Two questions: 1) it seems like the 150 g of flour can either be whole wheat OR the same white bread flour (the 250 g of CM high mountain), wouldn't they behave differently in the recipe, since whole wheat absorbs more water? 2) what is the starter fed with? I usually feed mine with all purpose flour, but sometimes use bread flour depending what I am baking. This can make a difference.

We've made this recipe a few times and it's so good. The first time we made changes to the original recipe and thought it was good but missing something. The second time we made it almost exactly as written, and it was so good, some of the best pizza I've ever had. The only small change we made was sprinkling on a little salt after putting on the sauce. We've proofed the dough 24 hours and 48 hours, and prefer the flavor of the dough with a 24-hour proof.

Best pizza ever!!!! It made 9 pizzas. 1 10 inch is enough for 1 person. So this feeds 9 people. We used our grill at 700° and a pizza stone. Definitely would recommend. We’ve tried many pizza recipes and this one surpasses them by a lot.

Fantastic results. Thanks BA team for doing all the leg work and distilling everything down to one recipe. The sauce is phenomenal. The maitake mushroom pizza is the bomb. I used pizza dough from an Italian store near me and it worked out very well. I made a mortadella pie as well. Delish!

Fantastic dough, sauce, everything.

I'm unsure of how many pizzas this recipe actually makes. The top says it makes 1 10" pizza but this obviously isn't true (unless that 10" pizza weighs a couple kilos). How much would I have to scale down the recipe to make 3-4 pizzas? Thanks. Love the work that went into making it BTW!

It really annoys me that this recipe isn't rated higher and that people rate it one star because it looks "pretentious". It makes fantastic pizza! Granted, I've only been able to make it with ingredients that are local to me, but this recipe is such a great guide to experiment with different flour combinations. Tip: if you only have a standard oven, I really recommend blind baking the dough once you've shaped it, but before you sauce it and put toppings on. If you cook it like this until it just starts to go slightly browned, you will end up with a crispier pizza with a more authentic taste.

The crust was a lot of work. We proofed the dough for 48 hours and it had good texture, the best homemade crust we've made but felt like it could have used a little more flavor, definitely more salt. We really liked the toppings, the sauce with Bianco DiNapoli tomatoes was probably our favorite component of the pizza. The mushrooms were delicious as well. The chiles were overpowering so I would not use those again. I like lemon but we skipped that and didn't miss it.

WARNING!: There is an error in the recipe write up. Under the ingredient list the recipe calls for "4 oz. 2-year-aged Parmesan, coarsely grated". This is an insane amount of parmesan cheese for 1, 10" pie. Please refer to the end of the write up where they say to add 1Tbsp + 1.5 tsp of parm and not over a cup of grated cheese. I started off adding over an ounce and it was overpowering. Also the recipe calls for 2 cans of " Bianco DiNapoli whole peeled tomatoes" but 1 can makes more then you will need for 9 pizzas. I would estimate 1 can made enough for 15 pies at 3Tbsp per pie. Disclaimer: I made the Perfect Pizza with the following 2 exceptions: 1) I do not have a Breville Pizzaiolo oven, but instead used my oven that gets to 600 degrees and a large baking steel. 2) I do not have a flour mill and instead of milling 150 g of cracked wheat I used 100 g of Central Milling fine whole wheat flour and 50 g of Central Milling medium whole wheat flour. -Review- There seems to be a lot of reviews for this pizza that did not follow the recipe at all or even try and make it. As a home baker I am extremely lucky to live about 40min from a central milling retail location and have access to specialty food stores that carry the other hard to find ingredients. The dough is amazing with great feel, elastability, flavor and texture. I will be making this dough again in the future, maybe scaled down to make 4-5 pies instead of 9. I did say “Kitten Fingers!” a lot while dimple-ing the dough to the amusement of my family and friends and I feel like it was instrumental in the success I had. Note: It tripled (not doubled) in size during the 3 hour bulk rise stage so be sure you have a bowl or container large enough. After I portioned them into 200g balls and left them in the fridge for 30 hours they had not risen as much as I had hoped so I left them on the covered baking sheet out at room temp for an additional 2.5 hours before I started baking and they were perfect from start to finish. Note: I live on the west coast and cake yeast proved to be almost impossible to locate. I ended up having to drive quite a distance to obtain it and was only able to do so because I made this during the christmas holiday season. In the future I will be forced to substitute dry yeast. The sauce was great. Bright, sweet and acidic. I liked it a lot, especially on the mushroom "perfect pizza" and when used to make a margarita pizza. I am a convert to Bianco DiNapoli tomatoes now and this is probably the best thing I learned about from this recipe. As I said earlier in my review you only need 1 can if your doing a single dough batch as you only use 3 Tbsp per pie. (I used the second can I bought to make some tomato soup that knocked my socks off!) In the videos the pizza places hung up on Andy when he asked what brand of canned tomatoes they used, but when Clair visited them to learn to make dough you can see pallets of Bianco DiNapoli tomatoes in the background. The cheese hybrid was better than either is alone and made for a creamy rich “perfect” pizza. The imported mozzarella di bufala was the most difficult ingredient to source after the cake yeast, but was worth the trouble and expense. Do NOT skip or rush the step where you drain the cheese. I left it draining for an hour and it was still losing water. The pies at the end where mush less soupy then the ones at the beginning even after an hour drain. Once again; Do not add 4oz of parm to your pizza. Even a quarter of that will ruin the delicate flavor of that expensive/exquisite mozzarella di bufala. The toppings were wonderful. The maitake mushrooms are expensive but are superior to every other mushroom pizza I have ever had. Definitely worth it. The Calabrian chiles worked very well with the rest of the flavors but I saw no advantage to chopping them and adding them to oil myself instead of using the pre-crushed ones that come in oil already. I tried both and tasted no difference in the end. (I have been using the oil to top just about everything I eat now. Move over hot sauce!) The lemon zest was a great way to brighten the pizza’s flavor profile and worked very well with the rest of the ingredients. The fresh “whisper thin” garlic slices were not very noticeable when you ate a slice but I would not have wanted to add more to this pizza. -Conclusion- Is it the perfect pizza? I don’t know. Is it the best mushroom pizza I have ever had? Yes. Is it the best pizza I have ever made at home in my oven? Yes. Was it worth all the effort it took? Absolutely. Will I make this again? Yes.

So, I’m not gonna comment on the dough, didn’t have time to make a starter and get a bunch of special flours. The sauce is simple, straight forward, and delicious. Nothing else to say. What I think is the biggest take away you should get from this recipe is that the combination of Calabrian chili, maitake mushroom, and lemon zest is absolutely, unbelievably delicious. Find a dough recipe, any will do. Wanna make a pan pizza? Put those toppings on it. Wanna make a Detroit style? A deep dish? Doesn’t matter. Put those toppings on it. I don’t even like mushrooms!

I just prepared this dough, turned out perfect! I didn't have any of the special flour, not the ability to mill my own, so substituted just 1kg of high protein bread/pizza flour. I see a lot of reviews complaining that this recipe uses special equipment and expensive ingredients. Remember that this is Make Perfect, so using the best ingredients and special equipment is the best path. Having said that, the flour can be replaced (as I did) and just use your regular oven turned to the highest temp with a pizza stone inside and it will cook fine. Final thought, anyone complaining about the use of grams needs to get serious. How do you measure 0.17637 ounces of fresh yeast. Please... Great work BA team. Looking forward to Making Perfect : Burgers!

I loved the series and everyone in it. Even though I knew I'd never be able to replicate the recipe at home, I learned some things. First, Bianco DiNapoli tomatoes are the very best canned tomatoes that I've ever tasted and beat out all of the San Marzano DOP tomatoes that I have tried. (You can get them at the market sometimes referred to as Whole Paycheck.) I learned that raw sauce rocks! I learned how to char a crust by getting the heat source (oven) stupid hot. I put a baking stone on my gas grill, turning all burners on high. My pizza was done in three or four minutes with a perfectly charred crust! Next, I learned to choose my toppings more selectively, choosing only a few great ingredients. Previously, I was a dump-everything-you-have-on-top kind of guy. My only wish is that I could have been there when they finally tasted that perfect pizza. I bet it was to-die-for.

well what about a regular oven for those of us who dont have extra mini ovens in our tiny NYC apartments

Thanks for this video series and recipe, it was a lot of fun to watch the discovery of new techniques and the progress towards a “perfect” pizza. I realize this recipe is not reproducible for a majority of people, so I won’t rate it as I can’t realistically make it. I will however keep an eye out for bison mozerella, and will try raw tomato sauce. If the meats mentioned happen to be available wherever I go I may try those too. Product placement wasn’t the point so much as finding what worked to achieve a desired result. I’ll be trying a mushroom pizza with olive oil and chili and lemon seasoning. Keep on creating :-).

I did not make all of the recipe because there is no way I'll be able to cook a thin-crust NY style pizza in my home. I'll go grandma style with a sheet pan any time. But, I did learn a lot of new things that upped my pizza game significantly in regards of sauce, cheese and toppings. 1) I'd never have guessed that raw sauce is so good. But it is! I'll never use a cooked pizza sauce in my life. 2) Who knew fresh mozzarella works on pizza? I didn't! I use fresh buffalo mozzarella because this stuff is just awesome and luckily easy to get where I live. 3) I always thought of mushrooms as a boring pizza topping. But adding chili and lemon zest made this an absolutely great pie. Even though I had to use regular mushrooms because no one here has ever heard of maitake mushrooms (I even looked up the german name and still, no idea)

I followed the recipe for the dough only, and it’s the most amazing pizza dough I’ve ever made or eaten (only slightly hyperbolic). Admittedly, I only tried the recipe because I love and trust Claire like a long lost friend trapped in my computer, but I can assure you that this review isn’t biased at all. The sourdough gave it just enough flavour to make even habitual crust-abandoners eat it while the yeast gave it the fluffiness it needed. This will definitely be my go-to recipe from now on. My only criticism is the sheer amount of dough this recipe makes. Since water isn’t listed as an ingredient, it’s easy to miscalculate how many dough balls this would yield. The number is nine by the way. BA, you should update this recipe with he amount of dough balls. Who needs nine??? There was so much dough that it literally jumped out of my stand mixer. I had to divide it into two batches just to mix. A tip for people unaccustomed to working with wet dough: it takes way longer than you’d expect to develop the gluten structure kneaded. This took a bit over 10 minutes per batch to come together. A good indicator that it’s done is that it stop sticking to the sides of the mixing bowl and kind of just slaps it.

I made this dough yesterday, which means we have not yet cooked it. That said, I followed the ingredients to the gram - I was very precise with the measurements - but I had to use different flours as I'm in Canada and don't have access to the exact kinds of flours they use here. It came out SO SO SO wet. I used all-purpose, whole wheat, and 00 pizza flour and it was ridiculously wet and sticky. I had to add several cups of additional flour after it rested 3 hours because I was hoping it would come together and develop the gluten more, but no. I fear that after the 24 hours of proofing today that when we go to bake it tonight it's not going to have the texture we wanted at all since we had to keep doctoring it along the way. I will report back after we bake it and we will try it one more time with some major adjustments, but it makes me feel like we probably won't be able to achieve the texture and the bubbles that are shown in their pizza videos, which is what we wanted so much. :( Fingers crossed the baking helps it a little...

Soapnana....no one “bashed” the recipe, we just giggled a bit. It’s just pizza dough.

There are a whole lot of opinions paired with starred reviews here, from people who didn't actually try the recipe. If you didn't try to make it, you shouldn't be assigning stars. I do think that the recipe should be prefaced that this is a pretty over-the-top approach to pizza, but that should go without saying if you watched the video series. I will probably never make this pizza but there's no need to bash the recipe because it doesn't align with your own approach to cooking.

I do like the presentation of the Bon Appetit crew but I'd prefer meals that I can cook for myself. The last few recipes on this site have featured fancy ingredients that I can't find or can't afford. I prefer Molly's videos because they're easy to follow and mostly use common ingredients.

Look, this may be a good pizza recipe, and if I had the money to drop on an $800 pizza oven, fly to Tuscany to watch people make mozzarella, mill my own floor, and still had gall tell someone this is the "perfect" pizza, I would be inclined to believe it just to justify the cost. I don't have those resources, and I think my pizza is pretty damn good, and I have a conventional oven with a pizza stone, which cost something like $35, don't believe the hype people, a poor craftsman blames their tools, and as far as I'm concerned, that's what everyone who worked on this "article" is. Bon appetit should take a page from chef John's book and make food that normal people can make without dumping a fortune into a gadget that only has one purpose, and will only be used a couple of times. Or they should make an entire series of recipes that involve cooking in this $800 oven with only a 10" deck.

Ok... so what is the point of even reading... even if I could get the same ingredients here what is wrong with normal flour? Or wholegrain flour? Is it possible to have a version of the recipe with common ingredients?

The only thing wrong with this recipe is that the ingredients are not where I am. I live in Alaska and would have to special order the entire thing. I wish I lived in NY still. I really enjoyed the series of making this pizza. I make my dough kinda the same way. I use a starter with a package of yeast and the rest is all conventional ingredients. I don't have access to much here.

Anonymous: well, they did mention an olive oil, Frankie’s....and that’s why your pizza was a complete failure.

Very disappointed to see that there was no indication of the brand of olive oil or the kind of filtered bottled water that should be used for this recipe. We need more product placement and weird measurements (like 660 grams of water) from this very serious publication!!! I am eager to renew my subscription in the hope that we get more recipes like this one (review supported by Ricardo's Original Espresso Pods).

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