8 to 10 inch: 4 to 6 oz / 107 to 166 g. 12 to 14 inch: 8.5 to 11.5 oz / 240 to 326 g. 16 to 18 inch: 15 to 19 oz / 426 to 540 g.

Nudge up for a thicker rim, down for a thinner one. My default is a 14-inch pie from an 11.5 oz (326 g) ball — that’s what the recipe makes four of.

Use the pizza dough calculator — pick your size and number of pizzas and it does the math, with this recipe’s baker’s percentages already filled in. It halves as easily as it doubles.

Either. Bread flour gives you a chewier, crisper crust; all-purpose gives a more tender one.

I use unbleached, unbromated — usually King Arthur all-purpose, which runs higher in protein than most national brands.

Two that don’t suit this recipe: 00 flour is milled for 800°F ovens and won’t brown in a home oven, and high-gluten flour like All-Trumps drinks more water than this formula gives it.

If you want to check your own bag: protein is in the nutrition panel in small type. King Arthur guarantees theirs — 11.7% for all-purpose and 12.7% for bread flour. Gold Medal all-purpose runs about 10.5%, Pillsbury 10 to 11%, Heckers and Ceresota 11.4 to 11.8%. On the bread flour side, Gold Medal Better for Bread is around 12% and Pillsbury Best Bread Flour about 12.9%. That spread is why King Arthur all-purpose behaves closer to another brand’s bread flour. Most brands don’t guarantee a number the way King Arthur does, so treat everything but theirs as approximate.

Yes, with vital wheat gluten — this gluten enrichment calculator gives you the amount. But don’t buy anything on my account; all-purpose makes a very good pie here.

Yes to both. For this recipe: 3.5 g instant (1 teaspoon) = 4.4 g active dry (about 1¼ teaspoons) = 10.5 g fresh.

Dissolve active dry first in a little of the recipe’s water at around 105°F for 10 minutes. Crumble fresh yeast into the water. Instant goes in with the flour — never straight into cold water, or you shock it.

Weigh it if you can. This is a low-yeast dough sitting in the fridge for three days, so a small error compounds.

I use Red Star, where instant and active dry swap 1:1 — that’s brand-specific, so check yours against Red Star’s yeast conversion table.

I haven’t tested it, and I won’t guess on a three-day cold ferment — too much can go sideways for me to send you into it on a hunch.

No. The long cold ferment develops most of the gluten for you, so this dough is far more forgiving about kneading than a same-day dough.

By hand: mix until shaggy, rest 15 to 20 minutes covered, then knead 5 to 8 minutes. The rest does much of the work.

Food processor: under two minutes. Reader Jestep ran it this way, cold-fermented three days, and called it the best dough he’d made. Pulse rather than run it, so the blade doesn’t warm the dough.

Bread machine: dough cycle only, and halve the recipe — a full batch is more than most machines hold.

Almost certainly not. At 62% hydration this dough should be tacky, which is what most people are describing.

If it’s genuinely slack, it’s your flour: lower protein absorbs less water. Don’t flour your way out of it — flour the ball top and bottom before shaping, and oil the container before it goes in.

You can, but this is the recipe I’d push you to weigh. A cup of flour varies by up to 20% depending on how it’s scooped, and at this hydration that’s the difference between a dough that handles and one that fights you.

Salt tightens the gluten network, so holding it back a minute or two makes kneading easier. Small thing, and the dough still works if you add everything at once.

1 tablespoon table salt = 1.5 tablespoons Morton kosher = 2 tablespoons Diamond Crystal, per America’s Test Kitchen. The recipe and calculator both assume table salt, and the two kosher brands are not interchangeable with each other.

The sugar, yes, in a home oven — it browns the crust before the pizza dries out, and feeds the yeast through the cold ferment. Skip it only if you have a pizza oven hot enough that browning isn’t the problem.

The oil is optional. It makes the crust more tender and, at 3% or higher, noticeably easier to stretch.

25 to 50% — not a doubling. This is the most common worry in my comments and almost nobody needs to act on it. In a clear container you’ll see bubbling along the bottom, which is the sign you want.

At least 24 hours, best on day three, and day four is still reliable. Past four you’re gambling — I’ve had dough go five and six days and be fine, and I’ve had it not be. If you’re making pizza for people on a particular night, don’t plan on day five.

The cold ferment does that work, and balling early means less handling of a developed dough later.

If you want to try it the other way, leave the balled dough at room temperature for 30 to 60 minutes before it goes in the refrigerator. That gives the yeast a head start and usually gets you a bit more rise during the cold ferment. Worth a side-by-side if you’re curious.

Yes — after the cold ferment, not before. That’s the part everyone gets wrong. Mix the dough, divide it into balls, and give them at least 24 hours in the refrigerator first. Freezing unfermented balls gets you convenience and no flavor.

Then freeze in two stages. Set the balls on a baking sheet lined with plastic wrap or parchment, cover loosely with plastic, and freeze until firm — 2 to 3 hours, or up to overnight. Once they’re firm, wrap each ball individually in plastic and put them in zipper-lock bags.

Freezing them firm first is what keeps them from going misshapen or sticking together, and it makes the individual wrapping a great deal easier.

They keep for up to 4 weeks. Longer may well work, but the results get less predictable.

Move the dough unwrapped into the refrigerator for 12 to 24 hours. Then bring it to room temperature for 20 to 60 minutes before you bake — nearer 20 in a hot summer kitchen, nearer 60 in a cool one.

Don’t shortcut this onto the counter from frozen. You get a ball that’s slack outside and still cold in the middle, and it will fight you when you stretch it.

The gluten isn’t relaxed yet. Cover it, wait another 10 to 15 minutes, try again. If it came straight from the fridge, that’s your answer — cold dough is tight dough.

Yes. Pull the balls within an hour of baking and let them sit covered — don’t leave them bare on the counter.

Cold dough blisters more and fights you when you stretch. That said, I often bake it a bit cold and just live with some bubbling, so don’t panic if you’re short on time.

You can, but it costs you the rim — a pin presses out the gas that gives a New York pie its puffed, chewy edge. Stretch by hand if you can.

Steel or stone, 6 to 8 inches from the top. Preheat at 500°F (260°C) for a full 45 minutes — the stone needs the time even once the oven says it’s ready. Aim for a 14-inch pizza in six minutes or less. Some people run two stones and bake between them.

You can still make this — it takes longer. Preheat the stone a full hour and expect 8 to 10 minutes rather than six.

Run the broiler for the last 60 to 90 seconds to get the top color a lower oven won’t produce on its own. Stand there and watch it; it turns fast.

In metric: 450°F is about 230°C, 500°F is 260°C, 550°F is about 290°C. Plenty of European ovens cap around 250°C and that’s fine.

A heavy cast iron skillet or griddle, preheated the same way — mass matters more than material. An inverted heavy baking sheet is a distant third. A thin pizza pan straight from the cupboard is the one setup that won’t crisp the bottom, because it has no stored heat to give.

On a gas grill, a stone on the grates with the lid down runs hotter than most home ovens.

It’s the whole difference between New York pizza and dry pizza. A long bake drives moisture out and you lose the crisp-yet-flexible crust that folds without cracking. The steel, the top rack and the 45-minute preheat all exist to make the bake short.

Check the cheese first — whole milk, low moisture mozzarella. Part-skim burns much sooner and is what most supermarkets stock.

Otherwise: a little more sauce buys time, frozen shredded cheese buys more. If it persists, your stone is too close to the broiler element.

Low moisture, whole milk mozzarella — the easiest upgrade on this page. Part-skim is the default in most markets, burns faster, and melts worse.

Brands melt differently, so try a few. Some well-known pizzerias blend grated hard cheese, fresh mozzarella and low moisture mozzarella, which is chef’s kiss good.

7/11 ground tomatoes, from a local Italian market. If you can’t find them, I’d rather point you at a type than a brand: canned ground or crushed tomatoes — not purée or sauce — with nothing in them but tomatoes and salt.

Two shortcuts that work in a regular supermarket: Jersey tomatoes, and cans with Italian branding. Both are usually good. I don’t stay loyal to one brand and I don’t think you need to.

No. It goes on the dough raw, and it cooks on the pizza. A sauce that’s been simmered on the stove and then baked has been cooked twice, and it comes out flat and a little pasty instead of bright.

My no-cook pizza sauce is stirred together in a couple of minutes. Two things I’d pass on from making it constantly: taste your tomatoes before you add any sugar, because canned tomatoes vary a lot in sweetness, and use fresh basil or nothing. Dried basil is wrong here in a way that’s hard to explain and obvious once you taste it.