The Elements of Pizza by Ken Forkish

Author:Ken Forkish
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Potter/TenSpeed/Harmony
Published: 2016-04-18T16:00:00+00:00

ENZO’S PIZZA DOUGH

Enzo Coccia is a third-generation pizzaiolo whose Naples pizzeria, La Notizia, won the AVPN Best Pizza award in 2014. His mano e mano lesson about the history of pizza dough (the best moment of my year) concluded with an explanation of his own evolution in dough making, circa 2010, when he opened La Notizia. “We use a mechanical fermentation,” he said, using a term I’d never heard before. The mechanical fermentation, or levitazione, is, in Enzo’s thinking, the air incorporated into the dough during a very slow 20-minute mix. (I’ve seen him demonstrate this by triumphantly showing pockets of air in the dough, right after he cut off a slab, immediately after he mixed a batch by hand.) Then the dough rests for just 10 to 20 minutes before being cut into dough balls—it’s this short rest, along with the very small amount of yeast used, that’s the hallmark of Enzo’s dough method. The balls then sit out for 10 hours at room temperature to ferment, a lengthy second fermentation. Enzo had one of his guys bring us out a tray of mature dough balls shortly before the pizzeria was to open for service on a Saturday night. They were perfect rounds of dough with beautifully smooth skins.

I was surprised to hear myself asking Enzo if I could use his dough recipe in this book. And I was further surprised to hear him say yes, so long as I didn’t say it’s going to make pizza as good as it is at La Notizia. Ha! No way, Enzo. You have one of the best pizzerias in Naples; all we can do is salute you and adapt your method for making a good pizza dough in our home kitchens. I think of this recipe as a learning experience, to see yet another way to make a great dough. But if you want to eat La Notizia pizza, book a ticket to Naples.

I made two big adjustments to La Notizia’s method. We cannot replicate at home the slow, 20-minute mix action of the mechanical dough mixer used at most Naples pizzerias, but we can do an extended hand mix, folding the dough over itself repeatedly to perhaps incorporate extra air. And we need more water in the dough for the home kitchen so it doesn’t get too dried out while baking (see this page for a discussion of dough hydration in relation to oven baking temperature). At La Notizia they average about 60 percent dough hydration, which is fairly typical for Naples. Here, I’ve adjusted to 70 percent dough hydration, but if you have a wood-fired oven, try 300 grams water (60 percent hydration) in your dough. I also increased the percentage of yeast in my adaptation here, since home kitchens are often not as warm as a pizzeria kitchen, nor are they as fertile. Even with these adaptations this pizza dough works great, with almost all of the fermentation happening in the dough balls after they have been formed, even if it ends up being nothing like a La Notizia pizza.

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