Part 4 making New Haven style pizza at home prepping the pizza

Pizza Toppings and Pizza Prep
If you're using a pizza steel like I am in this video, be sure to preheat the oven at the highest setting on the middle rack for at least 1 hour. In my case this was 550 degrees F in a conventional home gas oven. You may want to crack a window in case the pizza smokes a little bit.
Be sure to let the pizza dough proof at room temp for about 1 hour before shaping it.
The red dish with flour in this video is a "flour bath". I take a nice round dish with a good 8-10 inch diameter and throw about an inch of bread flour in it.
Take your container with the dough in it and turn it upside down and let it hoover over the "flour bath", is should plop right into the dish. Simply press your fingertips lightly into the dough, flip one time and press fingertips again. By now you basically already have like an 8"-10" head start to stretching your pizza crust.
Transfer the dough to a flat surface pre-coated with a dusting of bread flour.
Holding your hands flat with your palms down gently use both hands to separate the edge of the crust at 12 o'clock, 3 o'clock, 6 o'clock and 9 o'clock.
with your hands and fingers still flat with palms down gently pat the crust from the middle up and down and from the middle side to side.
Flip over to the other side and repeat.
By now you should have a round pizza dough stretched out to about 15"-16" in diameter.
Be sure to put a generous dusting of either corn meal or semolina flour or a combination of the two on the surface of your pizza peel making sure to cover all of the edges.
For a large 15" to 16" thin crust pizza I like to use about 8 ounces of sauce, about 8 ounces of mozzarella cheese and about 1 ounce of Romano cheese.
Don't forget to add a generous splash of extra virgin olive oil and a few pinches of fresh oregano on top.
Don't take too long to add the toppings, the longer you take the more you run the risk that the dough starts to stick to the peel. Trust me, you don't want the dough to stick to the pizza peel!
This video is part 4 of a 6 part video tutorial on making homemade New Haven style pizza "Apizza". Be sure to check out all 6 parts and also go check out my reddit pizza profile that has tons of photos and additional info on making homemade New Haven style pizza "Apizza".
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