit more

Expensive but in a way it’s nice that they come in smaller cans so that you don’t have to make giant batches of sauce and then freeze it or have it go to waste so between these three there should be at least one decent option that you can find in your area and

Actually after doing a bit more research I found that red pack actually makes smaller cans that are a lot more affordable than the Bianca to Nai tomatoes and they’re actually pretty readily available at a lot of grocery stores so of course I bought some test and while they’re not exactly the same

As the version that comes in the number 10 cans they’re close enough that I would still recommend them basically the main difference is that the commercial red pack tomatoes are more concentrated and therefore a bit thicker than the retail version and I also think that the commercial version tastes better but

It’s probably not a big enough difference to outweigh the inconvenience of buying those big number 10 cans all right so here’s our final lineup again from best to worst so even though we’ve only tasted the raw Tomatoes I feel confident enough of my three winners

That we don’t even need to bake a pizza with the rest so with my three winners I baked a pizza with each one just to make sure that they tasted just as good once they were baked and again I did a blind taste test just to eliminate any

Potential bias all right so between these bottom two here I really can’t tell any difference but it doesn’t matter because this one up here was the clear winner I mean don’t get me wrong they are all good but this one just had a really nice brightness and acidity to

It and the acidity isn’t something that you can modify by adding more salt or sugar so to me that is the most important trait when looking for a tomato for a pizza sauce so let’s see what it is yet again it’s the red pack so I think we’ve got a pretty clear

Winner here and not that it really matters because I couldn’t tell the difference between the two but this one’s a 7-Eleven and this one’s the Bianca denap so again I don’t think you could go wrong with either of these but for me I’m going to be using the red

Pack from here on out now we have to figure out the proper consistency for our sauce and this is something that we can get a pretty good idea of just by watching some videos of New York Pizzeria in action so I’m actually surprised to see that most places use a

Pretty thin sauce by the looks of it they probably don’t strain their Tomatoes at all but during my testing so far I have preferred a slightly thicker sauce because I found that a thinner sauce just tends to make the dough a little bit more soggy but I still want

To do an official test so I baked three small pizzas each with a different sauce consistency and since the consistency of these red pack Tomatoes is thicker than most other brands I actually had to add some water to create my thin sauce then my thick sauce is just red packed tomato

Straight out of the can and my extra thick sauce is strained off by about 15% all right so we’ve got the thin thick and then extra thick so surprisingly even the thin sauce didn’t really have a huge impact on the crispiness of the dough but it did have a noticeably sort

Of wetter surface which I wasn’t really the biggest fan of also the two thicker ones did have a noticeably more concentrated flavor which is nice as well I actually think this middle option struck the best balance between being nicely concentrated without being too dry but I do think we need to test it

Out on fulls siiz pizza before we can decide for sure so I made two more sauces one with red packed Tomatoes diluted by about 15% and the other with the red packed Tomatoes straight out of the can all right so a couple takeaways here number one to address the task at

Hand regarding the consistency I think I do actually prefer the thicker sauce even though it doesn’t seem quite as traditional based on what I’m seeing from New York pizza shops it just doesn’t really make sense to me to use a wetter sauce because it just makes the

Pizza a little bit soggier but maybe I’m missing something so if anybody does know the advantage of using a thinner sauce let me know in the comments so I definitely think thinning It Out by 15% was too much if anything maybe I would try thinning It Out by about 5 or 10%

But the other takeaway that I’m getting here which is possibly even more important is that I really don’t think I like olive oil in the sauce for my last few bakes before this test I hadn’t been using olive oil in the sauce and I noticed that the pizza was a lot less

Greasy than it usually was I think that with the full fat cheese you really just don’t need that extra fat from the olive oil and honestly I was trying to see if I could taste the olive oil and I really couldn’t taste it at all and I think

That getting rid of the olive oil would also allow me to use a little bit more cheese than I’m using here because I don’t have to worry as much about the greasiness of it so we definitely got some important info here but now it’s time to dial in the rest of our sauce

Now when it comes to ingredients there are a few that are absolutely essential a few that are sometimes added and a few that are rarely added now I’ve already determined that I don’t want to include olive oil but I do think I want to include sugar at least a little bit

Because I think it’s important in order to balance out the acidity then I’m also going to include oregano because personally I think that’s one of the flavors that kind of defines a New York style pizza then from there I’m also going to test garlic and basil but I

Think that anything beyond that would just be too much ultimately the tomatoes are the star of the show so I don’t want to drown them out with a bunch of other flavors especially if those other flavors aren’t considered essential but of course we have to take it from the

Beginning testing just one ingredient at a time so I’m starting off by making a very very basic sauce consisting of red packed Tomatoes diluted with water by about 7 1/2% plus some salt to taste which in my case is about 2 G of salt per 28 o of tomatoes and here I’m using

The big can red pack tomatoes because I didn’t find out about the smaller cans until after I’d finished all this testing but since again those do have a thinner consistency I found that I wouldn’t need to dilute those at all instead I just give them a blend to

Remove any big chunks and they’re good to go now I did also try using a food mill but I found that it removed too much pulp from the sauce and sort of just left it thin and watery so I actually much prefer the results from a

Blender and I mean if blending is good enough for scar then it’s good enough for me and if you’re worried about the sauce turning orange from Iration just let the Blended sauce rest in the fridge overnight and it’ll get back to its original color or you can just use

Crushed tomato straight out of the can which is what a lot of New York pizzas do anyways but for me I do prefer the slightly smoother texture that you get from blending anyways for each test I made three pizzas one with a large amount of the ingredient in question one

With a moderate amount and one with little to none so after each round as I decide on the winner I’m going to add the corresponding amount of that ingredient to my mother’s sauce here so we’ll sort of be building our sauce as we go along and the first ingredient

We’re going to test is the sugar so we got low sugar medium sugar and then high sugar and the high sugar is exactly what Joe’s uses all right so I definitely do think you need a good amount of sugar to balance out the acidity of tomatoes but

The Joe’s sauce is a little bit too sweet for my taste this one though might not be sweet enough so I think ultimately we’re going to end up somewhere in between these two so I would put a somewhere between 6 and7 g of sugar per ounce of

Sauce up top again we got the low oregano down here mid oregano over here High oregano all right so this first one I can barely taste the oregano if at all and when I tasted the second one I thought that would be the perfect amount

I could taste it just a little bit but it wasn’t overpowering but then I tried the third pizza and it actually wasn’t too bad either I would say it’s a little bit too much oregano but not by a huge margin so I think what I’m going to go

With is somewhere right between these two which will end up being about 3 TPO of oregano per 28 oz of tomatoes again this isn’t my final decision I’ll still have to see how it interacts with the rest of the ingredients but for now that’s what I’m going to go

With this is my Baseline this is no garlic this is about 1 clove per 28 oz of tomatoes and this is about two cloves per 28 Oz all right so this is a pretty tough one actually what I basically found is that even a pretty small amount of garlic pretty significantly changes

The flavor profile of the sauce and I can’t quite decide whether or not that’s a good thing for me though I do want it to be a pretty tomato forward sauce but I also kind of like the additional element that that garlic adds so I think

What I’m going to do is go with just a little bit of garlic probably about a half a teaspoon per 28 oz of tomatoes that way it will barely be detectable on its own but it’ll still add a nice little extra Dimension to the sauce so you can’t really taste the

Basil itself that much in the same way that you taste the oregano for example but you kind of get more of just like an essence or the aroma of the basil which I do think is actually pretty nice it kind of reminded me more of like a neopolitan style pizza which after all

Is what the New York style evolved from so I do think it’s worth adding so I think what I’m going to start with is exactly what I used on this Pizza which is about a half a leaf of Basil per ounce of tomatoes so for a full 28 Oz

Batch that’ll be 14 basil leaves but to be sure that the sauce is actually as good and as authentic as I want it to be I have to perform one final test all right so for my final test here I’ve got the sauce that we developed in this

Episode with the red pack tomatoes and then I made the same sauce with the 7-Eleven Tomatoes just to make sure that I do still like the red pack the best and then this third option here is a more basic sauce again using red packed Tomatoes but it only includes salt sugar

And a little bit of oregano but actually do have one more to compare with so I actually made it back to Joe’s yesterday and this time I brought myself home a few slices said I had a reference point to compare my own pizza to so as

We know Joe’s uses a very basic sauce just the tomatoes salt and sugar I mean it pretty much tastes like they use the Tomato straight out of the can definitely not cooked and it’s actually not quite as sweet as it was the last time there might just be variations from

Batch to batch but I do like it a little bit less sweet so I may end up bumping down the sugar content in my own recipe as well but let’s give mine a taste starting with on that basic recipe because that’s going to be the most

Similar to Joe’s so the Joe’s sauce is definitely good but tasting them side by side I do think I prefer mine I mean I think the oregano adds a great flavor and with the red pack Tomatoes it’s got a lot more tanginess to it like I said

The Joe’s sauce just tastes like tomato straight out of the can and the tomatoes that they use don’t seem to be quite as acidic but this is still my basic version so let me try the others and see if I do still like them better all right

So regarding the tomatoes I do still like the red pack ones the best but the 7-Eleven aren’t really too far behind so I’d say that if you can find red pack you should get them but I think that any of the top brands that we’ve talked

About are going to be fine now as far as the ingredients that one is a little bit trickier because even this basic sauce is really good for me though I do think I like the addition of the basil and garlic but only in very small amounts here the garlic is still actually a

Little bit too strong even though I only used a half a teaspoon for an entire 28 Oz can of tomatoes but this still begs the question which sauce is more authentic well that’s what I still need to figure out but in order to do that I

Think I need to make a trip to refresh my memory on some New York Pizza spots I traveled all the way to New York to eat at some of the city’s best pizzerias with the goal of answering one simple question what actually defines a great New York slice now if you’ve been

Following this series you know that we’ve already gotten pretty close in replicating the style of pizza at home but I’m not aiming for pretty close I want to make a great slice one that Rivals some of the top spots in the city and I want to create a foolproof method

That anyone can follow to do the same but in order to do that I need to try some of these spots for myself but I’ve only got one day to hit all nine of these spots so we better get started Pizza Time all right First Slice

Of the day here bleer Street Pizza let’s give it a try a lot of cheese on this one pretty good Ching on the bottom not a super dark crust on the top though so let’s see what it tastes like forgot to hit record it first hopefully I at least

Got some decent footage but again my main takeaway nothing really too special crust doesn’t have a lot of flavor not super crispy I mean there’s nothing really that sets it apart bet I’ll take down a couple notes here and then we’ll head to the next place when I get I take

Read a b all right so this is Two Bros honestly this one kind of looks better to me than bleer street it’s got some nice Browning on the cheese not too much cheese but then when I flipped it over there’s absolutely no Browning on the

Bottom of the crust so for me it’s not looking too good flavor wise is really not bad I mean my biggest problem with it is that the uh the sauce is really sweet does seem to have some oregano in there obviously the other problem is just that

The crust is so soft there’s absolutely no christas to it whatsoever kind of just tastes like a generic cheap Little Caesars or Chuck-E-Cheese type Pizza I mean it’s a dollar so you can’t really expect too much but I think it’s time to head to the next

Place so not a great start the cheese fell off the slice immediately but let’s see how it tastes flavor wise it’s not too bad I do think it has a little bit too much cheese for my taste could use a little bit more Charing on the bottom otherwise the sauce definitely has some

Oregano in it although I don’t think it has much of anything else I’d say the actual dough recipe is the best of any I’ve seen yet I just would have preferred a little bit more crispiness but now it’s time to hit the one I’ve been waiting for for this whole series

Let’s head over to Scars so this looks like by far the best one yet it’s got a really nice thickness to it nice crispiness good amount of cheese good amount of sauce smells really good so curious to give it a try I had super high expectations after all this buildup but that is a really

Really good slice possibly the best slice I’ve ever had again the crust is perfect the sauce is nice and tangy with a little bit of sweetness not too much spice I did see them using some oregano but I don’t think there’s anything else other than the oregano and the cheese

There’s something about it as well it’s got a slightly different flavor than most other New York pizzas I have to do a little bit more research see if I can gain any more insight but otherwise really good So visually very similar to scars actually the only difference I really noticed right off the bat is here they grade a little bit of parmesano over top and of course they also add some basil here pretty Dark Crust very good structure let’s give it a Try yeah that’s another really really good slice is pretty similar to scars it seem like scars cheese had a little bit of a different flavor maybe they use a little bit what’s that sh maybe they use a little bit of provon scars but sauce is very similar it’s got a really nice

Tang to it a little bit of sweetness great sauce to cheese ratio really well seasoned nice Airy crust honestly there’s not much you can really improve about this slice I do like the addition of the basil I don’t know if it’s classic or traditional based on some of

The other places I’ve tried but we’ll just see how it goes the rest of the time honestly this one and scars are the most similar to the slices that I’ve been making so I think I’m definitely on the right track with mine Bas on this I’m leaning more towards my basic sauce

Maybe with the addition of Basil but I really don’t think I should be adding the garlic I haven’t detected any garlic in any of the pizza I’ve tried so far anyways let’s keep it Moving all right this one’s best pizza it I’ve been sitting there for a while it looked like so it’s not Super Fresh but otherwise it looks pretty good so let’s see how it tastes they do use fresh mozzarella so you can definitely tell looking at it looks a little

Different than the rest but I still want to give it a try because I’ve heard good things about it again really good structure nice crust I’m par with scars and L industry lustry lit industry so this is another really good slice first thing I notice though I’m

Not the biggest fan of the fresh mozzarella when it’s on the pizza like this it kind of has a weird soft mushy texture to it crust is really good though not baked too dark not too crunchy but not too chewy honestly pretty much spot on it’s got a nice

Flavor as well and again the sauce really nice too not quite as Tangy maybe as the industry and scars but pretty good It’s definitely a little bit more heavily topped than the others that’s the first thing I noticed it’s got a nice crisp crust pretty decent structure though otherwise this has a lot of sauce on it it is a really good sauce though lots of oregano cheese seems to be really high

Quality pretty sure they just use Grande whole milk but anyways another great slice don’t think it’s quite as good as the last few but definitely very Solid this place is pretty similar to the last few and honestly it’s getting a little bit harder to discern each one the point here is not to compare them just to get a feel for what they’re like and this one’s definitely up there with scars in the industry is my favorites

The Dough’s got a really solid structure that nice crispiness great cheese to Sauce ratio really basic but delicious sauce with that little bit of tanginess and honestly my only complaint would be that the dough could use maybe a little bit more flavor but overall very solid

Slice so this is the last slice of the day new park pizza and queens first thing know it has a very floppy structure they also use fresh mozzarella so that’s a little bit different than most so it is a little bit too floppy for my taste I prefer a bit more

Structure but flavor-wise it is a really good slice I mean again a very basic sauce I don’t even think they put oregano in this one so it’s basically just tomatoes and salt maybe a little bit of sugar but it’s hard to tell so despite how it looks when you pick it up

There’s really no crunch to the crust the Charing does add a bit of flavor but that’s about it so after all this I definitely have a a much better idea of what’s authentic so let’s head back and dial in this final recipe I’ll see you

There so I learned a lot on this trip and throughout the series in general really more than I have time to talk about in these videos so I actually decided to start a free newsletter that you can check out right here but basically I’ll be sending out additional

Insights about pizza making and other food related topics that I don’t have time to cover in these videos so if that sounds like something you’re interested in be sure to check out the link in the description below all right now one thing I do know

After this trip is that I’m good on the cheats the most traditional taste definitely comes from a low moisture mozzarella along with the addition of some parano or pearo on top of the sauce and I talked all about that in The Cheese episode of this series so I’d

Recommend checking that one out if you haven’t seen it yet and as far as the sauce I think I’m also good there that is using my basic recipe which is an uncooked sauce consisting of just tomato salt sugar and oregano and since the sauce is so simple the tomatoes you use

Become even more important and for me I’m still really happy with red pack they have that nice Tang that I recognize from my favorite spots in the city like scars and lustry which the other brands and the other more mediocre slices I tried just sort of black now

7-Eleven and Bianco denapoli which is actually what both scars and lustry use are both great as well honestly I’m not sure whether I like those or red pack better I would just recommend trying whatever you have available to you and see what you like best so I think

Overall we’re very close but we’re not all the way there and if you’ve watched the series up until this point you know that by far the most elusive part of this pizza is the dough but after this trip I think I finally have all of the

Pieces I need in order to perfect it so my top three pizzerias in terms of dough structure were Lind scars and Joe’s but with that said there are a couple areas that I think my dough is still lacking in the first being The Chew Factor even using a high gluten flow I’m struggling

To achieve enough Chew in my crust as I should be so to address that I actually decided to remove olive oil from the dough you see oil inhibits gluten development so even though some pizzerias do include it I think they can get away with it because they’re making

Their dough in such large batches and they’re using heavy duty commercial mixers so for us who are making small batches of dough by hand removing oil from the dough helps us to get that much nicer chew that we’re looking for now the other main thing I noticed is that

Compared to some of the top Pizzeria I tried my dough is noticeably lacking in flavor when I compare to scars and lindry though their flavor is a lot more interesting bready and complex and honestly mine is just sort of bland by comparison and there are two main things

That I could think of that might help with that the first would be to use a preferment like a Bea or a poish which I actually found out on my trip that lustry does and I actually tried it too in the very first episode of the series

But I thought that it gave the dough a little bit too much of a fermente flavor for a New York style pizza but scars doesn’t use a preer and their dough still tastes great what they do do though that I haven’t been doing is use fresh yeast now this

Stuff can be pretty hard to find it took me about a dozen grocery store trips before I finally found some and there are mixed opinions about whether or not it’ll even make a difference but most New York pizzerias do seem to use it so there may be something to that so let’s

See what we’re working with here fresh yeast compared to the instant dry yeast that I’ve been using so the fresh yeast definitely has a much stronger yeasty sort of funky smell to it it may just be because it’s already hydrated though so what I want to know is if it’s still

Noticeable once it’s mixed into the dough it’s just barely noticeable once it’s mixed into the dough but what I really want to know is if it’s still noticeable once the pizza is baked it’s not still noticeable once the pizza is baked at least to me and I mean

That’s kind of what I expected from the beginning in theory they’re the exact same stuff one is just prehydrated and one isn’t I think that the actual fermentation process you use is a lot more important because as dough ferments the sugars and proteins in the wheat break down into more complex alcohols

Acids and other flavorful compounds so a longer fermentation means more flavor but it also means a weaker dough structure because that breakdown so I’ve been playing around with longer fermentation times in the fridge and I found about 2 to 3 Days To Be The Sweet Spot I think the dough develops plenty

Of flavor that way without the need for a preferment but another thing that really stood out to me about lindry was just how Airy their dough was that was probably my favorite thing about it even though that’s not always characteristic of a New York style pizza and it’s not

Just about texture more air in the dough actually means more flavor I mean air is the whole reason that bread tastes so good those aromatic flavor compounds get trapped within the bubbles in the bread only to be released when you bite into it so aside from using a longer

Fermentation period another thing that lustry does to create an airier dough is to use a higher hydration than most other pizzerias and I know I made a whole episode about how using a lower hydration is better and so far it has been I think the main reason lindry can

Get away with it is because they use such a high temperature oven but I’ve made a lot of changes to this dough since the beginning of the series so I wanted to give the hydration one more try now I was still playing around with fermentation times here and so my Do’s

Were definitely overproofed and therefore the pizzas ended up flatter than I would have liked but that’s okay because the main goal here was just to test the hydration level so here I’ve got three pizzas same exact recipe and process this one’s 55% hydration this one’s 60% and this one’s 65% what I’m

Also going to do is reheat the slices so usually when you go to a slice shop you’ll get a slice from a pizza that was baked anywhere between about 10 to 30 minutes ago so before they give it to you they’ll throw it back in the oven

For a couple minutes to reheat it which of course will have an impact on the texture of the pizza so I had to give it a try so after my usual baking process I just let the pizza cool for 10 to 15 minutes with my oven still running at

Its highest temp then I toss the slices back back onto my pizza steel which I have sat on my oven’s second highest rack for about 2 minutes or until they were charred to my liking all right time for the Moment of Truth wow I think we finally did it I

Kind of feel stupid for not thinking about it earlier but the reheat makes all the difference with that said I think any of these three hydrations could work it really just depends on what your preferences are so if you don’t want to mess with the reheat I

Would say the only one that was acceptable to eat after the first bake was his 55% that lower hydration it to crisp up with just a single bake so I would say around 55 to 57 is the sweet spot if you don’t want to reheat if you

Don’t mind reheating though and you want the absolute best results I would go for 60% or higher the reason being with higher hydration do you can develop gluten a lot easier and so these were noticeably chewier than the 55% the problem was that they didn’t quite crisp

Up enough after the first bake but by the time you reheat them you kind of get the best of both worlds both with the chewi and the crispiness so I would say 60% is kind of more like a classic New York slice that isn’t too Airy whereas

65 5% or higher gives you a little bit of an airer dough more like industry or scars and for me I really like that so I think I’m actually going to experiment a little bit more with fermentation times and hydration levels and I’ll discuss the results in the next episode which by

The way will finally be the step-by-step guide for how to make this pizza so you can watch that video right here once it’s uploaded but in the meantime if you haven’t seen the first few episodes of the series you can check those out right here thanks a lot for watching and I’ll

See you in the next one now in large part due to what I learned during this series I recently started my own pizza pie and it’s been pretty amazing to me just how quickly I can learn and improve when I’m making dough in such large quantities I feel

Like my skills have improved tfold since this series and I want to help you to have that same transformation which is why I recently created my 120 minute Workshop pizza dough Mastery in short the workshop is designed to help you discover the dough handling secrets to make perfect pizza every single time in

The workshop you’ll follow along as we make shape and stretch pizza dough together and we’ll walk through everything you need to know to make sure that you’re your next pizza and your next is always better than the last and this Workshop has already been transformative for a lot of home pizza

Makers just take a look at some of the results that students have already achieved so if you want to get in on the workshop I’m offering an exclusive discount for viewers of this video just enter the code NY Pizza 10 at checkout to get 10% off I hope to see you over

There but now let’s get back to the video I spent the past 6 months creating the perfect New York style pizza recipe I mean I study this pizza harder than most people study for finals and after countless hours and what feels like hundreds of tests I can confidently say

This is the most authentic New York style pizza recipe designed for home Cooks I mean probably and by the end of this video you’ll know how to make it and it all starts with the crust which to me is defined by four main things thinness chew crispness and charring so

Nearly every single pizzeria in New York is going to be using High gluten flour this is what gives the pizza its signature too so you’re really just not going to achieve the right results without it so personally I use King Arthur High gluten flour it’s easy to

Find online at least if you’re in the US although it is a bit more expensive than your typical flour so another alternative would be to use normal bread flour and then add some vital wheat Gloom to increase the protein content now some of the best pizzeria I tried in

New York also include a small amount of sifted freshly milled flour for extra flavor somewhere around 10% of the total flour so if you don’t have access to Freshly milled flour the best alternative would be to use either spelt or Ry flour and again you should sift it

To remove the excess brand because that brand would otherwise inhibit gluten development and reduce the chewi of the final crust personally I like to sift a big batch ahead of time and keep it in my cabinet for easy access and by the way you can find the complete recipe in

The description below but to make it more customizable I also made up a dough calculator spreadsheet basically you can enter the size pizza you want to make how many you want to make and a few other things we’ll discuss later and it’ll calculate a recipe for you and

There’s also an area where you can figure out how much vital wheat gluten you need to add to your flour if that’s the route you’re taking so the spreadsheet is free to use you can check it out in the description below but anyways now that the flow is taken care

Of let’s talk water AKA hydration basically the higher the hydration the aier your crust will be but also the less crispy in structured it’ll be so I found that a 65% hydration or 65 G of water per 100 G of flour is the perfect middle ground it’s low enough that the

Dough doesn’t become sticky and hard to work with but high enough that the final crust ends up both Airy and crisp but since everyone has different preferences I’ve listed a few different dough styles on the spreadsheet and based on which one you choose the hydration level will be adjusted accordingly but anyways

After mixing the flour and water we’re going to let the dough rest AKA otles for about 20 minutes this lets the flour hydrate and start forming gluten before we add any other ingredients and before you think I can just skip that step let me show you the difference it makes here

You can see the dough before the B versus after and whenever I made the dough without this step it turned out significantly less chewy but after the dough rests we can add the dry ingredients starting with the yeast I use a relatively small amount just about. 5% as a Baker’s percentage which

I explained in episode 2 of the series but that basically just means .5 G of yeast for every 100 G of flour and the reason I use so little is because this allows the dough to rise slower and therefore to develop more flavor as it

Ferments but now I’ll add my salt in a baker’s percentage of 3% and my sugar in a baker’s percentage of 1 and 1/2% the sugar is going to help the crust to Brown more quickly which is especially helpful in a home oven that doesn’t get as hot as a commercial Pizza Oven does

Now after giving everything a mix and a few needs on my table I’ll let the dough rest again for about 20 more minutes this is going to let the gluten relax which in turn will make the dough much easier to knead and when we come back

We’ll just knead for about 5 minutes if the dough gets too sticky at any point let it rest for about a minute or two and by the time you come back it’ll be much easier to work with after kneading I’ll let the dough rest for a few more

Minutes before forming it into a nice top ball and then throwing it back into my covered Bowl to rise we’re looking for it to double or trip in size here which take anywhere from 1 to 3 hours depending on the temperature of your environment then from there we’ll divide

The dough into the desired number of pieces in my case here I’m making two 14-in pizzas and of course you should weigh out the pieces to make sure they’re exactly the right size then form each one into a very top ball and this is important because this is well to

Keep the dough strong as it rises and allow it to stay circular when we eventually form it out into a pizza then from here we’ll just put them into containers to rise so I usually use either these metal cake pans or these bow plate thingies I have but just use

Whatever you have a 9×13 pan or even a normal plate works fine you just don’t want to use a container that’s too narrow because that’ll mess up the shape of the dough that we work so hard to create but next we’ll throw them into the fridge to ferment for another 2 to 3

Days technically you could use this dough the same day but the longer you let it ferment the more flavorful it’ll be after too long though the dough becomes weak and deflated so I found about 2 to 3 Days To Be The Sweet Spot now in the meantime let’s talk sauce and

The most important consideration here is which brand of tomatoes you use so canned tomatoes are a given for New York style pizza but not all brands have the right flavor profile the best I found are these red pack crushed tomatoes however this version only comes in these

Massive number 10 cans which is a lot of tomatoes perfect for those quiet nights at home when you want to bake 20 to 30 pizzas but for the average day not so much of course you can freeze the sauce but that’s still a lot to keep in your

Freezer Now red pack also makes a retail 28 Oz can but they’re not nearly as good the best retail brand I found is these chento all-in ones not the normal Crush Centos they have to be the all-in ones so you can buy them online from chento but with shipping they’re pretty

Expensive so I actually buy mine from a site called imperfect Foods this isn’t sponsored though that’s just genuinely where I buy most of my produce from I do have a discount Link in the description below though if you’re interested in signing up otherwise Bianca denapoli whole peeled tomatoes are also pretty

Good and they’re readily available at Whole Foods and on Amazon but now for the recipe itself New York style sauce is very basic it’s not cooked and the only ingredients are tomatoes salt oregano and sometimes sugar the last of which I do personally like to add because it helps balance out the acidity

Of the tomatoes but the other main thing to consider is a sauce consistency the commercial red packs are a bit too thick straight out of the can so what I do is dilute them by about 20 % that’s 26 o of water per number 10 can but when I’m

Using any other brand I don’t dilute them what I do do though regardless of the brand is blend the tomatoes I found that Milling removes too much of the Tomato pulp and leaving the sauce unprocessed leaves me with too many big chunks of tomatoes and if you use an

Immersion blender you can make the sauce straight inside a container for Easy Storage in the fridge but now with our sauce and dough prepared let’s talk baking a typical New York Pizzeria is going to be baking at a minimum of 550° f or 28777 7 77° C but the best spots I

Visited did bake even higher usually between 620 and 700° F this means at home we should bake at our oven’s highest possible temperature which is typically going to be 550° F but since that’s still lower than we would ideally want we need to make one more adjustment

And that is to bake on steel rather than Stone steel retains heat better than Stone and it also transfers heat much more quickly which is going to help to crisp up the bottom of the pizza so the brand I use is baking steel and this one in particular is the baking steel Pro

It’s great because it’s 38 of an inch thick so it retains plenty of heat and it’s also 16 in x 16 in which means that I can bake a 16in pizza which I think is important given that one of the defining characteristics of a New York style

Pizza is its size so again this isn’t sponsored it’s just a product that I genuinely use and enjoy but I was able to get a discount code for anyone watching my videos so if you use the code Charlie 10 at checkout you can get 10% off your order I’ll leave that link

In the description below but anyways when I’m getting ready to bake I’ll place my steel onto the second highest rack of my oven then I’ll set the oven to 550° F and let it preheat for at least an hour but preferably up to 90 minutes and at the same time I’ll take

My out of the fridge to let it come up to room temperature and to rise just a bit more then once the oven is preheated we can shape and top the pizza so here we’ll be making a classic cheese slice and when it comes to cheese there’s really only one obvious choice low

Moisture mozzarella preferably whole milk low moisture mozzarella because it’s going to have a much better flavor and texture than the part skim stuff unfortunately though it’s not too easy to find whole milk low moisture mozzarella let alone a high quality one the gold standard for New York Pizzeria

Though is a brand called Grande it’s only available at Food Service stores but if you can find some of it you should use use it what really separates the good cheese from the bad is the meltability it should melt super nicely without separating too much and it

Should stay rich and gooey on top of the pizza now since mozzarella is pretty mild tasting it’s also traditional to add some grated peino Rano for extra saltiness and Tang but now when we’re ready to bake I’ll start by getting everything lined up my dough sauce pecino and mozzarella and then I’ve also

Got my wooden Pizza Peel which I’m going to use to slide the pizza off into the oven and I’ve got my two flour shakers for dusting one allpurpose and one SEMA so I’ll start by sprinkling some of the SEMA flour onto my pizza peel and onto

My work surface then I’ll dust the dough with a generous amount of allpurpose flour bring it out onto my Surface and then Dust it again with the allpurpose flour now working from the center outward press the dough down being sure to leave a thicker portion at the edge

To form the crust then spread it out on the counter like so trying to keep it as round as possible and this is where all that flour that we added to the surface comes in handy and from here on you want to avoid stretching out the middle any

Further so be sure to only stretch around the edges next toss the dough back and forth from arm to arm to both knock off the flower and to continue stretching it out then finally continue stretching it with fist like so rotating and stretching until the dough reaches

The proper size you want to keep the dough moving as quickly as possible to prevent any uneven spots which will take some practice and I’m still not an expert by any means but you’ll get better as you do it more then just place the dough out onto your peel and if it’s

Still not big enough continue stretching until it is so we’ll start with our sauce pouring in the center and then swirling outward to create an even distribution then hit it with optionally a bit more oregano then peino and then mozzarella and you want to avoid adding

Too much sauce or cheese in the center because that can lead to a soggy pizza now the amounts of each ingredient you use will depend on what size pizza you’re making and on your preferences so on the spreadsheet there are several options to choose from here I’m making a

16-in pizza with medium sauce and medium cheese although I usually prefer to make the version with light cheese and I think it goes without saying that you can add whatever toppings you like at this point too now I’ll just give the dough a little shimmy to make sure it’s

Not going to stick when I slide it off which the wooden Pizza Peel really helps to prevent but if you have a baking tray big enough or even just a piece of cardboard you can use that instead now I’ll carefully slide this pizza off onto

My hot steel and bake it for about 4 to 5 minutes and I like to rotate the Pizza halfway through to make sure it Browns evenly you’ll know it’s ready to take out when the cheese is nicely melted together and it’s just started to separate but we’re not done yet because

If you’ve ever gotten pizza by the slice you know that it’s generally reheated to order meaning that it was baked and then cooled and then heated again before serving which has a big impact on the crust specifically it helps us to get that solid crispness and structure that

We’re looking for so after letting the pizza cool for 15 to 20 minutes I’ll cut a slice and then throw it back onto my steel with the oven still set to 550° and I also like to turn on the broiler to get the top of the slice nice and

Browned as well and after about 60 to 90 seconds when the slice is charred to my liking it’s ready to serve and that my friends is an authentic New York slice at home it’s got the perfect chew perfect crunch nice charring on the bottom the sauce is Tangy but also sweet really

This is my ideal New York slice and remember to take your pizza dough handling skills to the next level be sure to check out my pizza D Mastery Workshop you can find the link below either way thanks a lot for watching and I’ll talk to you in the next one