Cold Fermented 48-72 Hour Pizza Dough – Culinary Seasons

This fermented pizza dough is delicious! This will be your new go to pizza dough from now on.

This recipe does take some planning ahead to get the fermentation time. But hey, if you are sitting around watching Thursday night football, now is the perfect time to put together this dough at the beginning of the game to have pizza on Sunday. Have the dough ferment for the next three days and you will have individual pizzas to enjoy while you watch the games on Sunday!

Since the pizza dough cooks within a few minutes. The most time you will probably spend on cooking on Sunday will be setting up the pellet smoker or grill with a pizza stone and waiting for the coals to get up to temperature. You can still watch the games in between the steps of getting the grill ready.

Prep the toppings a day ahead. You will be ready pop those pizzas on the grill at halftime AND you will be sitting down to watch the second half with a hot pizza in your hand.

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Why Ferment Pizza Dough?

Neapolitan Pizzas may have been one of the first fermented pizza doughs but the fermenting foods goes back thousands of years. Neapolitan style dough is made similar to this recipe but many times the fermentation time is well less than 72 hours. The ingredients in many pizza doughs are simple just as they are in this recipe. Avoid putting olive oil in this dough, the high heat in the Kamado Joe cooking process can cause the crust to burn before it gets cooked.

Fermented dough provides you with an improved texture and flavor of the crust. The process of fermentation happens when yeast breaks down sugars in the dough which creates gasses (carbon dioxide and alcohol). In turn, this process leaves you with a more flavorful crust. This process provides the finished dough with more air holes, lighter and easier to digest. Cold fermenting in the refrigerator slows down the process which gives the yeast time to break down the carbohydrates making the necessary gases to provide the flavorful lighter pizza dough. The fermentation process actually makes the dough easier to stretch.

The Accidental Experiment

When I made the two batches of dough for the video below, I mistakenly grabbed a rapid acting yeast for the first batch of dough. When I realized the mistake, I changed to the regular dry active yeast on the second batch. Knowing the batches would be different, I figured it would be a good experiment to see how the two yeasts act in this recipe and see how the finished product of the dough compares between the two.

After the first 24 hour fermentation on the kitchen counter, the dry active yeast had risen some but not dramatically. On the other hand, the fast acting yeast had risen to the top of 1/2 gallon container I had used and it was beginning to push the lid off. I quickly knocked down the fast acting yeast dough back down slightly to be able to close the lid. I placed both doughs in the refrigerator to slow the rise and fermentation. Refrigeration slows the process of a dough rise.

I let both doughs ferment the additional 48 hours in the refrigerator. After the 48 hours, I pulled them out and continued the process of forming the dough balls and then rested the doughs in the refrigerator. At this point in the video you can see the 4 fast acting yeast dough balls on the sheet pan are visibly bigger than the second batch with the dry active yeast.

Results

When forming the dough into pizza crust, the fast acting yeast pizza dough was more temperamental when stretching as well as baking, one of the doughs I had stretched thinner and got stuck on the stone and tore when moving the pizza. Those 4 dough balls made into pizzas reacted differently in the cooking process. Some puffed up a lot more than others and some were inconsistent where they raised around the crust.

The dough balls with the dry active yeast were great to work with. They were easy to stretch and gave enough tension to avoid getting too thin. The pizzas cooked consistently and browned evenly.nI recommend to avoid using the fast acting yeast when making this recipe. The slower acting yeast provided a nice texture to the dough and made it easy to stretch, provided a flavorful, light crust.

Sun Dried Tomato Pesto, Fresh Mozzarella, Prosciutto, Spinach, Blue Cheese Crumbles & Balsamic Reduction Drizzle

Enjoy!

Kamado Joe DoJoe temperature was approximately 650° when cooking the pizzas. This dough works well in the DoJoe pizza attachment for Kamado Joe.Oven temperature set at 500° in ovens the time will most likely extend the bake time even if cooking on a pizza stone. If you are using a pizza stone or tiles in the oven let the oven come to temperature and let the stone heat for 30 minutes before baking pizzas.

Other pizza setups such as OONI or other pizza ovens, you will have to gage the temperature and time for your setup.