No-Knead Pizza Crust

Do yourself a favor: give homemade pizza another go (using our recipe of course). I know it can be frustrating when your pizzas don't look like those your cool friends got at that fancy Italian pizzeria in Brooklyn, but that's about to change. With this recipe you'll be able to make pizzas that are just as good, and make them vegan if you so choose. This technique makes the whole ordeal so much less of an ordeal that I want to eat the stuff every day! The recipe below is from Jim Lahey's book My Pizza, which along with My Bread is one of our favorite cookbooks. Available at fine bookstores everywhere.

Classic tomato pie

The dough

3 3/4 cups all-purpose or bread flour (whole wheat, white or a mixture)

1/4 teaspoon yeast

1 teaspoon salt (or less)

1 1/2 cups cool water

Preparation

Thoroughly blend all the dry ingredients in a large bowl.

Add the water and mix gently but thoroughly until all the flour is incorporated. If there is some flour left in the bowl, add more water, a few tablespoons at a time, until the dough is sticky to the touch. The dough needs to be fairly wet in order to rise properly.

Cover the bowl with plastic wrap or a damp towel and let it rise for 12-18 hours, until it has doubled in size and looks bubbly on the surface.

Flour your work surface and scrape out the dough; it should look stringy (glutinous) and wet.
You next need to shape the dough. With well-floured hands, fold the edges of the dough in towards the center four times - top, bottom, left, right - in whatever order you like. Then flip the dough over so that the seam side is down, and mould it into a nice round shape. If the mound is sticky, add another sprinkling of flour.

Let the dough rise for 1/2 an hour covered with a tea towel, then use a food chopper or knife to divide the mound into 4 equal parts for use on round pizza pans or stones. If you're using a large rectangular pan, 2 equal parts will fill 2 pans. Flour your hands and shape the parts into balls, then let them rise again for another 1/2 hour, until they have doubled in size. If you can poke the dough and it rebounds immediately, let it rise another 15 minutes. If you poke it and it retains a 1/4 inch depression, it is ready to use.

Cooking with a pizza stone

Things you'll need:

- a pizza stone, the thicker the better

- a pizza peel (those large wooden spatulas professionals use, but with a short handle)

- flour and cornmeal

If you're using a pizza stone (a technique we highly recommend), set the racks in your oven so that the stone is closer to the top than the bottom, but not right at the top. Put the stone in the oven and preheat the oven on bake at the highest temperature it can muster. You should start preheating the oven once you've shaped the dough, or around an hour before you intend to cook the pizzas. Ten minutes before you're ready to cook them, switch the oven to broil; this will super-heat the stone and should give your pizzas a nice crispy crust.

When the stone is ready, flour your pizza peel well and add a generous sprinkling of cornmeal (this is optional, but it makes sliding the dough off the peel much easier). It is important to flour your peel well or else the dough will stick to it and then this becomes an ordeal again. 

Take one ball of dough - add more flour to it if it's sticky - and stretch it. One of the best techniques for stretching dough is called 'knuckling': stretch the dough a bit with your hands until it is flat (be gentle!) then lift it on top of your clenched fists and stretch it gently with your knuckles. You can also stretch the dough by pulling and stretching it with your hands on the floured work surface. Try to stretch the dough immediately before you use it so that it retains its shape and moisture. And try to stretch it as evenly as possible, until it is very thin and about 10-12 inches across. Once the dough is shaped and is well-floured, lay it on the peel - you're ready for toppings!

The toppings are up to you (we'll give you some suggestions later). Once you have your pizza all dressed it's ready to cook. Use some good kitchen gloves to take the pizza stone out of the oven (it will be very hot). You can leave the stone in the oven but it makes this next step harder. Gently jerk the pizza peel forward and backwards to make sure that your pizza can move freely. If it can't, lift the edges of the dough and add more flour. Once you're ready, transfer the pizza with jerking motions onto the hot stone. This step is tricky because once the dough touches the stone it cannot be moved. Replace the stone in the oven and switch the oven to bake again.

The cooking time for your oven will vary depending on if you have a gas or electric appliance, how thick your pizza stone is and a dozen other factors like whether you and your oven have a friendly relationship (or perhaps something more?) Our oven is old, it's electric and it takes a while to heat up, and our pizza stone is about 1/2 thick. We bake our pizza for 7-10 minutes, then switch the oven to broil and cook the pizza until the crust is just this side of charred on top, and the ingredients are bubbling (usually only two or three minutes). Gas ovens often take less time to cook a pizza, so you'll have to do a bit of experimenting. Keep a close eye on, and detailed notes about, your first few pizzas and I'm sure they'll turn out great.

Cooking with a metal pan

Whatever the shape of your pan, start by oiling it generously - until you can trace lines in the oil with your finger, but don't add so much that you fry your pizza. If you're using a round pan, shape the dough as described in the directions for cooking with a pizza stone, above, but instead of placing the dough on the pizza peel, just stretch it and place it on the oiled pan. If you're using a rectangular pan, take one of your two pizza dough balls and stretch it to approximately the length of the pan. Lay it down on the pan, then gently stretch it to fill the pan width-wise. You will likely have to bake the pizza for a bit longer than if you were using a pizza stone, probably 10-15 minutes, then finish it with a couple minutes on broil. You can tell the dough is done when it pulls away from the edges of the pan and looks toasty. 

No-Knead Bread

This is hands-down the best bread I've ever had. The recipe here is adapted from Jim Lahey's excellent book My Bread. His technique works so well that we never buy bread anymore - we just bake it! There are two versions of this bread, depending on how long you're willing to let it rise. The slow rise version uses less yeast, and takes 12-16 hours to rise, but the added fermentation time makes the bread taste more complex. The quick version only takes four hours to rise, but it uses a heck of a lot more yeast. 
Note: We have modified the bread recipe for a smaller loaf with less salt. No-Knead Bread 2.0 is healthier and doesn't end up moldy before you can eat all of it. We've also improved the techniques below.

Ingredients

No-Knead Bread 2.0
3 3/4 cups all-purpose or bread flour
1 tsp salt (or less)
1/4 tsp yeast
1 3/4 cups cool water

No-Knead Bread: Slow rise

6 cups all-purpose or bread flour 

2 1/2 tsp. salt 

1 tsp. yeast

3 cups water

Quick rise

6 cups all-purpose or bread flour

1 tbs. salt

1 1/2 tbsp. yeast

3 cups water

Preparation

1. Mix all dry ingredients together in a large bowl. You can use white or whole wheat flour, or a combination depending on how you like it. The quantity of salt you add affects the crispiness of the crust, but you can use less.

2. Add the water and mix until all of the flour is absorbed. You don't need to knead the bread, just mix and let it be. If there is extra flour in the bowl, add more water a few tablespoons at a time until the loaf is sticky.

3. If you're attempting the slow rise dough, cover your bowl with plastic wrap to keep it from drying out. Let the dough rest for 12-16 hours, or until it has doubled in volume. For the quick rise, do the same but let it rest for 4 hours.

4. Once the dough has risen, scrape it out of the bowl onto a well-floured surface, like a silicone mat or parchment paper. At this point you can either divide the loaf into two, form it into a neat shape (like baguettes, buns, pretzels), or keep it as one large boule. These instructions are for an undivided loaf:
With well-floured hands, shape the dough by folding the edges in towards the center four times (top, bottom, left, right or some variation thereof). Next, flip the loaf over so that the seam you've created is on the bottom, and shape the dough into a round ball with your hands. If the dough is sticky, sprinkle a bit more flour on it. Cover the dough with a tea towel and let it rest for 1 to 2 hours, until it has doubled in volume. If, when you poke the dough, it springs back immediately, let it rest another 15 minutes. If your finger leaves a 1/4" deep indent, the dough is ready to bake.
Note: If you would like your bread to have something interesting on the outside like wheat bran, cornmeal, flax, poppy seeds  sesame seeds etc., you can either sprinkle those ingredients on now (after you have shaped the loaf), gently lifting it and sprinkling underneath, or you can wait 30 minutes (my approach) until the bread has moistened again and then add them. 

Bread 2.0: smothered in wheat bran!

5. Preheat your oven to 475 degrees, 40 minutes before the end of the dough's second rise. If you're baking the bread in a French or Dutch oven (the best method), put your vessel in the oven now, with the lid on (make sure the handle is heat-proof), so that it can preheat. If you don't do this now, you might crack your vessel by putting it into the already-hot oven. If you're using bread pans or a baking sheet (use parchment paper underneath), you can put a shallow heat-proof container of water into the oven now, to rest underneath your bread. This will create steam when the bread is cooking, which will condense on the surface of the cold dough, ultimately helping the crust not to burn, but keeping it crispy. Cooking your bread in a French oven accomplishes a similar thing, but keeps the steam contained in the vessel, and results in a better bread.

6. Once the oven is preheated and the dough has rested, remove your cooking vessel from the oven. Make sure the dough is well-floured and is not stuck to the surface it's resting on.  Once you're ready, flip the dough over and into your cooking vessel (gently!). Be careful because that sucker will be hot. Replace the lid and put the vessel back in the oven.

7. Bake your bread for 30 minutes with the lid on. Then take the lid off and bake it for another 25-30 minutes. Removing the lid part way is essential for getting a nice crust. 

8. Once it's cooked, tip the bread out of the pot and onto a cooling rack. You should hear crackling noises at this point (called 'singing'), which means the bread is cooling. You should leave the bread for around an hour to cool. If you cut the loaf too soon, you'll halt the last stage of the cooking process and you can ruin the consistency of your baby.

9. Enjoy! Store your bread in a container, or in the (cooled) French oven itself, just not in the fridge or it will go stale faster.