The Pizza Lab: Bringing New York Style Pizza Sauce Home

The key to great NY-style sauce is the balance between sweetness, acidity, heat, with a definite herbal backbone and a texture that's thin enough enough to spread, but thick enough to keep your pizza from turning soggy during the de rigeur fold-and-carry.

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54 Comments | Posted by J. Kenji López-Alt, October 7, 2010 at 2:00 PM
Tagged: cooking, homemade pizza, Pizza Lab, sauce, The Food Lab, The Pizza Lab, tomato

The Pizza Lab: How Long Should I Let My Dough Cold Ferment?

Fermentation is a fascinating thing. It's what gives a great pizza crust (and all yeast-leavened breads, for that matter) its light, airy structure and distinctive complex, slightly sour taste. But what's the best way to ferment dough? This week, I try to find out.

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87 Comments | Posted by J. Kenji López-Alt, September 23, 2010 at 3:30 PM
Tagged: cooking, crust, dough, homemade pizza, Pizza Lab, The Food Lab, The Pizza Lab, yeast

The Pizza Lab: Bringing Neapolitan Pizza Home (aka 'The Skillet-Broiler Method')

Perfect Neapolitan pizza at home is a myth. It's a golden ring that can be strived for but never quite achieved. So where does that leave the rest of us home cooks? The ones who want to throw together a quick, really good pizza that doesn't require jury-rigging the oven? Lucky for us, really-really-good-but-not-quite-authentic-Neapolitan-pizza is not an unattainable goal. All you need is a skillet and your oven's broiler.

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84 Comments | Posted by J. Kenji López-Alt, September 9, 2010 at 5:00 PM
Tagged: cooking, homemade pizza, Pizza Lab, The Food Lab, The Pizza Lab

How to Grill Pizza Indoors

If you've got a backyard or deck and a grill, grilling pizzas is a natural in the summer. After lighting up the grill, hot, crisp-chewy, perfectly blistered crust is just a few minutes away. But what if you, like me, recently moved from a decked-out Brooklyn apartment to a Manhattan high rise with no outdoor space? The answer seems obvious: Grill the pizza indoors on a grill pan.

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27 Comments | Posted by J. Kenji López-Alt, June 29, 2010 at 4:00 PM
Tagged: cooking, galleries, grilled pizza, homemade pizza, how-tos

Flavorful Toppings for a Robust Sourdough Crust

Having had great success with dough recipes from Peter Reinhart's American Pie, I expected his sourdough crust to be as tangy and aromatic as the best examples of this superior variety of bread. My toppings would have to be equally assertive and delicious to create balanced and harmonious pizza. Here's what I used....

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8 Comments | Posted by Aaron Mattis, June 26, 2010 at 11:00 AM
Tagged: cooking, homemade pizza, ingredients, sourdough crust, topping combos, toppings

Top This: 'Muffuletta' Pizza

You know what's a frickin' awesome pizza topping? Leftover olive salad mix from a muffuletta I made a couple weeks ago. Delicious. Get the recipe here!

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22 Comments | Posted by J. Kenji López-Alt, June 25, 2010 at 3:00 PM
Tagged: cooking, giardiniera, ingredients, muffuletta, olives, Top This, toppings

Basil on a Pizza: Before or After Baking?

Dom DeMarco scissoring fresh basil onto a pizza at Di Fara. And, yes, we know that pizza is burned! [Photograph: Adam Kuban] Pizzablogger's informative email about Neapolitan basil got us at Slice HQ thinking about the many ways basil can be added to a pie. Do you like basil added before the pie goes in the oven so its flavor mingles with that of the sauce or added after the pie comes out of the oven so it doesn't wilt? And how do you like 'dem leaves—whole or cut into a chiffonade?...

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35 Comments | Posted by Aaron Mattis, June 22, 2010 at 5:50 PM
Tagged: basil, cooking, ingredients, open threads

How to Make Thin-Crust Focaccia Pizza

Many Slice'rs, myself included, use various pizza hacks to approximate the heat of a wood oven in a standard gas or electric home oven. The other night I wanted to try something different. I wondered what would happen if I accepted the limitations of my home oven instead of trying to overcome them.

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33 Comments | Posted by Aaron Mattis, June 19, 2010 at 10:00 AM
Tagged: cooking, focaccia pizza, homemade pizza

Broiled No-Knead Pizza (No-Knead Pizza 102)

Because these pizzas are so thin, it's possible to overcome the limitations of a home oven and generate extreme heat long enough to bake the pie to blistery perfection. I find that the easiest and safest way to achieve this level of heat is Heston Blumenthal's broiler method. Blumenthal superheats a cast iron skillet, inverts it, places the pie on the underside of the skillet, and slides it under the broiler to cook the pizza with bidirectional heat.

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24 Comments | Posted by Aaron Mattis, June 16, 2010 at 1:45 PM
Tagged: cooking, galleries, homemade pizza, how-tos, Jim Lahey, no-knead pizza dough, the broiler method

How to Make No-Knead Pizza Dough (No-Knead Pizza 101)

The best and worst thing about this dough is that it's wet and sticky: Water develops the gluten proteins in the flour, causing the dough to stretch beautifully when the yeast produces a high volume of gas in the heat of the oven. It's undeniably hard to roll out, but considering that rolling out the dough is the only difficult step in the entire process, this strikes me as an eminently fair trade-off.

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37 Comments | Posted by Aaron Mattis, June 10, 2010 at 11:10 AM
Tagged: cooking, dough, galleries, homemade pizza, how-tos, Jim Lahey, no-knead pizza dough