pizza-dough | best possible pizza dough for Neapolitan pizza

pizza-dough is a Ruby library. pizza-dough has no bugs, it has no vulnerabilities, it has a Permissive License and it has medium support. You can download it from GitHub.

This recipe is dedicated to helping you make the best possible pizza dough for Neapolitan pizza. My personal motivation has always been to recreate one of my childhood memories - a pizza in a small restaurant named Panorama in the Italian city of Olang(Valdaora1). For years I have been obsessed with tasting different pizzas, observing how the pizzaioli make the dough. I have tried endless times, discussed with people from all over the world. This repo is dedicated to sharing my quest of figuring out the best possible pizza dough. Please note - this guide is scoped to the dough only, not the actual baking/topping of the pizza. Disclaimer - I in no way claim that all of the information here is scientifically correct. This is not a work of professional science, but more a work of my endless research over the years. If you can further back some of my observations by scientific articles I would be more than happy if you created a pull request. The Neapolitan pizza is characterised by a relatively high edge and a thin center of the pizza. The only ingredients required to make the dough are flour, water, salt and yeast. Historically sourdough has been used as an alternative to yeast. However the Neapolitan pizza association (Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana) clearly states that only yeast should be used to make the dough. This can be debated as our ancestors did not have access to yeast, they were using sourdough for their pizza. Also it can be debated whether our ancestors did truly make pizza, since a high amount of gluten in the wheat is required to make the dough. The gluten is the core factor that allows us to stretch the dough apart and make it thin on the interior. It is also the factor that allows air to be trapped inside of the dough, creating the open edge filled with tiny alveoli. This high gluten flour did not exist for a long time. If you look at the popular brand Caputo it started selling its wheat flour in 1924. New kinds of flour have been developed using radioactivity, or toxins. This resulted in faster genetic mutations which then increased the yield of the crop. So it can be argued that when pizza was created new flour and modern yeast had already been available. Using yeast is easier than sourdough, since you have fewer variables you need to control. For example if fermented too long a sourdough have a negative impact on the gluten structure of the dough. These factors can be more easily controlled with regular yeast. The traditional Neapolitan workflow has always been to create the dough on the night before baking the pizza. This is one of the core features of creating a dough that has a great taste on its own. In fact - you could just bake the whole dough as a bread and it would taste awesome. A combination of room temperature fermentation and cold fermentation creates special enzymes which foster the complex but very pleasant taste of the pizza dough.