The Slow Route to Homemade Pizza

No wonder some of the pizza-obsessed do everything to coax their ovens into performing above their limits. (Making pizza on the self-cleaning cycle seems to be popular.) The Johnny Knoxville approach has its appeal. But after cooking more than 200 pizzas over several months, I learned an easier way to edge closer to the kind of airy, creamy, chewy, thin crust you find at pizzerias that have otherwise sane people waiting in line for an hour. And it has less to do with heat than good baking technique.

I let the dough rise overnight.

It’s not a new idea. Anthony Mangieri redefined New York’s artisanal scene when he opened Una Pizza Napoletana in 2004 (now living in San Francisco, he will reopen his pizzeria there later this summer). He learned to let dough rise for 24 hours in Naples. Pizzeria Mozza in Los Angeles, Pizzeria Delfina in San Francisco and Pizzeria Bianco in Phoenix all have overnight rises; at Lucali’s in Brooklyn, the dough rises for about 36 hours; and at Saraghina, also in Brooklyn, it goes for as long as 72 hours.

And yet most recipes for the home cook specify a three-hour rise at room temperature. That might be enough to let activated yeast produce carbon dioxide that inflates the dough. But the prolonged fermentation of an overnight rise not only develops the dough’s structure, it also enables starches to transform into flavorful sugars. The dough becomes complex and nuanced. It’s a crust you want to eat.

It’s also a crust you want to admire. While a three-hour rise yields a crust that has the pasty pallor of raw flour, the caramelized sugars from an overnight rise give the cornicione, or edge, a color that goes from golden brown to the deep bronze of a ’70s tan.

Peter Reinhart, author of “Artisan Breads Every Day” and “American Pie,” said the 24-hour wait will improve any dough: take your favorite recipe, let it sit overnight, then enjoy the upgrade.

Mr. Reinhart recommends letting the dough rise at room temperature for three hours, then refrigerating it. Or you might follow the example of Mr. Mangieri and let the dough remain at room temperature for the entire rise.

Mr. Mangieri is unusually candid for a pizzaiolo (most guard the tricks of their trade — understandably, they don’t want to give away the store). Besides employing an overnight rise, he uses a natural starter (instead of yeast) and Italian 00 flour.

Italian 00 flour is considered “soft” — low in the proteins called glutens that give dough its elasticity, like the flour used in the thin and supple Naples-style pizzas so popular in New York. Only I discovered that things aren’t so simple.

The 00 designation refers to how finely the flour is milled, not the protein content. Some 00 flours are around 7 percent proteins, others are 11 percent or higher. (By comparison, all-purpose flour is around 11 percent.)

While many pizzaioli consider the ideal 00 pizza flour to have 8 to 10 percent protein, there’s no sure way to tell from the bag, although some brands, like King Arthur Flour and Divella, post the percentages on their Web sites.

My goal was to mix soft and hard flours for a crust with Naples-style pliability and a bit of American chew. (Some pizzerias swear by a single flour, while others formulate blends.) Blending the flours doesn’t mean they cancel each other out. “It’s like mixing vinegar and olive oil,” said Edoardo Mantelli, the pizzaiolo of Saraghina. “Together they create a different flavor.”

Flavor is the point. Which is why, although I came up with a yeast dough that I like, I much prefer one made from a mother starter — sometimes called a sponge. It is a natural culture of active yeasts (which produce carbon dioxide and alcohol) and bacteria (which produce lactic acid) that both leaven pizzas and give them a tangy bite.

There is plenty of mythology surrounding mother starters, what Jeff Ford of Cress Spring Bakery in Blue Mounds, Wis., calls “misty-eyed accounts of capturing yeast in the air.”