I’ve mentioned Ken Forkish’s Flour Water Salt Yeast before, which is for making breads. A companion book to it is Forkish’s The Elements of Pizza: Unlocking the Secrets to World-Class Pies at Home. It has lots of great recipes for dough, sauce, and the overall pizza. Making the New York Cheese Pizza was my personal project for this week.

Preparation

We prepare our normal pizzas within the span of about 15 minutes: dough, sauce, toppings, the whole shebang. With the New York Cheese Pizza recipe, you prepare the dough two to three days ahead of time. The dough yields three dough balls, so you can make three different pizzas (or get three chances to do one right 🙂 ).

Here’s what the dough balls look like fresh from their second fermentation in the refrigerator:

The sauce can also be made ahead of time. You can get most of it done in the blender with prepared ingredients, and then there’s a bit of cooking with some sugar. Here’s what it looks like in the blender: