Week 5 Bake: Stretching and blistering pizza bases

Type 00, 0.1% yeast and a 90-second bake — the week where the oven stops being equipment and starts being the difficult variable

22 March 2027

A Neapolitan base ferments for two days and bakes in ninety seconds. The dough is deliberately plain — flour, water, salt and almost no yeast — because at 480 °C the oven supplies everything else.

Before the session#

Mix on Saturday morning for Monday. Per person: 500 g type 00 flour, 310 g water, 13 g salt and 0.5 g instant yeast. That is 62% hydration, 2.6% salt and 0.1% yeast, and the yeast figure is not a typo — weigh it on a jeweller’s scale or scale the batch up and take a share.

Dissolve the salt in the water, add the flour, and mix for three or four minutes, only until there are no dry patches. Do not knead it. Leave it covered at room temperature for two hours, divide into four 250 g balls, seal each one tight against the bench, and put them in the fridge at 4 °C for 24 to 48 hours. Take them out four hours before the bench so they come up to 20 °C and finish proving.

You cold-retarded focaccia last week for flavour. Here the fridge is also doing the lifting: at 0.1% yeast the dough needs those two days simply to rise, and the slow rise is what makes it extensible enough to open with your fingers.

Type 00 is ground from soft wheat, and ground gently, so it carries less damaged starch than bread flour. Damaged starch is what amylase can get at, so this dough makes sugar slowly and finishes two days of fermentation with very little of it left over. That matters on Monday. A sugary dough in a 480 °C oven goes dark all over in the time the rim takes to rise; this one browns where the heat is worst and stays pale everywhere else.

After ciabatta and focaccia, 62% will feel tight and almost dry in your hands. That is the point. A wet dough will not come off a peel in one piece, and a slack base drops its rim on the way into the oven.

Bring your four balls in a lidded box and nothing else. Tomato and fior di latte are on the bench.

In the session#

Four hours, four bakes each, and most of the learning happens in the ninety seconds you cannot intervene in.

Open the ball on a bed of semolina. Press your fingertips into the centre and walk them outward, stopping 2 cm short of the edge — you are driving gas out of the middle and into the rim, which is where you want it. Then lift the disc onto the backs of your knuckles and let it widen under its own weight, turning as you go, until it is 28 to 30 cm across, 2 to 3 mm in the centre and a plump 1.5 cm at the edge.

There is no rolling pin on this bench. A pin flattens the rim you just spent two days inflating, and because it thins the centre unevenly it leaves you a membrane that tears — usually at the worst moment, halfway off the peel.

Dress it with 70 g of crushed tomato spread to within 2 cm of the rim and 80 g of fior di latte, torn and drained on paper for twenty minutes first. Drained is the whole instruction. Cheese straight from the brine carries water that has nowhere to go in ninety seconds except down, and a soggy middle is the most common failure on this bench by a wide margin.

The bench oven runs at 480 °C. Here is what that buys, against the ovens you have at home:

Colour at this speed is two reactions, not one. Maillard browning — amino acids and reducing sugars rearranging from around 140 °C — turns the pale ground of the rim gold and tastes of bread. The dark spots are past that: a bubble of gas pushes the skin up into the hottest air in the oven, its surface passes 300 °C, and the sugars and starch pyrolyse to carbon. Leoparding is a controlled burn — coin-sized, faintly bitter, scattered across a pale field. A continuous black underside is the same reaction with nobody watching it.

A wood oven normally runs its dome hotter than its floor, and you want it that way. If your base browns before the rim has risen, the floor has got ahead of the air. Shortening the bake will not fix it; you will get a raw rim on a burnt base. Let the floor shed heat between pizzas, or lift the pizza back onto the peel and hold it up near the dome for the last twenty seconds.

At home you will not reproduce this, and you should stop trying. Six minutes is long enough for the interior to lose the moisture that makes a cornicione custardy, so a 250 °C oven gives you a crisp pizza rather than a Neapolitan one. A steel closes more of the gap than a stone, because steel conducts heat an order of magnitude faster and dumps it into the base in the first thirty seconds instead of trickling it in. Preheat either one for a full hour at maximum, then switch to the grill element for the last two minutes so the top catches up before the base overbakes.

Afterwards#

Start a sourdough starter today. Week 6 is sourdough, and a starter begun next Monday will not be ready for it.

In a clean jar, mix 50 g wholemeal flour with 50 g water at about 28 °C. Cover it loosely and keep it somewhere near 24 °C. From tomorrow, once a day, throw away all but 25 g and feed it 25 g flour and 25 g water at the same temperature. Days two and three will smell sharp and rise hardly at all — that is the wrong bacteria winning early, and it passes. By week 6 it should double within four to six hours of a feed and smell of yogurt and green apple. A nail-polish smell means it is starving, so feed it twice a day for the last stretch.

Fermentation is the thread from here to week 8: today’s two-day cold rise, then sourdough, rye and bagels, all of it marked by bake-off 2. Keep the starter log from today — feed times, how far it rose, how long it took. That log is evidence, and you cannot reconstruct it in week 8.

Before you leave, photograph the underside of your best base and your worst one side by side, and write one line on which of the three went wrong: the tear, the flood, or the floor that ran ahead of the air.