Making Vito Lacopelli Pizza Dough

After watching his video, twice, I decided it was time to make Vito Lacopelli pizza dough. If you want an authentic pizza dough recipe, you have to follow his to the letter! In order to do this, you need a food scale and measuring cups.

For the perfect pizza dough recipe, you will need to make the poolish. Poolish is made my mixing water, yeast and flour. This will essentially be your yeast that you use a day later with the rest of the ingredients. For the poolish you will need:

• 300 ml of water
• 300 gr of flour
• 5 grams of dry yeast
• 5 grams of honey

After mixing all the ingredients you place the mixture in an airtight container and leave it in the fridge 16-24 hours. I may have left it in there a little longer because my brain forgets easily.

The next day, I did the remaining steps of Vito Lacopelli pizza dough. For the next part you will need:

• 700 ml of water (3 cups of water)
• 1250 gr flour
• 40 gr salt

The first part is to mix 700 ml of water with the poolish. After incorporating this into a smooth consistency, you add half of the flour and mix some more. Once that is incorporated you add the salt and mix thoroughly. I did not do this step correctly. I mixed it enough but I should have probably done at least a minute or two not 15 seconds or so. Next, you add the remaining flour and create a loose dough ball.

Since I didn’t add enough water, my dough was a little harder. Vito’s dough was stickier so he covered it for 15 minutes and voila! It was perfect. I covered my dough for 20 minutes. The next step was to coat your hands with olive oil (I ran out and used canola) and loosely shape the dough into a round ball. Once you have your dough shape, coat your container or bowl with oil and place the dough inside. Let the dough rise for another 30 minutes then you can cut it into strips and smaller dough balls.

Perfect Pizza Dough Balls

This is where your scale will come in handy. You can make sure that every ball is equal or as close to equal in weight as possible. We aimed for 180 grams for every pizza dough ball. After letting the dough balls rise for two hours, they are ready to be used for pizza. We left out two dough balls and placed the remaining doughs in the freezer. You can freeze the dough overnight and then place them in individual freezer bags.

From Vito’s recipe we got 13 180g pizza doughs. If I added just a tad more water, perhaps I would have gotten more. We will have to try the recipe again and maybe use the mixer. Vito Lacopelli pizza dough came out great! So far, we’ve used it to make “mini burger buns,” bagels, and pizzas. This is the perfect pizza dough recipe for Neapolitan style pizza. Give it a try! You won’t hate it! And you won’t need to buy Walmart pizza dough for a few days at least.

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