Whether at the Fourneau Factory or at home, our pizza sessions involve slinging a minimum of four pizzas, more often at least eight. Kenji López-Alt's "Chicago Thin-Crust (Tavern-Style) Pizza Dough" recipe, published on New York Times Cooking, makes easy work of assembly line pizza sessions with a low-hydration dough that gets prepared well ahead of the session.
After fermenting this dough, it is rolled out and air-dried to a leathery crust. You can have a stack of these crusts ready ahead of a big family dinner or pizza party and crank out pizzas as fast as the oven will cook them. The low-hydration dough will handle a rather hefty ingredient load (handy when novice pizza composers and kids belly up to the pizza station) and it produces a very satisfying, crunchy cracker-crust.
We're pairing Kenji's crust recipe with another recipe that can be found on NYT Cooking, Marcella Hazan's Tomato Sauce. I stopped using onion in my fresh tomato sauce years ago because I don't like all of the fiber it adds. This recipe, which Garrett from the Fourneau team recommended, is cooked with onion halves for the rich flavor, but the onions are removed at the end of cooking. The result is wonderful. Garret pointed out that Marcella recommends blanching the tomatoes in boiling water for a minute to make peeling easier, a detail that doesn't seem to be in the NYT Cooking recipe.
The sauce and the crust are so good, we're topping with simple ingredients and going for Margarita style pizzas. Cheese shown here is a dry style mozzarella. A little drizzle of olive oil and pinch of salt are always called for. The absolutely giant basil leaves were grown in our neighbor, Artesian Farm, are put on after the pizza is baked.
We're baking in the Fourneau 16" Wood-Fired Grill which has a 13" pizza stone, so we go with Kenji's suggested ratio for 12" pizzas. The following makes four crusts: 450 grams of bread flour, 10 grams of sugar, 10 grams of salt, 2 grams of dry active yeast, 230 grams of cold water, 45 grams of olive oil.
Check out the link for detailed instructions. Our usual process for evening pizza starts in the morning, mixing the dry ingredients in a stainless steel bowl with a wood spoon, before adding the oil and water. After letting the well incorporated dough mass sit 10 minutes, we scrape it out onto a floured counter and knead for 10 minutes until smooth. At that point we divide the dough and form the sections into balls which sit covered on the counter at least 3 hours. Around lunch time, 4-6 hours before pizza time, we roll out the dough on a floured counter into 12" discs. With dough surfaces lightly floured we let these sit out in the open air for an hour or two and under cotton towels the rest of the time. The doughs are ready to use whenever the oven is ready. We coat the pizza peel with fine corn meal or semolina flour before placing the crust on the peel and composing the pizza.
I recommend doubling the Marcella Hazan recipe on NYT Cooking. So, blanch 4 big tomatoes or about 8 Romas – enough to chop up 4 cups of tomatoes – in boiling water for a minute. Cut an X into the top of each tomato before blanching to make peeling easier. Cool the tomatoes, peel them, chop them and add them to a pot. Add 2 medium onions peeled and cut in half or 3 whole onions if they are small in size. Add 10 tablespoons of butter. Add salt to taste. Simmer this for 45 minutes to an hour, remove the onions and you're set! Your house will smell like rich buttery goodness and anyone around will be maddeningly hungry!