Had a few friends over for a holiday party this week and made two extra large New York style pizzas to feed everyone a lot faster and with a lot less work than my neapolitan process.

For the kids, a half-pep/half-mozz. For the adults: smoked kalamata olives (holy moly, amazing), red onion, mushroom, basil, pecorino, mozz.

I’ve been struggling to land on a good dough process without doing a bunch of math.

Lucky for me, I found a modern Lehmann calculator (named after a forums poster, so you know the approach is good), and have had great luck with it, using bakers percentages a bit more like Kenji’s at 60% hydration, 2% oil, 2% salt, 1% instant yeast.

I use cold water from the fridge and mix it using a food processor until it registers mid-70s F on a thermapen, then cold ferment.

Maybe counter-inuitive but someone posted (I don’t remember who or where, probably on pizzamaking.com) that bulk fermenting dough like this at room temperatures effectively insulates the dough from dropping to fridge temps when you later cold ferment, what with all the bubbles.

The dough should already have warmed up from both the cold strike water equalizing with the other ingredients to a target temp, and the kneading further raising the temp.

Just throw it in the fridge immediately.

Very small sample size but: I overshot kneading on one of two dough balls by 10 degrees to mid-80s F, so when I placed them in my fermenting tray (and flattened them out given I had so much space to work with, so that they would cool more evenly), I marked that one.

After cold fermenting, the too-warm dough was slightly smaller, visually, than the correctly kneaded dough.

Go figure.