Ooni Gas Powered Pizza Oven

There are a lot of good dough recipes on here if you look. The dough balls that Ooni regularly sells are pretty good for practice if you're new to pizza ovens.

It's pretty discouraging to spend 72 hours making dough and then botching it because you don't know how to launch a pizza - ask me how I know

I get Ooni's pizza dough, works well and although it seems expensive at $100 for 24 of them, I have no interest in making my own dough and the time saved is worth it.

I love the brightness of the San Marzano tomato sauce but the rest of the family like plain ol' store bought sauce. Point being, store-bought tomato sauce works just fine.

Someone on here does steaks in his/her Ooni, I haven't done it yet myself but it makes perfect sense.

If you're interested in making your own dough, I would recommend the book The Element of Pizza by Ken Forkish. He has a bunch of recipes depending how much time you have until you need the dough.

His 48-72 hour biga(pre-fermentation process) pizza dough has tremendous flavor and is very nice to shape.

For cheese, I usually use a 4 cheese blend of low moisture shredded mozzarella, shredded provolone, fresh grated parmesan reggianno, and fresh grated pecorino romano. It gives a really well rounded cheese profile.

We have a pizza party right before Christmas, and this year I threw together a prosciutto, pear, mushroom, and spinach pizza with white sauce drizzled with fig sauce after baking. It was an absolute hit.

Look everyone’s time is worth something but…

The pizza dough recipe I use takes about 5 minutes of active time and 18 hours of if sitting on your counter top under a kitchen towel. It costs maybe $.50 to make 4 dough balls. It makes a tremendous dough.

So not saying your time isn’t worth it because you could be a really high priced lawyer or bill gates, but it’s pretty cheap and easy to make your own dough.

Jim Lahey No Knead Pizza Dough is the answer.

You can get the kindle version of The Element of Pizza for $4.99 right now (not sure of the typical cost).

Making bread/pizza dough seems complex but as said above, the active hands on time is very low.

If you have a digital kitchen scale and just follow the recipes and techniques (honestly easy), it's pretty simple.

Things that make it easier would be a dedicated cambro dough container with lid, dough knife and plastic dough scraper, and a proofing container that fits in your fridge (for my last bake, I used 15 small circle ziplock containers that stacked very neatly in groups of 5).

If you're just getting started, using pre-made dough is obviously easier. And if you want to get your shaping and cooking technique down, it may be a perfect place to start. If, however, you want to go down the rabbit hole a bit of making your own dough (and if you have an Ooni it seems like a hole you may want to explore), it is very VERY possible to create a dough that will wow people with an exquisite flavor profile and texture (pre-fermented 48-72 hour doughs).

Whole Foods makes a good dough. So does Trader Joe's. But making your own dough once you've made a bunch of pizzas is the way to go.

Cooked on an Ooni Koda 16

Also, there are plenty of resources to get into pizza making. Vito Iacopelli, Marco Capiotti are two I went to early, and the Pizza Bible was another one my wife got me for a birthday.

I wouldn't suggest that. There are lots of tutorials on how to stretch dough. Since I only do 12" sized pizzas it has become a pretty simple step. You don't have to do any fancy throws and spins...lol

I just remove from my dough ball from the proofing tray and into a bowl with flour and flip it to both sides, and then press down on top of my countertop from top to bottom leaving a little bit of the outer edges for crust (varies depending on how much crust you may like, flip and follow the same pattern to really form the crust and make the middle as uniform as possible, and then I use the back of my hands, knuckles, and fingers to stretch as I rotate the dough. I try to not make it too thin because I have found early on that those tear easily during the cook and they flop while eating them.

For those that don't like as much crust I will just press down across the whole dough, follow the same stretch process and then spread the sauce a little further out.

There are more advanced ways of stretching dough, but the way I do it works for me.

When I first started I followed the first part of my dough process and than I would just gently hold the pizza on one end and let gravity stretch the dough as I rotated it, but I found I couldn't control it as much and had thin patches and more tears. Especially with neapolitan style which is pretty soft dough.

Don’t buy premade dough. Just download the Ooni app and follow the instructions.

Also— If you’re looking for a quick dough, this is a solid option

LINK

Thanks for the tip. Curious if others have had success...