Dough

This recipe is part of the Epicurious Online Cooking School, in partnership with the Culinary Institute of America. To watch it being made, and to learn how to make other Italian classics, check out the videos.

This versatile dough is ideally made in a stand mixer, but a food processor works surprisingly well, too.

This dough is chewy, bubbly, and better than what you'll get at most pizza places. It bakes wonderfully in a home oven, on a pizza stone or a baking sheet. And thanks to the brilliant no-knead method of Jim Lahey—owner of New York's Sullivan Street Bakery and pizza spot Co.— it's easy to prepare, deriving its character from overnight fermentation, not laborious kneading. Just remember to start at least 1 day ahead.

Editor's note: Use Jim Lahey's no-knead dough recipe to make his Popeye Pie. While I'm not picky about the flour—either bread flour or all-purpose is fine—what does concern me is how the dough is handled. Treat it gently so the dough holds its character, its texture. When you get around to shaping the disk for a pie, go easy as you stretch it to allow it to retain a bit of bumpiness (I think of it as blistering), so not all of the gas is smashed out of the fermented dough. I prefer to hold off on shaping the ball until just before topping it. If it's going to sit for a while—more than a couple of minutes—cover it with a damp kitchen towel to prevent it from drying out. I offer you two approaches for shaping. The simpler one, executed completely on the work surface, is slower than the second, where you lift the disk in the air and stretch it by rotating it on your knuckles. Lifting it into the air to shape it is more fun, too.

This colorful dough should be made in a food processor, which ensures that the vegetable puree is distributed evenly throughout.

Pâte sucrée is another type of pastry dough. The method for making it is the same as for pâte brisée; you just have to add a bit more sugar and a couple of egg yolks. The presence of sugar results in a sturdier crust—ideal for the more structured crusts used for tarts. The flour and butter are processed slightly longer than for pâte brisée, as there should be no pieces of butter remaining. Both sugar and egg soften the dough a bit, making it a little harder to roll out perfectly than pâte brisée; it’s easier to patch, however, because any tears can simply be pressed together. Pâte sucrée is often used for blind-baked tart shells (meaning the crust is baked before the filling is added; see note on page 448). Because it is tender (due to the eggs), it will hold its shape better than a flaky crust would. A baked pâte sucrée shell is delightfully crisp, providing a nice contrast to soft, unbaked fillings, such as the panna cotta in the recipe that follows.

There are a handful of dishes that serve as true measures of any good cook: a great omelet, a comforting and well-balanced soup, a perfectly crisp and golden roast chicken, and a tender, flaky pie crust. Perhaps because of the risk of overworking, and turning out something that tears in two or tastes more leaden than light, many home cooks shy away from homemade dough, opting instead for unfold-as-you-go boxed crusts. But making perfect pie dough from scratch should be part of any home cook’s basic skills. And the best dough for homemade pies is pâte brisée. Like pasta dough, pâte brisée is a simple paste containing flour and water, but in this case butter is a key component and plays an integral role in creating the flaky texture. Getting the right proportion of butter to flour is crucial, as is using very cold ingredients and a light hand.

We use this dough to make all of our filled pasta shapes such as Fresh Ricotta and Egg Ravioli with Brown Butter (page 175) and Francobolli di Brasato al Pomodoro with Basil and Ricotta Salata al Forno (page 177).

This dough is more toothsome than any of our other pasta dough because it is fortified with semolina, a by-product of milling durum wheat flour, which is what the majority of dried pasta is made of. We use it to make orecchiette and pici, both of which need a strong dough to hold their shape.

We use dry dough to make the pastas that we serve with our ragùs. It gets shaped into maltagliati, garganelli, corzetti stampati, and tagliatelle (all described later), as well as other short shapes. We call it dry dough because it feels dryer than our basic pasta dough since it is made with only egg yolks and no whites.

It’s very traditional to use ortiche, or “nettles,” to make green pasta such as this one. Despite the fact that they are often called “stinging nettles,” they don’t really sting, but they do have a bristly texture that can irritate your skin. If you wash them first, they won’t bother you as you pick the leaves off the stems. Another solution is to wear thin rubber gloves. If you can’t find nettles, spinach is an acceptable substitute. In either case, the greens have so much water in them (no matter how much you try to squeeze it all out) that we use very few eggs in this dough.

This is the Basic Pasta Dough with the addition of squid ink. The ink makes the pasta black and also infuses it with a subtle seafood flavor. You may want to wear plastic gloves while making this pasta; otherwise, the black ink will stain your hands for days. You can buy squid ink or cuttlefish ink at Italian and specialty food stores; if you can’t find it, you can’t make this dough. Use a quality store-bought squid ink pasta, preferably fresh, instead.

The first thing I need to tell you about this pizza dough recipe is that it is not an exact replica of the pizza dough we use at Pizzeria Mozza. What I can promise you, however, is that when you make this dough at home, your pizza will be just as delicious as the one we serve. Dough reacts differently in different ovens, and when our restaurant dough is baked in a home oven the result is a thick and doughy crust—not at all like those that come out of our extremely hot wood-fired ovens. My challenge for this book was to come up with a recipe for a pizza dough that, when baked in a home oven, resulted in a crust that was as close to what we get out of our pizza ovens as possible. And with the invaluable help and relentless persistence of Jon Davis, a breadbaker whom I’ve worked with since I hired him at La Brea Bakery more than twenty years ago, we came up with this recipe. The dough is made with a sponge, which means that half of the flour is fermented, or aged, for a period of time—in this case, for an hour and a half—before being mixed with the remaining ingredients. This is a breadbakers’ trick to coax the subtle flavor characteristics from the flour in a relatively short period of time. I have also made this dough without the sponge, adding all of the flour and water at once and saving that hour and a half of fermenting time. If you are pressed for time, you can do this, and though you might lose a bit of flavor, it will still be better than most pizzas I’ve been served in the States. You will need a scale to make this recipe. Bread making, or in this case pizza dough making, is so specific, there is no way around it. When making the dough, it’s important to time it so that it’s ready when you want to make your pizzas.

We “borrowed” this recipe from our friend and Italian culinary mentor, Lidia Bastianich. Since it is an Italian tradition to pass recipes down through the generations of a family, and since Lidia’s son, Joe, is one of the three partners who own Mozza, we felt that this was not just okay but also the Italian thing to do.We hope Lidia feels the same way.

This pastry dough may be made in advance and frozen after the fourth turn for up to 2 months. The final two turns should be completed immediately before using.

This pastry dough may be stored in the freezer for up to 1 month. Defrost by refrigerating overnight or letting stand at room temperature for 1 hour.