I loved Jim Lahey's pizza restaurant Co. when it was open in NYC, and was so sad when it closed. It was a regular go-to whenever I was anywhere near that side of town. And so when I saw that Jim Lahey had a pizza recipe book while browsing my local library stacks, I grabbed it with high excitement.
The resulting two pizzas I made from the half portion of his no-knead dough recipe were very good with nice salty and yeasty flavors in every bite. I didn't follow any of his pizza topping recipes, rather just the dough and baking method.
The dough required an 18-hour room temperature rise, which led to a slightly sticky dough that was hard to stretch out nicely. I imagine my lack of experience shaping pizzas by hand v. rolling probably contributed to this difficulty though.
What I most liked about Lahey's pizza approach is that he calls for pre-heating a pizza stone 8 inches from the top of the oven at 500 degrees before then turning on the broiler to bake the pizza. That high heat leads to a nicely cooked pizza in just a few minutes.
Moving forward, to really make use of this technique, I should pre-heat the broiler for longer before putting in the shaped pizza and leave the dough in the oven slightly longer until there are more black spots across the pizza. I will probably continue to pre-cook the dough, which I generally do, before adding toppings to avoid the toppings overwhelming the thin dough.
What I least liked about this pizza was the relatively small pizzas that his portions led to. One Lahey pie is enough for slightly more than one person, but not quite enough for two. As a result, for the slightly higher effort of an 18-hour room rise instead of a forget-about-it fridge rise, I think I'll probably continue to default to my standard pizza dough recipe, but now coupling it with Lahey's broiler bake approach.
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