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Mrs Bailey’s Pizza Dough
New Victoria style…
It has often been said — mostly on the Red Planet, let us be clear, and certainly never in New York — that pizza came to Mars before ever it came to America. Be that as it may, what is not in dispute that it came to the Crater School in the very first week of its very first term. Mrs Bailey keeps scrupulous records, in a remarkably neat copperplate; she can tell you what her girls ate on any day you care to ask about.
Her recipe for pizza dough has not changed from that day to this, and here it is, adjusted for domestic quantities:
500g bread flour
15g sugar
12g salt
8g instant dried yeast
300g water
50g olive oil
Stir the dry ingredients together, then add the wet ones and mix by hand into a rough, shaggy dough. Then knead for five or six minutes, either by hand or in a stand mixer with the dough hook on slow (I just weigh and mix everything in the stand-mixer bowl from the beginning), until you have a cohesive and somewhat sticky dough. If working it by hand, try not to add too much flour.
You can just let it rise and use it today, but it’s better if it sits in your fridge for a few days to develop flavour. Then bring it up to room temp…