Nancy’s Pizza Dough

The first thing I need to tell you about this pizza dough recipe is that it is not an exact replica of the pizza dough we use at Pizzeria Mozza. What I can promise you, however, is that when you make this dough at home, your pizza will be just as delicious as the one we serve. Dough reacts differently in different ovens, and when our restaurant dough is baked in a home oven the result is a thick and doughy crust—not at all like those that come out of our extremely hot wood-fired ovens. My challenge for this book was to come up with a recipe for a pizza dough that, when baked in a home oven, resulted in a crust that was as close to what we get out of our pizza ovens as possible. And with the invaluable help and relentless persistence of Jon Davis, a breadbaker whom I’ve worked with since I hired him at La Brea Bakery more than twenty years ago, we came up with this recipe. The dough is made with a sponge, which means that half of the flour is fermented, or aged, for a period of time—in this case, for an hour and a half—before being mixed with the remaining ingredients. This is a breadbakers’ trick to coax the subtle flavor characteristics from the flour in a relatively short period of time. I have also made this dough without the sponge, adding all of the flour and water at once and saving that hour and a half of fermenting time. If you are pressed for time, you can do this, and though you might lose a bit of flavor, it will still be better than most pizzas I’ve been served in the States. You will need a scale to make this recipe. Bread making, or in this case pizza dough making, is so specific, there is no way around it. When making the dough, it’s important to time it so that it’s ready when you want to make your pizzas.