I’ve been having a lot of fun making great bread from Ken Forkish’s Flour Water Salt Yeast. While I’ve stuck mainly with boule loaves using his Overnight White Bread With Poolish recipe (some of which are pictured below), this week I used his recipe for making pizza dough.

Ken Forkish’s recipes for pizza dough are written to yield enough dough to cook 5 pizzas. But since I wasn’t sure whether the dough balls were meant to be frozen, and refrigerator storage was recommended for only a few days, I thought I’d cut the recipe in half and make only 3 (slightly smaller) pizzas.

Since I don’t have a pizza stone (yet!!) I used my cast-iron skillet to bake up the pizzas.

The first pizza I made, the day the (overnight) dough was ready, might have been slightly underdone as the crust was not as crispy or browned as I would have liked and came out rather flat. (The toppings look well done because I broiled for the last 2 minutes of cook time).

I made the second pizza the next day, and added a few minutes to the cook time before a (shorter) broiler zap. This crust was much crisper and better developed with more body, but because it was much gassier than the first crust, some of the crust bubbled up pretty high and got scorched by the broiler. Regardless of the charring, I liked this pizza better than the first.

The third pizza, made two days later, I think was the best. Letting the dough develop over a couple of days gave the crust just a bit more tang, closer to a sourdough flavor. I predicted that this would gas up higher than the second pizza, so I tried to pierce some of the bubbles I noticed were starting to form before putting into the oven. And in addition to pepperoni, I added onions, grape tomatoes, and broccoli (to my half). The crust was delightfully fluffy on the inside and crispy on the outside, and overall, the result was delicious!