Classic New York Pizza At Home

This is everything you want in New York-style pizza: a crispy crust, a light, foldable center, and bubbling cheese — all made right at home. No pizza oven required!

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if your kitchen doesn’t look like this after you made pizza you probably didn’t make pizza we’ll start off by making our dough now can you go to the supermarket and buy some pre-made dough yes do I think you can make better dough at home definitely all you need is a bit of bread flour then some salt and just a little bit of yeast and once you whisk that all up to make sure it’s evenly combined add in your water then toss on that dough hook attachment make sure it’s locked in there you never want to lose it inside of whatever’s in your bowl and we’ll close it down and continue to mix i’m going to use a rubber spatula now to make sure that we incorporate all that flour and right now my mixer is on the lowest setting that it can possibly go i don’t want to over mix anything i’m not trying to tear this dough apart or beat it up in any way my goal is to get it to pull all together into one sometimes it’s good to stop your mixer for just a moment careful with your fingers and just lift it around over onto itself make sure everything’s evenly combined this helps to speed up the process a little bit and then hook back on we can keep it going if you watch carefully here you’ll see that once in a while my mixer sort of lifts up like that as it’s kneading this dough and the reason is I’ve left it unlocked on purpose you can use this trick as long as you’re careful but what happens sometimes if you’re kneading dough if the mixer is locked in is it burns out the engine in your mixer so what this does is it allows it to sort of bounce up and down like this as it needs and it doesn’t ruin the motor that’s inside here after about 2 to 3 minutes of mixing our dough is looking great so I’m going to loosen it up from the bottom of my bowl and we could allow it to just rise in here but a lot of people at home have a metal mixing bowl and you don’t really want to proof any kind of dough in metal so instead I’m going to add some olive oil to the bottom of a plastic container and then I’ll drop my dough ball right in you can feel free to spread it out just a tiny bit but it’s going to do most of that work on its own then on goes our lid and we’ll rest this at room temperature for 24 hours 24 hours later sometimes I use a little bit of magic in my recipes here is what our dough looks like you can see it’s beautifully jiggly you can smell the development of that yeast you can see all of these really nice air bubbles starting to form which is going to give us a really nice crust and if you wanted to use this dough right now and make pizza you could just toss it in the fridge till it kind of cools down a little bit and then it’d be ready to go but as much as I’m sure you’d love to make a few pizzas with this dough right now the lid’s going to go back on and it’s going to go into the fridge for one to two more days and what that does aside from developing flavor is give really nice chew to the texture of the dough it’s a very important step and I promise it will be worth it and with a bit more magic my dough has now been sitting in the fridge for 2 days developing all of that delicious flavor and texture so yes technically if you want to be making this dough from scratch and you want to make pizzas on a Saturday you need to start making the dough on Wednesday and I know that sounds like a lot of planning ahead for some of you so that’s why I said if you want to buy pre-made pizza dough you can definitely do that the next step is quick and easy we need to portion out our dough we want to go for about 300 g per ball of dough so I’ll cut off what I think looks like a nice generous chunk throw it on down oh my gosh I nailed it 3001 i promise there was no movie magic there normally if I hadn’t hit the perfect number there I would be adjusting and pulling off a bit of dough or adding some more but since this one’s already perfect I’m going to sort of roll it into itself to create this nice ball and if I flip this over you’ll see what I’m doing here is basically just pulling that dough from the outside and pressing it to the middle underside and what that does is it kind of forms this tension on the top of the dough that creates this nice little perfect ball fold press fold press fold press and eventually you’re left with a nice pre-portioned dough ball like this once it’s rolled out this is going to be perfect to make about a 12 to 14in pizza now I’m just going to lightly flour up a baking sheet and that ball is going to sit on there until we’re ready to make our pizza and then all you do now is measure out the rest of your dough before I put it down let’s see how close I can get to nailing that same thing again boom that’s too much I think 318 take some off oh that’s 300 good it’s looking like I’m going to get three nice big dough balls out of this but if you want to make more pizzas that are just smaller you can always portion your dough out to a lower amount there are dough balls if you’ve just gone through the process to make all this dough from scratch first of all great job second of all if your dough looks like this with those little nice air bubbles that are forming all over the top of it that is a sign that you’ve done a really really great job making the dough those little air pockets that we’re going to get in the cross-section of our pizza crust once we cut into it later that provides amazing texture and aireriness in each bite that we get and that is one of the keys to a good pizza once we finish making our dough balls we’re going to cover these up just lightly and because this is still cold from being in the refrigerator I’m going to let it sit at room temperature until I’ve got all the rest of my ingredients ready to go and at that point it should be ready our dough is done so now we can move on to making our tomato sauce pizza is only made of three basic components you’ve got your dough your sauce and your cheese so we need to make sure every one of those components tastes right for the sauce you’ll want to grab a can of whole peeled tomatoes i got the ones with basil in them cuz they have a little bit of extra flavor and I’ll pour these off into a bowl and to this I’m going to add a little bit of dried basil just to continue boosting that basil flavor i’ve got a few red pepper flakes it’s really up to you to make it as spicy or as mild as you want and we’ve got a light dusting of garlic powder and then this here is a really special ingredient this is dried oregano but it’s still as you can see on the stem and all I’m going to do to take it off is basically just press the leaves off from between my hands and it’ll fall right into my sauce i don’t expect you to go and find oregano that’s still on the stem but because I found it and because it does pack a bit more flavor I’m using this instead of that classic dried jarred oregano that I would normally use for something like this the only other thing I’ll do for now is add a few pinches of salt and then I think this is my favorite part about cooking pizza besides eating the actual pizza i’m going to get in there with my hands and start to break all of these tomatoes apart if you’re going to do this just remember to squeeze them away from you if you turn your hands up like this and then squeeze you’re going to get hit right in the face with tomato juice so if that happens just don’t say I didn’t warn you there are two reasons I like doing it this way the first is that you get these nice differences in texture for example if I lift up some of this sauce you can see that some of the chunks of tomato are larger and what that does when you eat the pizza is give these slightly different pockets of texture some might have a little chunk of tomato while others are going to be a little bit more smooth with less of a bite to them this might make a little bit of a mess in your kitchen if you don’t use a big enough bowl so just keep that in mind as well before you set your sauce off to the side give it a little taste and there are a few things you can and should do here first if it doesn’t have enough salt make sure you add more salt remember there’s going to be some salt in the cheese but you do want this to be well balanced on its own then the other thing I’m looking for when I’m tasting it is acidity i’ve got some sugar here because sweet can balance out acidity and depending on how ripe the tomatoes were when they put them in the can or what time of year it is when you buy those tomatoes they’re going to taste different and whenever we think about food we need to think about balance so adding in just a touch of sugar can balance out that acidity to make the perfect tomato sauce time for cheese we’ve got two types of cheese for making our pizza the first is a classic mozzarella this will give our pizza that iconic stretchiness and meltiness and here we have fontina this cheese here melts smoother than mozzarella and will give us this mild but nutty punch of flavor most of the time I do eat the rind when I eat cheese but I don’t think anyone’s going to want to label on their pizza so I’m going to slice these off i’m going to make sure I get as close to the edge as possible on this last one here cuz I don’t want to lose any of our cheese if I still had a hamster I would have given him these as a snack and now I’ll start by grating my mozzarella by the way I almost forgot to mention these just came out of the fridge that’s the only reason the mozzarella is grating as easily as it is right now if this was room temperature it’d be a sloppy mess in my hands so remember that keep your cheese in the fridge if you’ve already watched a bunch of my videos this goes without saying but grate your own cheese do not buy pre-grated cheese especially if you’re making pizza the reason is it’s filled with all kinds of starches that make it harder for the cheese to melt so by grating our own cheese we can make sure that it’s going to melt super super well the one other important note that I have here with my mozzarella is that I’m using low moisture mozzarella and the reason for that is that if you use a mozzarella that has a high moisture content it’s going to make a really watery pizza and do you like watery pizza i’m going to guess probably not i don’t think anybody does as I grate my fontina I’m going to grate it the long way that’s going to give us these nice really long strands of cheese instead of grating it the short way like this so when you think about that cheesiness and that texture on top of the finished pizzas part of that is going to be because we got these nice long strands of cheese attention to detail when it comes to cooking is so so important all these little differences that I’m talking about add up to such large changes in the final product so if you’re really careful and purposeful while doing all these steps your pizza is going to be that much better to stretch our dough we’ll start by tossing some flour down onto the bottom of our cutting board and I’ll grab one of my pre-portioned dough balls remember this has come to room temperature now and as a first step I’m going to press it down but I’m going to try not to pop those air bubbles i have a really cool fun fact that I’ll tell you about those air bubbles later i’ll keep stretching it lightly on the board and then when it looks about this size I’m going to pick it up put it on the back of my hand and then we’re just going to let gravity do all the work i’ll do a light stretch by the edges then spin light stretch if I need to set it down once in a while I can reposition it a little bit we don’t want any one part of this dough getting too thin and see we’re keeping all those awesome air bubbles on there lift stretch then I’ll rotate i’m leaving a little bit of extra dough on the edges there for the crust you can use your knuckles or if you’re being really delicate with it and you’re trying to do sort of finer stretches you can use your fingers just be really really careful and the goal here is to keep moving it around and stretching it until you feel like you’ve got yourself a nice pizza dough i’m just looking for any thin spots that I can see light through for instance you can see here when I lift up that there’s a nice big light spot right there and I don’t want to stretch that part anymore or the crust might rip so I’m avoiding that i’m spinning it around to make a nice even pizza crust it’s okay if your pizza is not in a perfect circle at home the people that are making pizzas in restaurants or places you might get delivery from they’ve been making them for a long time and it’s really really hard sometimes to get it into a perfect circle almost done gentle with the dough work it work it work it this looks good look at all those little air bubbles i’m happy with that this thing here it’s called a pizza peel what we’re going to do is dust the bottom of our pizza peel with some semolina flour if I were to take a microscope and show you this flower really up close basically a bunch of these tiny little beads that are going to help the pizza dough roll around to make sure it doesn’t get stuck anywhere if you’ve ever played that game shuffle board it’s almost exactly that and now you can use whatever method you want to do this but lay that dough over the top of your pizza peel kind of restretch it out to fit the edges but don’t push down or break the crust in any way and the very first thing we do before we do anything else before we put on any topping anything is we give it a little shake that makes sure that you don’t build your entire pizza and then lose it when it gets stuck to your peel before you launch it into the oven now all that’s left is to build it i’ll go down with a little bit of my tomato sauce not too much at the start you want to just sort of spread it around and gauge how much you have and I like to take mine all the way to the edges but not over the edge if there’s any extra large chunks of tomato in there like this that you just don’t want in your pizza you can either eat them or put them back in here you can leave them too but I don’t like any chunks to be too big when you’re building a pizza like this another really important thing to remember is that less is more don’t overload this thing with toppings and especially not cheese you want just enough that there’s coverage but remember it’s all going to melt together when you put it into the oven so don’t go too crazy during this step if it makes you feel better this is our test pizza the first one that you put in the oven is probably going to be the worst one that you do you’re dialing in the temperature of the oven you’re figuring out how much of each topping you should put on there it’s totally okay for your first pizza to be your test pizza one more time before the cheese little shake see how it almost got stuck there that’s why we do the shake it’s very important and now mozzarella cheese i’m not doing very much just a little bit because we have some fontina and because less is more usually if I’m making pizza at home for my family for my friends I’ll make a test pizza before anyone really can notice or pay attention that way you get all the mistakes out of the way before anyone tastes or sees anything mozzarella cheese is on there now I’ll go down with some fontina i’m not going to put as much fontina as I put mozzarella just enough i’m literally talking about putting down a few strands and now this is my added touch that you don’t have to do but I love i’m going to add some olive oil all around the crust this is going to give me a beautiful shiny delicious flavorp packed pizza crust nobody should be wasting the crust on a pizza you should want to eat the crust on a pizza so if you want to get creative throw some everything bagel seasoning on this olive oil do something that makes the crust exciting for you or whoever’s eating this pizza i want this pizza to stay pure so I’m just going to season with a bit of salt all around the edge one more little shake if you need to add some extra semolina flour you don’t want anything getting stuck this is not the time to get anything stuck few more shakes make sure it’s nice and loose on there don’t go too crazy don’t want to lose the pizza oh let me show you my oven before I bake so my oven here is currently at 550° F and what I have here are two really nice pizza stones these are called baking steels and what it is are two heavy steel plates that are working together to almost mimic an at home pizza oven launching a pizza is all about confidence i’m going to open my oven i want to do this quickly so all the heat doesn’t escape i’m gonna shimmy the pizza all the way to the edge of the pizza peel then I’ll bring it to the back of my pizza stone and I’ll go like this since it’s a little hard to see I’ll demonstrate that same movement right here with this plate so pretend the plate’s a pizza what you want to do is first shake it to the edge of the pizza peel so it’s just like that and then if this is the surface that we’re going to bake it on you’ll want to go all the way towards the back and then tilt and once it starts to drop down just shake and then pull at the very end and you should hopefully let your pizza sit right in the center without getting folded over itself or looking all weird but you got to do it with a real pizza and not a plate when I’m making pizza like this I tend to sit in front of the oven the entire time and just watch it especially the first pizza and every single oven is going to be different so I can’t give you a specific time but what I can say is get your oven as hot as it can possibly get you’ll need it to be super hot in order to mimic a pizza oven speaking of which I think this is ready for a spin get under there just give it a spin the reason I keep spinning is because the oven is filled with all different kinds of hot spots so by spinning it around we make sure that every single part of the pizza gets equal love got to be focused though you can’t be on your phone right now not the time all right let’s see how we’re looking for our first pizza we nailed the crust i can tell you that without lifting it up to look at it just listen oh but I should put it on a wire rack so it doesn’t steam itself and get soggy i almost broke one of the basic rules of pizza if you’re going to cut it you can put it on a flat surface but until then keep it raised up keep the air circulating under it all right I’m going to cut it again this is our test pizza so this is when I can iron out all the different difficulties with it before I eat my test pizza that fun fact that I was going to tell you is that those little black spots on there those are called leopard spots on a pizza and that’s why we don’t pop our air bubbles so that you get those nice dark almost black spots that have this crunch this crisp that you can’t get anywhere else or any other way and also they just have the iconic pizza look to them they’re amazing as far as my test pizza goes I think I put a good amount of cheese on there looks like the slice can hold up on its own pretty well then if we fold it it’s got the right sound to it i’m usually not very happy with my test slices but I’m super happy with this there’s one more touch on the pizza that we didn’t do yet that I have to do when I make a pizza i’m going to make the finishing touch which is just simply some melted butter if you want to make it brown butter that’s optional and that’s advanced and you can do that but this is the final touch that I’ll paint around the crust and it adds this really nice final layer of flavor that will make anybody eating this pizza say it’s the best slice they’ve ever had just trust me here i know you probably don’t want to cook or do any more steps here you just want to make and eat pizza you definitely can but that last little kiss of butter on the crust is what really brings this pizza home i like the nuttiness that’s in the brown butter so I’m going to bring this all the way up to that light golden brown color but even if you just take a few seconds to melt a little butter that’s all you need to do here once it foams up like this that’s usually a pretty good sign that I’ve developed some of the flavor that I want to develop so if I leave this here it should be ready to go when we come back to paint it on our real final pizza it’s our second pizza it’s a real pizza now since we’ve moved past our first pizza there are no more excuses i’ll do this one faster and more at a normal pacing which may make it even easier to understand to prepare the dough I’m twisting and then stretching each time using the back side of my hand so that I don’t accidentally push through the dough and remember always be looking at the dough to make sure you’re not pulling too far in any specific area the real key here is to work smarter not harder let gravity do all the work and let technique just guide the dough to where it needs to be once I feel pretty good about my dough I’m going to lay it out try to make sure it looks as much like a circle as you can possibly get but again don’t be upset if it’s not a circle that’s okay then I’ll grab my pizza peel and hit it with that semolina flour and then we’ll lift up and pull it right over the top remember here we just want to stretch it out so that it sort of takes up the shape that we want it to bake at and then before anything quick shake first layer down your sauce i never mentioned this before but you can even make this sauce with just tomatoes and a tiny touch of salt doesn’t need all these extra herbs and spices in it either don’t worry about not having all the right ingredients it’s one of the easiest and most basic things you can make anywhere in the world cuz at the end of the day there are really only just a few ingredients so look my sauce is spread out all nice here right up to the edge but not over it then down with my mozzarella cheese not too much you should still see some tomato sauce through it and it’s a mistake I made early on when I was making pizzas where I would put way too much cheese cuz I thought I had to cover everything and that could not be further from the truth you need so much less cheese than you actually think you do once we have our mozzarella we’ll add some fontina just a couple strands lay it all around the pizza think I had pretty much the perfect amount of cheese last time so I’m not really changing the amount of cheese that I put down quick shake make sure nothing is stuck and I’ll paint my brush with olive oil and go all around those edges and now this one’s going to be even better because we have all that delicious butter to work with after try not to let that oil leak off the edges as you make this try to keep it all in the pizza one more shake and let’s toss it in the oven this time I’m going to toss it on that top one so that you can see it much easier get to the back start to lightly shake it once it grips 3 2 1 pull the only difficult thing about making pizzas like this at home is there’s no true replacement for that beautiful classic wood-fired pizza oven that you might see in a nice restaurant that gives tons and tons of flavor and also gets up to ridiculously high temperatures but this for me is a close second and this is the closest that I’ve been able to get at home in terms of replicating the perfect pizza quickly now with my new pizza here which you can see is a little bit of a longer shape this way than I wanted it to be and that’s because of the way that I pulled it out when I dropped it in there but that’s not going to change anything about the pizza that’s just me being extra picky i’ll take some of my beautiful brown butter and I’ll paint it over the edge of the crust to get that nice golden shine see how right away that crust already looks a lot better than our first one the only thing I think I really need to work on now which I believe I can nail in the third and final pizza is the shape yeah this is a pretty darn perfect pizza it’s going to be hard to beat this look at that beautiful cross-section that we’ve gotten with the little air pockets in there that’s one of the several results of waiting so long for it to ferment in the fridge and look at the bottom of the crust on this now like I said something about the second pizza is always going to be better than the first you got those nice black speckled spots and I’m sure even the sound on this one will be better listen that was even better i’m not just saying that it was like three times better there’s a better balance of cheese the crust is perfect i can taste the brown butter on the crust there’s just enough oil on there but not too much i’m not going to show you the whole process of making the third and final pizza i am going to show you that you can just continue getting better as you continue to make them [Music] there it is there’s my third pizza you guys vote in the comments below if that’s the best looking one or if one of the other two were better fun fact I’m actually an Italian citizen and dare I say this pizza is better than what you can get in Italy i probably shouldn’t say that i hope none of you watching are Italian [Music]