♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - You know, everybody's wrong about pizza, including me.

The reason is that the dough is very hard to stretch out.

So we've come up with a recipe that borrows some techniques from the Middle East and Greece to make a dough that you can actually roll out properly and shape.

Now, the first thing we do with that is to make a fresh cherry tomato pizza.

Then we do an arrabbiata-style sort of slab pizza.

And finally, we do a tarte flambée.

That means onions and bacon and a little crème fraîche.

So please stay tuned as we go into the mysteries of pizza dough and solve them so everybody at home can stretch out pizza and make pizza any night of the week.

- Funding for this series was provided by the following.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - So this is a segment, a recipe, about, how do you make a pizza dough you can actually shape and get into the oven without destroying it?

So here's the problem.

So you get some, some dough, and first of all, it's too cold.

And one thing we do know, it's gotta be room temperature, it's gotta be, like, 75 degrees.

'Cause when it's cold, it's gonna retract.

In any case, this is the standard pizza dough.

And now we're going to, you know, let gravity do the work, et cetera, et cetera.

But when you go to stretch it out, it's gonna start to come back like that.

And so you end up overworking the dough.

And that means when you actually get it into your pizza oven, you're gonna end up with a really tough pizza.

That's the problem.

So the, the solution is based on flatbreads.

You know, in the Middle East, also in Crete, when we've been traveling, we noticed that a lot of flatbreads are made with yogurt and also olive oil.

So we wondered, what would happen if we did that for a pizza dough, because we've noticed those flatbreads are really easy to work with.

The dough's really extensible.

So that's what we did.

We're gonna start with the dry ingredients, which is flour, yeast, sugar, and salt.

We're just gonna mix that up.

So now we have warm water, a little yogurt, some oil.

Then we're slowly gonna add it to the dry ingredients.

So the question is, why would yogurt and olive oil, why would that help making a dough that's extensible, that is easy to work with without pulling back?

My theory is the reverse creaming you see in some cake recipes, which means that I think what's happening is, the yogurt is coating the proteins in the flour, and when those proteins come together, they form gluten.

I think it just makes them harder to get together to create that web-like network.

So I think that is really what's going on here-- it's not the fat.

We're gonna let this knead for about seven or eight minutes.

It's gonna have to be worked a fair amount.

Scrape down the sides.

Okay, we'll let that rise room temperature.

Make sure it's not 60 degrees in your kitchen.

It's over 70.

We'll let this rise for about an hour and a half.

Nicely risen.

Okay, so we're going to cut this into four pieces.

What we want to do is create four balls, fairly taut ones.

So I'm just going to bring in the sides, turn it over.

I cup it, I'm bringing sides together underneath.

And then I'm just going to roll it.

Drag it.

Okay, we're going to let this sit covered for at least half an hour or so.

This dough is so easy to work with, and that's the point of this exercise, that you could probably go ahead and actually shape them into small pizzas right away, but we'll let them sit.

Dough's rested, I'm rested.

So this is a really super-simple topping.

Cherry tomatoes cut in half.

Teaspoon of salt.

So... First rule is, for any kind of pizza, make sure the dough is at room temperature.

Now, this is, I know this is stupid.

You're gonna immediately email me and tell me what an idiot I am.

But this dough is so soft and extensible, you could actually use a rolling pin for this.

Lightly use a rolling pin.

(chuckles) But you can do that.

And I think, unless, unless you're very skilled at pizza, which some of you probably are, this is actually gonna be easier for you.

You can let gravity do some of the work, as well.

There you go.

Now, normally, when I would be doing this in my younger days, the dough would be constantly coming back.

I'd have to fight with it and I'd overwork it.

So what do you put on a pizza peel if you don't want it to stick?

This is semolina flour.

Semolina is a very high durum wheat flour, which means it's very hard.

It's almost little, tiny, tiny, tiny, little balls, which makes it super-good at getting something to slide off a surface.

Okay, so we have these.

This is fresh mozzarella.

In Naples, when they make their three types of pizzas, they use fresh buffalo mozzarella.

It can actually add water.

And I find those pizzas pretty watery.

The center of the crust is a little soggy, but the flavor is so much better.

And half the parmesan.

Okay, super-hot oven.

We have a baking steel on the top rack.

Hey, I can get a job making pizzas.

(chuckles) It doesn't look bad at all.

♪ ♪ And now I get to eat one.

Mm, this crust is super-thin and super-crispy.

I need just one more bite to make sure this is okay for you guys.

If you want a pizza dough recipe that's going to work every time, and you can actually stretch it out and get it on the peel and get it in the oven, this is the one for you.

Nice thin crust, nice tender outside crust, good chew in it, good crispness.

And it's something that anybody can make.

♪ ♪ - So how do you turn your home kitchen into a pizza oven?

I've got a little advice for you.

♪ ♪ You go to a pizzeria, especially in Italy, you're going to see all those beautiful, wood-fired ovens.

Those ovens are super-hot, sometimes up to 900 degrees.

So they'll cook a pizza in about 90 seconds.

So how do you do that at home?

Well, first of all, most ovens are going to go up to 500 degrees.

So you want to set your oven high and make sure that you preheat it all the way.

Secondly is the equipment that you use.

We love working with a baking steel here at Milk Street.

These are really great because you put them in the oven when you preheat, and it will give you the same exact result as if you had a wood-fired oven with that ceramic or stone floor.

It gets the bottom crusts very, very crispy and the top will cook evenly, as well.

And they're very fast.

Most pizzas in a 500-degree oven will cook between eight and ten minutes.

There's also baking stones, which, if you do a lot of bread baking, they're a great thing to have.

These also conduct heat really, really well.

You slide a pizza right on this and you'll get a nice crisp crust.

It seals in that dough the minute it touches, and it'll get nice and bubbly and brown on top, as well.

But what if you don't have either one of these?

Well, we've got another solution for you.

And that's a simple sheet pan.

We have these great just industrial sheet pans.

Make sure they're somewhat heavy-- don't use a cookie sheet for this-- and flip it over.

You could preheat these in the oven just like a pizza steel or stone at 500 degrees.

So we wanted to compare how these three pieces of equipment made a perfectly crispy brown crust.

So the first thing we did was to preheat them all in a 500-degree oven.

We took a laser thermometer and measured the surface temperature of each one of the surfaces.

They were really pretty close, within 30 degrees of each other.

The stone actually, surprisingly, was the hottest.

It registered about 460, the steel was 450, and the baking pan was about 430 degrees.

Then we made the same exact pizza using a pound of dough, a cup of tomato sauce, and a half-a-cup of cheese, and baked them all exactly the same time on every service, for eight minutes.

Of course, the baking steel was beautifully crisp on the bottom.

It was nicely cooked all the way through, a little crunchy around the edges.

Baking stone also made a nice, nice crisp-crust pizza on the bottom.

Wasn't quite as crispy or brown as the one we cooked on the steel, but it was a delicious pizza.

The sheet pan worked very well, except it was not quite as brown and crisp on the bottom.

So we cut it apart, we took a look at the bottom there.

It was set and it was beginning to brown, but it didn't rival the steel.

So we took about half that pizza and slid it back into the oven onto the upturned baking sheet to see if we could get it browner.

Sure enough, a couple more minutes made the difference.

It started to brown and crisp on the bottom.

So if you're going to use any one of these pieces of equipment, heat your oven very, very hot.

And if you're using an overturned baking sheet, cook it a little longer.

Your pizza will take maybe ten to 12 minutes instead of eight to ten, but you'll get a nice, crisp bottom crust regardless.

So there are other ways to get a delicious crispy pizza in the oven.

I've got a great recipe that doesn't rely on any of this.

♪ ♪ If you're dying to make pizza at home and you don't have all that special equipment and you don't have a wood-burning pizza oven in your backyard, have no fear.

I've got a great recipe for you.

All you need is a mixer, a sheet pan, and a hot oven.

This is our arrabbiata slab pizza.

So I poured about three tablespoons of olive oil onto the sheet pan, and now I'm gonna take a couple tablespoons of semolina flour.

This will dry up when the pizza bakes and it will stick to the bottom of the crust and give it a little extra crunch.

So now on to the dough.

We're using bread flour here, it's a high-protein flour.

We need that for the structure, a little more gluten and protein in there, so that it will hold the pizza up as it rises.

And then we're gonna add more of that semolina, sugar, salt, and instant yeast.

And we use instant yeast here-- this is pretty much almost all you can find now in the grocery store.

But instant yeast does not require activation.

So I just want to mix that up for a few seconds with the dough hook.

While that's happening, I've got two cups of water, and I want to add a couple of tablespoons of olive oil to that.

So while the mixer's on low, I'm just going to slowly drizzle in the water and oil mixture, and let that go for just a minute or two until that dough comes together.

And then I'll turn the mixer up to medium.

I want to mix this until the dough is pulling away from the sides of the bowl.

This is a pretty wet dough.

Now, hydration.

This is a higher-hydration dough.

Now, what does that mean?

Hydration is the ratio of weight between water and flour.

This particular dough is 78%.

And some of our focaccia, our favorite focaccia, actually, is a 90% hydration.

So it's a very loose, almost liquid batter that you pour into the pan.

So you can see on the sides of the bowl here that the dough is clinging to itself around the dough hook and pulling off the sides of the bowl.

So this is ready to remove.

I'm gonna pour it out onto the sheet.

Nice greased spatula is much more helpful than your fingers in this case.

So now what we'll do, just for the first rising-- the first proofing, they call it-- drizzle about a tablespoon of oil over the top of the dough, give it a little brush, and then we'll cover it with a sheet of plastic wrap and just let it calm down, relax, spread out a little bit.

That takes about 30 minutes.

So after about 30 minutes, you can see that yeast has gone to work, it's started to puff up a little bit.

The dough is relaxed.

Now I'm gonna wet my fingers and just gently coax it out into the corners of the pan.

You don't really need to knock the air out of it here.

Just gently use your fingers and press it.

Now it needs another 30 minutes, and we'll come back to it and do a final pressing out of the dough.

All right, the final rise here, you can see that we're not all the way out completely to the edges of the pan.

So I'm just gonna give it a little coax.

But look at all that beautiful bubbling in there.

We don't want to knock any of that air out because it'll give it that nice squishy texture.

So just out here on the edges, just give it a little final push.

So this will rest for about 20, 25 minutes.

In the meantime, I'll make a quick sauce and we'll get ready to throw this pizza in the oven.

So the sauce that works perfectly, we found, if we cook some crushed tomatoes, a little water, garlic, and chili flake, and cook it down, just to concentrate the flavor, but left it pretty loose, that was just right.

So this is how we make it.

About three tablespoons of oil into a saucepan, and I'm gonna add the garlic here and get that sizzling a little bit.

(pan sizzling) I'm gonna add red chili flakes.

And we're just gonna cook this briefly until that garlic starts to brown around the edges.

This is a small can of crushed tomatoes.

(pan sizzling) Bubbling up here.

A little salt and pepper, half-teaspoon of each.

And then some water-- I want to thin this out, let it simmer, and then let it cook down.

It will concentrate the flavor of the garlic, the chilies, and the tomatoes, and it'll make a beautiful pizza sauce.

I preheated the oven, by the way, to 500 degrees, high as it will go, and put the rack in the lower middle position.

The lower this pizza is in the oven, the crispier edges you're gonna get out of it.

So bake low.

Now, this beautiful dough has filled the pan.

It's nice and bubbly already, and you can see the corners.

Our sauce took about 15 minutes to cook down.

Took it off the heat and just let it cool.

That is first-- just spread it lightly.

Don't press down on the dough.

And spread it out to about a half an inch away from the edge.

We really loved, with this spicy, spicy sauce, the flavor of fontina cheese.

It has a really buttery, nice flavor, and it definitely has more flavor than plain mozzarella.

The other thing about this pizza, you don't want to put a lot of really heavy fillings on top, because you don't want to inhibit the rise of that crust.

It's that beautiful, spongy, focaccia-like crust that we're looking for.

Pecorino also is a little bit sharper than parmesan.

It's a nice, salty, kind of briny flavor.

It's great with the buttery fontina.

Just a few thin slices of pepperoni on here.

That looks good, and then finally, I love pepperoncini on a pizza.

This is a nice briny pop.

They're not really spicy, they're more vinegary.

And these will crisp up, actually, in the oven, but they still retain that vinegary flavor.

This will bake for about 25 minutes.

It will rise really high, get very deep, golden brown.

Make sure you bake it long enough so that the dough in the center bakes all the way through.

That's a beautiful pie.

Took it out of the oven, let it cool for a few minutes.

Now I want to slice into this.

Run your knife around the edges there, make sure that it's not sticking to the sides.

But I can hear that nice crispy crust.

Nice and puffy, like a focaccia.

Crispy around the edges.

Bottom is nice and golden brown and crisp.

So that is a great thick slab pizza.

So no need to avoid making pizza at home.

Don't be afraid-- it's really very easy, especially with a recipe like this.

You don't need fancy equipment.

You just need a super-hot oven, a good heavy sheet pan, and a great recipe.

♪ ♪ - For me, pizza is for sharing, and I've tried pizzas all over the world.

And Brazilian pizza is the best.

- (speaking Portuguese) - Mm, I love it.

- Pizza is the best form of bread.

And it, it fits in almost every moment.

We have a joke here that in Brazil, we put ketchup on it, and we kill some traditional families in, in Italy every time we do it.

- We tend to experiment a lot.

And I feel like the Italians, they do it more classic.

- Of course, Italians just came up with the, with the idea, but we got a lot of different kinds of pizza, not just the Italian one.

- Actually, I prefer Domino's, but this one is, like, second place, for sure.

♪ ♪ - And now I have a French version of "pizza."

This is tarte flambée or flammekueche.

It is a all-sauce flatbread from the northeast region of France, and it's typically topped with a soft spreadable cheese called fromage blanc, crispy, smoky bacon, and thin-sliced onions that are cooked until they're sweet and soft.

So the base of that is this really simple dough.

I'm gonna make that for you right now.

We have flour, a little bit of sugar, some salt, and yeast.

So I'm just gonna mix that up for a couple of seconds to incorporate it.

And then I'm gonna add a little bit of olive oil and some water.

And I'm gonna turn this to medium and let it go for about four or five minutes, scraping the bowl occasionally.

You're gonna get a really soft kind of sticky dough, but it's gonna pull away from the sides of the bowl.

(whirring) So this is ready.

This is not gonna be a smooth dough, and it's gonna be very soft and sticky.

As it sits, it's gonna gain structure, so it will be fine.

Push it into the center of the bowl.

It's gonna double in size, and you'll see that it'll have a little more structure.

It's still gonna be pretty sticky.

So now that our dough is rising, we're gonna prepare all of the toppings.

I've got some beautiful smoky bacon here, and we're gonna cook that for about five or six minutes until it's nice and crispy.

(sizzling) I'm gonna pull this out with a slotted spoon and put it on a paper towel to drain.

So now this bacon fat is the perfect thing to cook our onions in, but we only need about a tablespoon.

Okay, so to our bacon fat, I'm gonna add our onions.

(pan sizzling) We want to cook these until they're kind of soft and just starting to brown.

You don't want to caramelize them, because they're going to a really hot oven, and then they could burn.

(sizzling) So while I'm waiting for those onions to cook down, I'm going to do the last part of the topping.

And we are using crème fraîche here.

Fromage blanc is the cheese you normally would use for this particular tarte, but it's harder to find.

If you can find it, it's a one-for-one substitution, but we do love crème fraîche for this.

To this, I'm going to add a little bit of salt, some black pepper, and a little bit of nutmeg.

So I'm just gonna finish up the onions, and we'll be ready to put this together.

♪ ♪ Okay, so our dough has doubled in size, and now we're ready to make our flatbread.

I'm really gonna flour the counter pretty well.

This is still pretty sticky.

I'll tell you, the other great thing about this dough is, it does not need to rise twice.

This one is very easy.

I'm gonna use my bench scraper to cut that in half.

So we don't even need a rolling pin for this.

I'm just gonna press it into about a 12-by-five-inch oval.

And then when I get it there, I have oiled a baking sheet, put down a piece of parchment, and oiled it again.

That little bit of olive oil is gonna help get a nice brown crust on the bottom of your flatbread.

So I'm gonna put this on the sheet.

We want these to be about 14 inches long.

So once they're on the sheet, you can kind of move them around a little.

If they start to shrink back, it's okay.

Once you put the topping on, you can move them a little bit more and make them a little bit bigger if you want, so don't worry about it too much.

That's the great thing about this, nothing has to be perfect-- it's my kind of recipe.

The other thing I want to mention is, about a half-an-hour before you're ready to work with your dough, you want to turn your oven on to 450 degrees with a rack in the upper middle position.

So these look pretty good.

We're gonna use half of our crème fraîche mixture and we're gonna spread it about a half an inch from the edge.

And then we're gonna use half of our onions.

Some recipes, when you get them, you're not really sure-- this was such a hit.

Every time we made this, every drop of it was gone in less than ten minutes.

And then our crispy bacon.

Okay, so these are ready for the oven.

They take about 18 to 20 minutes to cook until the edges are nice and brown.

You do want to turn the pan halfway through.

So let's bake these off.

So these have cooled for ten or 15 minutes and they are ready to serve.

I'm just gonna put them on a cutting board and sprinkle them with some parsley.

So I think this is an any-time-of-day flatbread.

You could cut these in half, serve them for breakfast, serve them with a nice salad for lunch or dinner.

Or you can cut them in smaller slices, which is something I really like to do, as a delicious appetizer.

If you have people over with something sparkly to drink, I think this is a great thing to serve.

This combination is unbelievable.

So the next time you're having a pizza party, think outside the box: tarte flambée, smoky bacon, sweet onions, a little bit of tangy crème fraîche.

You can get this recipe and all the recipes from this season of Milk Street at MilkStreetTV.com.

♪ ♪ (bell ringing) ♪ ♪ - (speaking Italian): (people talking in background) - Thank you!

- Thank you!

- Oh, my goodness.

- (speaking Italian): ♪ ♪ - Recipes and episodes from this season of Milk Street are available at MilkStreetTV.com, along with shopping lists, printer-ready recipes, and step-by-step videos.

Access our content anytime to change the way you cook.

- The new Milk Street Cookbook is now available and includes every recipe from our TV show.

From Vietnamese chicken salad and tiramisu to easy-stretch pizza dough and Austrian apple strudel, the new Milk Street Cookbook offers bolder, fresher, simpler recipes.

Order your copy of the Milk Street Cookbook for $29.95, 40% less than the cover price.

Call 855-MILK-177 or order online.

- Funding for this series was provided by the following.

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