This is how I make my pizza crust. I never ROLL the dough.
Why go through all the trouble of making a dough with yeast to get all of those nice air bubbles and then roll the dough and squish them.
I make a wet dough as in the pictures in the link below. I press the dough a bit to get the initial shape and from there on in, I let the dough hang while turning it, letting gravity do the work to make it bigger.
This makes a beautiful crust.
https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/blo...FBQUFBR0ljWklN
I bake mine on a steel, preheated for at least half an hour, in the top third of the oven. I prefer baking mine around 450F to 460F. I don't know if it is the altitude in Calgary or what, but I prefer the finished pizza at a lower temperature if baking in an oven.
Baking in a pizza oven is different of course.
By the way, you can use any recipe you want for your crust, just make it wetter to use this technique. Plus, you get way more flavor if you make the dough the day before, using the artisan method.
Wet dough
Little yeast
Cover and rise for 18 to 24 hours
Shape and bake
Edit: Things to keep in mind if trying the recipe above...or when making any yeast dough, or a quick bread which is a bread that uses baking powder or baking soda instead of yeast, such as biscuits, scones, etc.
The amount of flour in the recipe should be a
guideline and not written in stone. Flour will not be the same all over the world as it depends on the humidity of the region that you live in.
If you are in Calgary, where it is very dry, your flour will be dry too. That means your flour will absorb more water than flour say in the southern states or Mediterranean regions where the humidity is high.....resulting in a dry dense product unless you compensate. To compensate for that in recipes, you either have to use a little less flour or a bit more liquid. My strategy is to start with a little less flour and then size up the situation as to how the dough looks and feels. And of course the opposite would hold true if you live in a region with high humidity.
Now as for the pizza dough recipe in the link above, or for any artisan breads you might want to try, go for the
LOOK of the dough as shown in the recipe. If your pizza dough looks like the dough in the link above, you should get the same results.
Also, some make pizza with 00 flour, which is readily available anywhere. That will work. I use a flour that has 14% protein. Most flour sold is 13%, which is fine for cakes, muffins and the like. But higher protein flour makes better bread. How do you know which is which? Look on the side of the bag of flour. You want the fiber number to be 4%, not 3%.
When I make pizza dough like in the link above, or focaccia, ciabatta, flatbreads, which all use the wet dough, little yeast, rise on the counter for 18 to 24 hours method, I often add a bit of gluten as well, about 1/2 to 1 tsp per 4 cups flour. Gluten increases the protein and will give the dough extra strength.
Wet doughs produce products with bigger air holes, but at the same time, it is harder for them to hold their structure. That is why you want a flour with a high protein content. It will help support the structure of the bread so it does not collapse. You want nice long gluten strands to make those type of breads.
