Paul's Same Day Pizza Dough Recipe

Over more than three years' cooking in wood fired ovens, I've been through lots of trial and error with dough recipes and making adjustments to my process.

I cook using various Ooni pizza ovens, two Gozney ovens and a large steel pizza oven, among others - and this dough is suitable for use in all of them.

Ultimately I'm quite a lazy cook, so I wanted to perfect a simple, low-work dough process that would produce restaurant quality pizzas for us, our family and friends.

My key takeaway from the last three years is that dough is a learned process, not just a recipe - so in the video below you'll learn the stages of dough making, as well as  how to tweak your ingredients to suit different dough volume and ambient conditions.

While my go-to process is to use a 24 hour room temperature prove, I think it's important to be able to make pizza when you (or your family!) want it - and having a great same-day dough in your pizza making arsenal is a really useful skill.

What's different to every other same day dough out there? I hate recipes that call for a whole sachet of yeast, because they're built for convenience over quality - pizza dough doesn't need that much yeast and for me, going too heavy on the yeast has a negative impact on flavour.

Obviously, we recommend watching the whole thing if you want to make the best pizza dough possible!

But if you're looking for something specific, you can use the scroll bar in the video to jump forward to the chapters below:

YES! This pizza dough can be used in all outdoor pizza ovens, including Ooni, Gozney, Delivita, Clementi, Igneus, Alfa Forni, Clementi or Skillcraft, among others.

There are several elements to consider when it comes to making dough for use in a pizza oven such as Ooni or Gozney, because they can heat up to over 400°C for authentic Neapolitan pizza.

Firstly, your dough should only ever contain four ingredients - water, flour, salt and yeast. Several recipes I used early in my pizza making experience contained oil or sugar, but I found out later these dough recipes were designed for baking in a home oven. When cooking Neapolitan style pizza at more than 400°C in your outdoor pizza oven, these ingredients will burn before your dough is cooked through, and make it much harder to make quality pizza.

Don't be too intimidated by this! Even if you never understand it, this won't stop you making awesome pizza dough.

Baker's percentages simply measure your other ingredients as a percentage of the total flour in your recipe. So, if you use 1kg (1000g) of flour and want to make a 60% hydration dough, you will use 600g of water.

Your salt is also measured as a percentage of your flour, but keep it simple and let your phone do the hard work for you - head to 1m14s in the video to learn more about an app that will help unlock better pizza dough.

In the app, just increase the hydration of your pizza dough recipe, and it will work out the percentages of water, salt and yeast for you. Super simple, and you didn't even need to get your calculator out!

There are loads of reasons to make longer prove dough - it makes a difference to the experience of baking your pizzas, as well as the final quality of your pizzas in terms of taste, texture and digestibility.

But there are also loads of reasons not to! I talk about this in the video, but it's so important to be able to make good quality pizzas when you want them, and that's where this process comes in.

By watching the full video, you'll be able to scale my pizza dough process to make any amount of dough you need. But how big should your doughballs be?

Below are my thoughts for Neapolitan style pizza:

12in pizza - 250g doughballs

14in pizza - 340g doughballs

16in pizza - 440g doughballs

In my opinion, authentic Neapolitan pizza gets pretty hard to make beyond 14 inches due to the difficulty in shaping and launching a pizza of this style & size. But by all means, give it a try and let me know how you get on!

If you still aren't sure which pizza oven wood to buy, just send us an email on info@love-logs.com and we'll do our best to help!

We'd love it if you shared it with your fellow pizza enthusiasts!