I’m following this recipe:
[https://www.seriouseats.com/basic-new-york-style-pizza-dough](https://www.seriouseats.com/basic-new-york-style-pizza-dough)
(slight twist, using much less yeast for an overnight room temp ferment)
I’ve added and mixed all the dry ingredients. Then add oil. Then add water. The result is hard blobs of oil that don’t distribute when I mix the dough.
In searching for what I should do, I’ve seen:
* Add oil more slowly
* Wait until after water is added, then add oil
* Hold out flour, add water (so it’s soupy), mix, add oil, mix, add rest of flour, mix
* Don’t add oil until you’ve made a fermented dough ball
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Any tips on which method will incorporate the olive oil evenly? Thanks in advance!
by FusionToad
7 Comments
I add the dry ingredients to the water, mix to incorporate, let rest about 5 minutes, start kneading, then add the oil toward the end of the kneading process.
Adding oil early will hinder hydration of the flour.
I see the same oil blobs in the dough, but they haven’t been perceptible after baking. Have you seen impacts?
Never had an issue. Olive oil? And real olive oil, like many scam bottles out there. Try another bottle
I float the oil on the water and add while the food processor is running. Never had any blob with that method. I would definitely not add the oil first, as it might prevent some of the flour from absorbing water.
take a look at this:
[https://www.pizza.devlay.com/calculator](https://www.pizza.devlay.com/calculator)
It has worked pretty well for me in the past.
This is obviously meant to be an easy recipe, and the easy answer is you can add all the water and pulse a couple times followed by the oil, or you can mix the two and add while pulsing. Just don’t add the oil before the water.
Why? Gluten.
If you add fat directly to flour it coats the grains, waterproofing them. If the flour is waterproof it won’t absorb water, so it can’t form gluten. This is why we cut butter directly into flour when making biscuits or pie crust. Those things are meant to be flaky, tender: basically anything but chewy. In those cases we further minimize gluten by adding the liquid last and mixing as little as possible.
You want pizza dough to be sturdy and chewy, so you need gluten to develop. There’s a lot of advice posted here that’s cool for more in-depth techniques, but this is a quick food processor recipe. It’s designed to get that flour hydrated and gluten developed very fast.
All that said, what you have made already should work just fine. There isn’t enough oil in the recipe to significantly impact your results, and while those little oil blobs won’t win you any awards you don’t need to throw it out and start over.
I’ve made this recipe tons of times and tried different orders of adding. I do mine in the stand mixer and not food processor because I originally learned the recipe from Peter Reinhart’s book (the SE recipe is basically Peter Reinhart’s NY Pizza Dough, but it says to do it in a food processor instead). I mix the oil and water together in the mixer bowl and I’ll give it a good whisk before adding the dry ingredients so the oil is dispersed more. Then I’ll add the flour and yeast, mix it on low until just combined. Then sprinkle the salt and sugar over the top of the dough and let it rest for 15-20 minutes. This is the autolyse stage which lets the flour hydrate, but the sugar and salt will sort of compete with the flour for the hydration, so it’s best to just sprinkle them on top so they’ll start to dissolve and will incorporate easily when you do the final mix. After the autolyse, mix on medium-low until you get a windowpane, which will be much quicker, due to the autolyse step.