New York-Style Pizza Recipe

The keys to New York-style pizza perfection.

A hand holding up a slice of homemade New York-style cheese pizza.

Serious Eats / J. Kenji López-Alt

Why It Works

  • Using a food processor to knead the dough and giving the dough an overnight rise in the fridge creates a crust that is tender, chewy, and crisp all at once.
  • A standard home oven outfitted with a pizza stone admirably replicates the gas ovens used by New York slice joints.
  • Grating full-fat dry mozzarella yourself and freezing it for 15 minutes before baking ensures a mottled, browned crust with no burning.

New York pizza is my favorite style of pizza. Sure, I love me a neo-Neapolitan, sit-down-with-a-fork-and-knife pizza on occasion, and grilled pizzas are fantastic in the summer. Even chewy, Roman-style pizza bianca has its place. But the pizza I find myself most often craving is of the simple, by-the-slice, medium-thin, crusty, and lightly chewy style.

Luckily for us, it's also the variety that seems most easily adaptable to the home kitchen. Unlike, say, Neapolitan pies, which require wood-burning, 1000°F (538°C) ovens (or at the very least a reasonable workaround), the modern* New York pie is baked in a gas oven that doesn't often go north of 500 to 550°F (260 to 288°C) or so—a temperature range not out of the pale of even the most bog-standard home oven fitted with a pizza stone.

*I say "modern" because traditional New York pies are cooked in coal ovens, but the vast majority of corner-slice joints these days use gas, even the best ones.

So what is it that makes a New York pizza unique?

New York-Style Pizza Sauce

First of all, it's the sauce. It's an emphatically tomato-ey sauce with a balanced sweetness and acidity and the barest hint of herbs and alliums. I've already tackled this sauce, and the secret is to use mix of butter and olive oil, whole tomatoes, dried oregano, a couple of halved onions, and a slow simmer on the stovetop.

New York-style pizza sauce in a white bowl on a wooden counter.

Serious Eats / J. Kenji López-Alt

What's the Best Cheese for New York-Style Pizza?

Next, it's the cheese. Unlike a Neapolitan, which uses fresh mozzarella, New York-style pizza uses grated, dry mozzarella—the kind you can get sliced on a meatball sub or wrapped in cryovac blocks near the milk. It's applied sparingly so that it melts into a loose matrix that mingles with the sauce underneath, browning ever so slightly in the heat of the oven. The top of a New York-style pie should look mottled with red, white, and brown—definitely not a solid expanse of white melted cheese.

With a couple pies under your belt, you'll quickly discover two things about the cheese: it must be full-fat mozzarella (the part-skim or low-fat stuff just doesn't stretch right), and you must grate it yourself. No matter how much you are tempted, do not buy pre-shredded cheese.

Shredded cheese is coated with a dusting of starch intended to keep it from clumping. What it ends up doing is preventing it from melting properly. Your cheese will not acquire the requisite goo-factor. I've found that the best way to get good cheese for pizza at the supermarket is to go to the deli counter and ask them to cut you a pound or so straight off the slicing block in one chunk. Grated on the large holes of a box grater, it's perfect for the job.

Here's a problem I used to have: the cheese would over-brown and burn before the crust was done cooking. This happen to anyone else? I don't know if it's because professional pizza ovens have different convection patterns or some other sort of thermodynamic oddities going on, but the only solution I've found is to grate the cheese onto a plate, then pop it in the freezer for 15 minutes before applying it. This slows down its cooking just enough so that the crust can catch up before the cheese starts to burn.

The Crust Is the Key

The final factor that makes a great New York pizza—and this is the real key—is the crust. This is what separates the men from the boys. The New York slices from the Sbarros. The true Ray's from the hordes of imitators.**

**In New York, there are a half dozen or so "Famous Original Ray's" pizzas, all of them unrelated, and few of them any good. Prince Street Ray's is the original, and the 6th Avenue Ray's is the best.

Let's take a closer look, shall we?

A Perfect New York-Style Pizza Crust

Close-up of New York-style pizza with a bite taken out so you can see the structure of the crust.

Serious Eats / J. Kenji López-Alt

Thicker than a Neapolitan crust but thinner than a pan pizza, a New York crust starts with a crisp, well-browned bottom layer about 2 millimeters thick. It must be sturdy enough that a single slice slightly bent lengthwise down the center will cantilever out straight under its own support, not requiring the eater to prop the tip with a second hand.

There's nothing worse than walking out on the street with a slice, having the tip sag down, and the cheese slip off into a greasy puddle on the sidewalk. Even thinking about it makes my eyes well up.

The crust has to be sturdy enough, but—and this is important—just sturdy enough. Crunchy, tough, or cracker-like are not adjectives that can ever accurately describe a great New York pizza. The slice must crackle and give gently as you fold it, never crack or split.

After the initial crispness, the next 3 to 4 millimeters are devoted to a thin layer of soft, slightly chewy, and tender cooked dough. This layer must be as flavorful as the best bread with a savory, wheaty, and complex aroma. Never floury, never bland, the crust is absolutely not just a support mechanism for the cheese and sauce on top. It's this layer that gives the slice its distinctive chew. You've got to pull slightly with your teeth to separate a bite from the rest of the slice. It should not break off with no effort. If that's what you're after, you're better off ordering a Domino's thin crust with its matzoh-like base.

The very top 1 to 2 millimeters of crust—the bit in closest contact with the sauce and cheese—should be slick and nearly doughy, though it shouldn't taste raw. This crust-to-sauce interface is one of my favorite parts of the pizza, and should not be taken lightly.

Finally, we get to the raised outer crust known by pizza snobs as "cornicione," or colloquially as "the bones." Unlike the poofy, leopard-spotted edge of a Neapolitan, a New York pie has a crust that's only slightly raised. The pie as a whole goes from thicker at the edges towards thinner in the center, an artifact of the toss-and-stretch method favored by most piemen. The crust should be relatively evenly browned, with a couple charred bubbles here and there, and an open bread-like structure, though again, not as outright airy as a Neapolitan crust.

So the obvious question is, how does one go about achieving a crust like this?

It's all in the dough.

The Difference Between Neopolitan and New York-Style Pizza Doughs

There are a couple of key characteristics that separate a New York dough from a classic Neapolitan dough.

  • The flour in a classic Neapolitan dough is a high-protein, finely milled Italian Tipo "00," referred to as "double-oh" by the cognoscenti. It absorbs water easily and bakes up with a super-thin crisp layer surrounding a moist, airy interior. New York pizza dough, on the other hand, is generally made from American bread flour. Also high in protein, it readily develops gluten (the protein matrix that gives bread structure). It is made from a different variety of wheat and not milled as finely. It results in a crust that's chewier, a little denser, and with significantly more structure than a Neapolitan crust.
  • Sugar is almost always added to New York dough. Aside from adding a bit of flavor and a little activity-boost for the yeast, it also aids in browning—essential if you want to get a nicely browned crust at relatively low oven temperatures.
  • Olive oil is the last addition. By coating individual flour granules, oils will effectively lower the maximum level of gluten formation in a given dough, making the resultant baked crust slightly denser and notably more tender than a fat-free dough. Without oil, a New York pie would dry out and toughen during its 12 to 15 minute stay in the oven. Olive oil keeps it nice and supple.
New York-style cheese pizza cut into slices on a wooden cutting board.

Serious Eats / J. Kenji López-Alt

Luckily for me, there's already a pretty fantastic recipe for New York style pizza dough out there in Peter Reinhart's American Pie, which if you don't already own, you should. His method is to mix together the flour, yeast, salt, sugar, olive oil, and warm water in the bowl of a stand mixer, knead it slowly for a couple minutes, then allow it to rest for a few minutes in a step called an autolyse. Autolysis allows time for flour to absorb water, and for the gluten-forming proteins to shorten themselves through enzymatic action, allowing them to be more easily aligned and stretched with subsequent mixing.

The dough is then kneaded again until enough gluten is developed to pass the windowpane test, allowed to rise overnight in the refrigerator, then shaped, proofed, rolled, and baked.

The results are pretty good. Texture-wise, the crust is spot on. It's the flavor that's always seemed lacking to me. It's not bad per se, nor underseasoned, just a little...off.

It was only recently when I was perusing On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee that I came up with a theory as to why. Here's what he has to say on the subject of kneading:

As oxygen from the air and oxidizing compounds from the yeasts enter the dough, the gluten molecules begin to bond end-to-end and form long chains. An excess of [exposure to air and oxygen] bleaches the remaining wheat pigments and alters the flavor.

So here's my theory: in order to get a ball of pizza dough to pass the windowpane test, it needs to be kneaded for a relatively long period of time. In a large-scale, New York pizza operation, dough is made in massive 30- to 40-pound batches. With such a large mass of dough, there's significantly less exposure to oxygen while the dough kneads, as only the dough on the very surface of a rather large ball is exposed, the rest being protected by the sides of the mixing bowl, and by the dough itself. With a small ball of dough in a home mixer, on the other hand, a much higher proportion of the dough is exposed to the flavor-altering effects of air as it mixes.

The result? A dough made in small batches at home oxidizes more, and thus never tastes as good as a dough made in large batches in a pizza parlor.

McGee goes on to suggest that mixing doughs in a food processor might actually be a better method than the stand mixer, something counterintuitive to me, as the stand mixer seems to resemble the gentle action of hand-kneading far more accurately. The idea is that the rapidly rotating blade of a food processor will batter and realign the proteins in the flour much more efficiently than the slow-moving stand mixer. It should give you a windowpane-worthy dough in a fraction of the time. Less time kneading means less time oxidizing, and thus better flavor.

A Mixer Bake-Off: The Best Way to Mix New York-Style Pizza Dough

New York-style pizza dough kneaded in a food processor.

Serious Eats / J. Kenji López-Alt

To test this, I decided to set up a three-way bake-off:

  1. Dough mixed in the stand mixer for a full 7 minutes post autolyse, until it passes the windowpane test.
  2. Dough mixed in the stand mixer for only half the time. (It won't pass the windowpane test, but should show improved flavor.)
  3. Dough mixed in the food processor.

I was frankly shocked at how quickly the food processor dough came together. Within about 30 seconds, I had a dough that easily passed the windowpane test with a smooth, supple feel that you only get with many minutes of stand-mixer kneading after an autolyse period. I packed away my three 12-ounce balls of dough in the quart-sized deli containers I use for overnight proofs (I highly recommend them for this task!) and waited until the next day, where another surprise awaited me.

Two batches of New York-style pizza dough in deli containers after rising: barely-kneaded in a stand mixer, which barely rose, (left) and dough kneaded in the food processor, which nearly came out of deli (right).

Serious Eats / J. Kenji López-Alt

The fully-kneaded stand mixer version, as expected, rose quite well; it came up to the 3-cup mark on my container. The barely-kneaded stand mixer version rose significantly less; it only came up to around the 2 1/2 cup line (pictured at left, above). The food-processor kneaded version, on the other hand, nearly blew the top off of the lid. What does all this mean?

Well, bread doughs rise because, as yeast consumes the sugars naturally present in the flour, they release both alcohol and carbon dioxide gas. This gas gets trapped within the gluten structure formed by the flour proteins. The stronger this structure, the better the gas bubbles are trapped, and the more the dough is leavened. Thus the fact that my food processor dough rose better than either stand mixer dough was a good indicator that the dough sported superior gluten formation, and would thus have a better finished texture.

Two batches of New York style-pizza dough in balls: one barely kneaded in stand mixer, which tears (left), and one kneaded in food processor, which forms smooth ball (right).

Serious Eats / J. Kenji López-Alt

Even forming them into balls showed a superior structure. The barely-kneaded stand mixer version tore as I formed it, ending up with a rough surface that translated into a risen ball of dough that was far more fragile as I tried to stretch it before topping. The well-kneaded stand mixer dough and the food processor dough, on the other hand, were a dream to work with. Smooth, supple and elastic, they were easily shaped and just as easily stretched for topping.

A cross-section of a New York-style pizza slice with under-developed dough, showing flat texture and rise.
Crust from an under-developed dough.

Serious Eats / J. Kenji López-Alt

So would a better-feeling dough produce a superior end product? As they say in the industry, the proof is in the pie.

After applying my sauce and cheese, I baked all three pizzas one after the other in the same oven, at identical temperatures. (I used my laser thermometer to ensure that the pizza stone came back up to temperature before baking the next pie.) Every oven may be different, but in my own oven, I've found that placing the baking stone directly in the middle is the best way to get the top and the undercarriage to cook simultaneously. If your bottom is cooking too fast, raise your stone a level or two. Top burning before the bottom browns? Just lower the pizza stone or take it to the extreme and place it directly on the floor of the oven.

As expected, the under-kneaded crust came out with a miserably inadequate texture (pictured above). Dense and almost cake-like, it nevertheless had a decent, wheaty flavor.

Cross-section of New York-style pizza slice with crust made from dough kneaded in food processor, showing airy, well-developed texture.
Crust from dough made in the food processor.

Serious Eats / J. Kenji López-Alt

Of the two remaining crusts, both baked into perfect New York-style pies—at least in appearance. The stand mixer version had the familiar off-flavor that I'd noticed with my New York-style pies in the past. Only the food processor-produced dough created a crust that was perfect in both texture and flavor. Tender, chewy, and crisp all at once, with that coveted slick layer at the sauce-crust interface and a thin layer of melted cheese just hinting at brown, it was the archetypical New York pie, and it had just come out of my own oven!

Are you as surprised as I am? Is it really true that, at least as far as small batches of dough go, a food processor can produce a crust better and faster than a stand mixer can?

I'm a convert, and as a devout atheist, converting me ain't an easy task.

October 2010

Recipe Details

New York-Style Pizza Recipe

Prep 15 mins
Cook 40 mins
Active 30 mins
Rising Time 26 hrs
Total 26 hrs 55 mins
Serves 4 to 6 servings
Makes 3 pies

Ingredients

  • 22 1/2 ounces bread flour, plus more for dusting (638g; about 4 1/2 cups)

  • 0.5 ounce granulated sugar (15g; about 1 1/2 tablespoons)

  • 0.35 ounce kosher salt (10g; about 1 tablespoon)

  • 0.35 ounce instant yeast (10g; about 2 teaspoons)

  • 15 ounces lukewarm water (415g; about 1 3/4 cups) (see notes)

  • 3 tablespoons (45ml) extra-virgin olive oil

  • 1 batch New York style pizza sauce

  • 1 pound grated full-fat dry mozzarella cheese (454g; about 4 cups), placed in freezer for at least 15 minutes

Directions

  1. Combine flour, sugar, salt, and yeast in bowl of food processor. Pulse 3 to 4 times to incorporate. Add water and olive oil. Run food processor until mixture forms ball that rides around the bowl above the blade, about 15 seconds. Continue processing 15 seconds longer.

  2. Transfer dough ball to lightly floured surface and knead once or twice by hand until smooth ball is formed. It should pass the windowpane test. Divide dough into three even portions and place each in a covered quart-sized deli container or in a zipper-lock freezer bag. Place in refrigerator and allow to rise at least 1 day, and up to 5.

  3. At least two hours before baking, remove dough from refrigerator and shape into balls by gathering dough towards bottom and pinching shut. Flour well and place each dough ball in a separate medium mixing bowl. Cover tightly with plastic wrap and allow to rise at warm room temperature until roughly doubled in volume.

  4. One hour before baking, adjust oven rack with pizza stone to middle position and preheat oven to 500°F (260°C). Turn single dough ball out onto lightly floured surface. Gently press out dough into rough 8-inch circle, leaving outer inch higher than the rest. Gently stretch dough by draping over knuckles to form a 12- to 14-inch circle about 1/4-inch thick. Transfer to pizza peel.

  5. Spread approximately 2/3 cup sauce evenly over surface of crust, leaving 1/2- to 1-inch border along edge. Evenly spread 1/3 of cheese over sauce. Slide pizza onto baking stone and bake until cheese is melted with some browned spots and crust is golden brown and puffed, 12 to 15 minutes. Transfer to cutting board, slice, and serve immediately. Repeat with remaining two dough balls, remaining sauce, and remaining cheese.

Special Equipment

Food processor, pizza peel

Notes

Using a food processor ensures that your dough is properly developed without over-oxidizing, which can affect flavor. To scale up, make dough in separate batches in food processor. Do not try to process more than one batch at a time. When adding lukewarm water to the dry ingredients, use the temperature zone recommended by the manufacturer of your yeast.

Nutrition Facts (per serving)
552 Calories
13g Fat
89g Carbs
18g Protein
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Nutrition Facts
Servings: 4 to 6
Amount per serving
Calories 552
% Daily Value*
Total Fat 13g 17%
Saturated Fat 4g 18%
Cholesterol 11mg 4%
Sodium 933mg 41%
Total Carbohydrate 89g 32%
Dietary Fiber 4g 15%
Total Sugars 9g
Protein 18g
Vitamin C 7mg 36%
Calcium 162mg 12%
Iron 2mg 9%
Potassium 449mg 10%
*The % Daily Value (DV) tells you how much a nutrient in a food serving contributes to a daily diet. 2,000 calories a day is used for general nutrition advice.
(Nutrition information is calculated using an ingredient database and should be considered an estimate.)