Making homemade pizza dough from scratch

Dough needs time to rise. This is going to be common in most recipes that you come across for dough with yeast, in general.

To answer your question, yes.

using beer instead of water to make the dough was a game changer for me.

Pizza dough is best when it's a 24 hour process.

I'll use one or the other

1 cup warm tap water (110-115 degrees)
1/4 ounce active dry yeast
3 1/2 cups flour (double 00 or all purpose)
1/2 cup course ground cornmeal
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup vegetable oil


4 cups King Arthur Unbleached All-Purpose Flour
3 tablespoons yellow cornmeal
1 3/4 teaspoons salt
2 3/4 teaspoons instant yeast
2 tablespoons olive oil
4 tablespoons butter, melted
2 tablespoons vegetable oil or salad oil
1 cup + 2 tablespoons lukewarm water

Since I started using Caputo 00 flour my dough comes out perfect. Highly recommend.

Do you find it in a store?

I read someone's post in a recipe comment section that mentioned 00, and they said it was expensive and they had to find it online.

One hour pizza will be harder to stretch, not brown as well as the overnight rise stuff. At least 24 hrs cold rise works great. Google Lahey pizza dough for a good recipe.

The pros tout letting it have a slow rise in the refrigerator to develop flavors. I've done Kenji's New York Style Pizza dough, which you put in bags in the fridge for 1 to 5 days.

It was good, but I've also had good results with a recipe that uses plenty of yeast and rises just 45 minutes to an hour (in a warm place). It allows you to decide to make pizza and do it that day.

It's clipped from a a Cuisinart food processor recipe book. Here is a version: LINK

Is that a surf green countertop???

If you really want to make good homemade pizza, get a Baking Steel (or source yourself an equivalent piece of 1/4 inch steel). I've cooked pizza on everything from baking stones to sheet pans to firebricks in a wood oven to a Big Green Egg, to the grilled pizza popular in the 90s (you cooked a bit, flipped it, then topped so it was more of a flatbread than a true pizza). Baking steel plus your broiler will yield amazingly good results.

Or, if you are a true pizza obsessive (hey, there's a club w/a secret handshake and everything), you can buy the Kettle Pizza with the Baking Steel insert. I haven't bought one (yet) because I get great results from the infrared broiler in my oven. But I still might...