What we'll do over six weeks
Okay so here's the thing. I've spent three lessons telling you what's wrong with your pizza and basically none of that helps you unless you know where we're actually headed. So let's lay it out.
Six weeks. That's the deal. Here's how they break down.
Week 1 was the diagnosis lesson — why pizza goes sad, mostly water temp and rushing things. You've got that one already.
Week 2 was time as an ingredient. Cold ferment, why it matters, why I'm annoying about it.
Week 3 was ovens and flour, and why your oven is the actual bottleneck, not the bag of flour you're using.
That gets us caught up. Here's the rest.
Week 4 we make dough. Actual hands-in-the-bowl, flour-on-the-counter dough making. I'll show you my ratio, we'll mix a batch together, and then — this is important — we're not baking it that night. We're putting it in the fridge and leaving it alone until next week. I know that's a weird feeling for a cooking class. You come, you make something, and you don't get to eat it. Sluff off that discomfort. It's the whole point.
Week 5 is stretching and shaping. This is the week people either love or want to throw something. You're going to tear holes in dough. Your first one might come out looking like Idaho, or Ohio, or some country that hasn't been invented yet. Mine still do sometimes. We'll talk about why hand-stretching beats a rolling pin — rolling pins are for pie, I firmly believe that — and I'll have you tear a few on purpose so you see that a torn dough isn't a dead dough. You patch it, you move on.
Week 6 is toppings, saucing, and baking start to finish. This is where I get a little contrarian and tell you to use less sauce and less cheese than you want to. Everybody drowns their pizza. We'll do a side-by-side — one pizza loaded up, one pizza restrained — and taste them next to each other. Most people don't believe me until they've done that comparison with their own mouth.
That's the shape of it. Diagnose, understand time, understand heat, make dough, shape dough, top and bake. In that order, on purpose.
Why the order matters
I could've started week one with "here's how to make dough" and just gone straight into it. A lot of classes do. But if I hand you a recipe before you understand why the recipe works, you're just following steps, and the second something looks different than the picture you're going to panic and add too much flour or give up.
So we're doing it backwards from most classes. Understand the problem, understand the two things that actually fix it — time and heat — and then and only then do we touch dough.
A real story about why week 4 and week 5 are a week apart
I didn't plan cold fermentation on purpose the first time. I made a batch of dough one afternoon and then got called into an early shift at work I wasn't expecting. Dough sat in my fridge, forgotten, for two days. I came home, remembered it was in there, figured it was probably garbage by now.
It was the best crust I'd ever made. Bubbly, actual flavor to it, crisp on the bottom in a way my rushed same-day dough never got close to. I had no idea why. It bugged me enough that I spent a week reading about fermentation on forums at like eleven at night, which is a strange hobby to develop, but here we are.
That's basically why week 4 and week 5 are separated by a full week and not back to back. You're going to make dough, put it in the fridge, and go home. It's going to sit there developing flavor and structure while you're at work or asleep or wherever, doing nothing, which is the entire trick. Then you come back the following week and stretch it. If we did dough-making and stretching in the same two-hour class, you'd be stretching same-day dough, and same-day dough is just worse. I'm not going to set you up to practice on the worse version.
What you'll need to bring
Nothing fancy. I'll have flour, yeast, salt available for week 4, but if you want to start building the habit now, grab a bag of bread flour or all-purpose next time you're at Macey's or Costco — you don't need the specialty stuff, we covered that. A kitchen scale if you've got one. If not, don't sweat it, we'll figure out measuring cups too.
One real caution, since we'll be handling a hot stone or steel starting in week 6: those things hold heat like nothing else in your kitchen, and they do not look hot. Don't touch one straight off the oven and don't run one under water while it's still warm. I did that once with my stone. Loud crack right there on the counter. My wife heard it from the other room and just said "what did you do." So learn from me instead of the stone.
Before next time
Just come with questions if you've got them from the last three weeks. Week 4 is where this stops being theory and starts being dough on your hands.