How to make Pizza Dough with Love Logs
Paul runs Love Logs with his partner Heather. After buying their first pizza oven in lockdown, Paul & Heather were frustrated with the quality of wood they could order online. Love Logs is now the UK’s leading online retailer of specialist pizza oven wood, cut to the perfect size for your oven, always sourced from sustainable British woodland, and always delivered next day in completely plastic free packaging. Love Logs also sell British lumpwood charcoal as well as a variety of cooking wood for BBQ and open fire cooking.
For me, the starting point is to think about dough making as a skillset rather than a recipe – of course you can use a recipe to give you your ingredients, but you need to invest time in learning about the factors than can affect your dough, as well as a number of different techniques used through the process
So, this is a recipe with a difference – you’re going to need to put some work in to find out the exact ingredients you’ll need for the dough you want to make. Download an app called PizzApp, which will give you the precise ingredients for a certain amount of dough when you plug in your planned length of prove as well as your room/fridge temperature. You’ll be asked to pick a dough hydration, 60% is a great starting point, once you’re happy there you can increase your hydration by 1-2% at a time – all my dough these days is made at 63% hydration which I find bakes beautifully but isn’t too difficult to handle. Of course, you can keep pushing this up and up, but I don’t personally find the benefit is worthwhile when balanced with the increased difficulty of handling. You’ll need accurate scales to weigh everything out precisely, including yeast weighed out in increments as little as 0.01g.
The best dough is proved for 24-48 hours or more – longer proved dough tends to be lighter, more digestible and have better flavour – but this isn’t always necessary, you can make good dough in just 4-6 hours if you want a quick pizza fix! A super important part of good dough is matching the flour you use to the length of prove you have planned. Different flours have different protein contents – the higher the protein, the longer you should prove your dough. Flour with 11-12% protein should be used for proves of 6-18 hours, flour with 12-13% protein can typically be used from proves from 18-36 hours, and anything over 13% should be great for long proves of 36 hours or longer. This is a rough guide but there are loads of resources online where you can learn more.
From there, it’s as easy as following the steps below
1. Mix your flour and yeast and together in a mixing bowl.
2. Incorporate your water about 10% at a time, using either one hand or a wooden spoon to mix; keeping your spare hand dry and dough-free is a good idea. Once roughly half of your water is incorporated, dissolve your salt in the remaining water and continue adding it to your flour mix.
3. Once you’ve combined all the water and scraped your bowl down and have a rough, shaggy dough, cover the bowl with a damp tea towel or put the lid on if it has one, and leave the dough for 30 minutes. This resting stage will allow the dough to absorb all the water and start developing all on its own, making it easier to work with. This is the start of your bulk prove, so the proving time you used in PizzApp starts now.
4. After 30 minutes, it’s time to knead! Kneading builds strength in your dough but it isn’t the most important step, so you can do this anywhere from one minute to ten – watch some YouTube for technique, or you can use a mixer if you have one. It’s important not to add any flour to your work surface, as this will reduce the hydration of your dough.
5. Once you’ve kneaded for as long as you chose, it’s time to do some stretch and folds to start building tension in the dough, which is the most important step to build your gluten network and give your dough strength. Fold the dough over on itself, dragging the front of the dough back under itself to create tension across the top of the dough mass – this is a simple stretch & fold.
6. Turn the dough through 90 degrees and repeat – you’ll see a taught surface start to form on the top surface of the dough. Again, YouTube is your friend for technique here. After 5 or 6 stretch & folds, pop the dough away into an airtight container to continue to prove.
7. Depending on the length of your prove, come back every 30 minutes for 2 hours or every hour for 4 hours, and do 5 or 6 stretch and folds each time. This will mean that by the end of either 2 or 4 hours, you have done 5 stretch and folds including the first one in step 5. With each set of stretch and folds you should notice your dough is becoming more elastic, and can stretch further without tearing, until at the final step you should have a beautifully tight surface on your dough. Now your dough can go away to complete the rest of its bulk prove.
8. I always ball up at least 6 hours ahead of when I want to bake, which allows my doughballs to be relaxed when I’m ready to bake. For a shorter prove, this can mean your balled prove is longer than your bulk prove – this is okay! I use a 250g doughball for a 12-inch pizza, but anything from 225g-275g can work. Tip out your bulk dough and cut portions off while trying to keep the taught skin on the top intact. With each doughball, do 3 or 4 stretch and folds, continuing to build tension in the existing smooth surface, folding the bottom of the doughball in on itself. Use your fingers to grip the sides of the doughball and push the bottom of each ball in on itself. When you have a nice smooth, tight surface, flip the doughball upside down and seal the bottom – pinch the centre together into a seam, ensuring no air can escape and all the air bubbles from your fermentation will stay in your dough through the next stage of proving.
9. Ideally, line your doughballs up in a proving tray with an airtight lid, but you can also prove them as single doughballs in any form of food-safe tub or Tupperware, as long as it has a lid making it airtight. Don’t use any flour or oil, as again they will affect your dough and how it cooks in the oven. A tight, well-sealed doughball will release pretty easily from most containers without oil.
10. Assuming your room temperature stays as expected, your doughballs should be ready like clockwork, but over time you will develop an understanding for when they aren’t quite ready, perhaps due to fluctuating temperature. If your doughballs fail to stretch properly and they spring back, the dough isn’t relaxed enough yet and needs a little more time – just pop them away and come back in 30 minutes.
11. Time to stretch, top and bake your pizza! Yet again, Youtube is a fantastic resource for technique, so it well worth investing some time watching videos.
Good luck, and feel free to reach out to me any time via our social media – our username on all social media channels is @planetfriendlyfirewood and you'll also find regular videos, hints and tips about all things pizza making, so give us a follow!
Happy pizza making! Paul