It's time for another round of The Food Lab. Got a suggestion for an upcoming topic? Email Kenji here, and he'll do his best to answer your queries in a future post. [Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt] Just as the jocks like to stick together and nerds travel in packs, obsessives bordering on the psychotic (like me) seek out the acquaintance of others like themselves, in a manner that some say borders on the, well, the obsessive. The first time I heard that the mineral content of water might have an effect on the properties of bread dough was about eight... More

Roberto Caporuscio, one of the partners-pizzaiolos at Kesté Pizza & Vino in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, led a Neapolitan pizza-making class last night. Before he began punching dough balls and spreading tomato sauce, he went over the basics. Naples is a couple hours south of Rome, and "the pizza from there is not better, it's just different." He gave us a little history on the famous Naples-originating Margherita pizza, which we were about to bake in the Kesté oven cranked up to 950°F. A baker named Rafaele Esposito whipped up the first pizza Margherita in 1889 to welcome the Queen... More

Jim Lahey playing with his dough at Co. If the lines at Co. remain at WTF? status, go home and make your own no-knead pizza dough with Jim Lahey's recipe. There's nothing sneaky about his approach: just the expected yeast, salt, flour, and water. Back in December, we told you about a no-knead dough recipe from Chef John of the blog Food Wishes. His version is slightly busier than Lahey's, with additional ingredients like sugar, olive oil, wheat flour, and cornmeal.... More

I don't know whether to thank you or throttle you, Peter Reinhart. See, your Neapolitan pizza dough recipe rocks. Judging by the three pies I made with it last night, I think it's going to completely change the way I make dough for my homemade pizza. At the same time, it's forced me to review my last 15 years of at-home pizzamaking and conclude that it has all been for naught. And that kinda sucks. More