Seventy-Two Hour Pizza Dough

Author Notes

One of my favorite pizza-dough recipes is Jim Lahey’s no-knead dough, on which this recipe is based. It’s simple, doesn’t require any equipment, and doesn’t make a big mess. (My wife disagrees about the mess; I have a talent for covering the kitchen in flour.) I make this dough at least once a week, sometimes quintupling the recipe and saving the extra balls of dough to use later or for the pizza classes I teach.

This dough is simple and foolproof, but you do need time. Not hands-on or working time, but twenty-four hours for rising and then forty-eight hours for the cold ferment. That’s seventy-two hours total, in case you don’t have a calculator.

The first twenty-four hours allows the dough to bulk ferment (or rise as one unit before being divided into individual dough portions) at room temperature; just park the dough someplace where it won’t be disturbed. The dough will release a pleasant aroma that will make your kitchen smell like a bakery.

Next, you’ll portion out the dough, ball it up, and store the balls in the refrigerator for a minimum of one day and up to ten. This is when the dough will develop some kick-ass flavor. The process is called cold fermentation, and it slows down the activity of the yeast to produce amazing flavors in your dough. The strike zone for the dough, in terms of optimal texture and flavor, is from day three through day five (or forty- eight to ninety-six hours after the bulk fermentation that occurs in step 4). You can take the dough out of the fridge and make pizza earlier, but the full seventy-two-hour method is what gives it a truly memorable taste and texture.


Through the years, I have adapted Jim’s original recipe to make it my own. One change is that I use bread flour instead of all-purpose flour, which adds the perfect heft to your crust when the dough is baked at high heat in a home environment. And somewhat ironically, I actually knead the no-knead dough. After I incorporate all the ingredients, I wet my hands and knead the batch for two to three minutes. Without this step, I’ve ended up with dried clumps of flour in the dough. There are worse things in life, but we’re seekers of pizza perfection.
—Food52

Test Kitchen Notes

Reprinted with permission from Baking Steel's Baking With Steel cookbook. —The Editors