Neapolitan pizza dough

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I was writing out a recipe for authentic Neapolitan pizza dough on another forum, and thought y'all might enjoy it, too. 


This is Ken Forkish's recipe for Neapolitan pizza dough based on Enzo Coccia's recipe used at La Notizia in Naples (winner of the 2014 AVPN Best Pizza award):



1.5 cups of water

2.5 teaspoons fine sea salt

1/10 of 1/4 teaspoon of instant dried yeast

4 cups or 500 grams white flour, typically 00



This is a dough you hand mix. You start with the water at 90-95 degrees F (32-35 C). Add in the salt, swish it around until the salt is dissolved. Add the yeast, wait a minute to let it hydrate. Then swish it around until it is dissolved. Add the flour to the water-salt-yeast mixture, then begin mixing with your hands to incorporate all of the ingredients together into a dough. Continue folding the dough over onto itself until it is a unified mass, incorporating all of the flour. Take a minute or two to split the dough and fold it onto itself.



Once you have a shaggy dough ball formed, you can check the temperature, target temp is 80 degrees F (27 C).



Let the dough rest for 15 minutes.



Knead the dough again on a lightly floured surface, for 2-3 minutes, without adding anymore flour. You should slowly be kneading it here, the idea is to incorporate air into the dough. The 15 minute rest should make the dough easy to handle, and after 2-3 minutes, you should have a nice silky dough ball that is smooth all around.



Place the dough seam side down in the lightly oiled dough tub and covered with a tight-fitting lid. (I didn't have a dough tub at this time, so I used a gallon plastic bag, and covered the dough ball with a tablespoon of olive oil.) Keep the dough covered at room temperature for 20 minutes for the first rise.



Divide the dough and shape it into dough balls. With floured hands, gently remove the dough from the tub out onto a floured work surface. Dust the entire top of the dough into flour, and then cut into three equal sized dough balls. (Each dough ball should weigh about 275 grams or 9.7 ounces.) Shape each piece of dough into a nice tight round.



Place the dough balls on a lightly floured dinner plate or baking sheet (make sure there is light flour under the dough so it doesn't stick to the plate or sheet). Leave space between them for expansion. Lightly flour the tops of the dough, and then cover airtight with plastic wrap. Let the dough balls rest at room temperature to ferment for 10 hours. This is the second rise.



After the second rise, you have three dough balls ready to make three pizzas.



Note:I have made this recipe (and many other Forkish recipes) and while it makes a solid authentic Neapolitan style dough, I didn't care for the extra salt and the use of so little yeast. I like the water-salt-yeast-flour method for making dough by hand (and strongly recommend it if you don't have an electric mixer), but I think the use of so much salt and so little yeast ends up with the salt killing or retarding some of the yeast, causing less of a rise than you'd like, and a dough that is more flour and water than anything else. If you use fresh yeast or active fresh yeast, I think this is a great method. Forkish recommends instant dried yeast for use in the home kitchen, and I don't think it works as well for this method. If using instant dried yeast at home, I recommend increasing the amount of yeast to 1/4 or 1/2 a teaspoon, decreasing the salt to a literal pinch of salt. I also throw in 1/4 or 1/2 teaspoon of granulated sugar, equal to however much yeast I use, but that is a personal preference. Do everything else the same as far as the two rises, and I think you'll like the end product.