Quick pizza dough – when there was no time to ferment
No 72-hour dough in the fridge? Here is how to make a good dough in three hours, and a straight list of what you actually give up along the way. No guesswork.
Quick answer: no 72-hour dough in the fridge? A quick dough in about three hours can be done well, but it needs more yeast and a warmer fermentation – and you give up some of the depth of flavour and the digestible structure that a long cold fermentation provides.
What you actually give up
In three hours the enzymes barely get started breaking starch down into the sugars that otherwise give deeper flavour and finer leopard spots in the oven (see leoparding). The dough is also less digestible, because a long fermentation normally breaks down some of the gluten and starch that would otherwise weigh on your digestion. No disaster for a weeknight pizza, but noticeable if you put it side by side with a 48-hour dough.
How to make it good anyway
Increase the yeast substantially compared with the cold-fermentation recipe and keep the dough warm (ideally close to 25–28 °C) throughout the fermentation. Keep a closer eye on it with the poke test rather than the clock – a quick dough can go from perfect to overproofed in a surprisingly short time.
If you have 6–8 hours instead, read room-temperature fermentation for a better middle ground. Get the yeast quantity exactly right with the calculator, and for a quick first go, see your first pizza.
