New York Style Pizza

This New York Style Pizza recipe will help you to create a hot and delicious pizza with a thin crispy crust, zesty pizza sauce, and the best cheese blend. Once you get it down, you’ll make it again — and again — and again.

I’ve made a lot of mistakes throughout this journey of learning to make great pizza, and I’ll be sharing some of those with you along with tips and tricks so you can learn from my mistakes and hopefully make some amazing pizza yourself, from home. I’ve made hundreds of pizzas, even working at a pizza place at one point, to bring you this delicious New York-style pizza you can bake in a standard home oven. To make this pizza, you don’t need an expensive pizza stone or fancy wood-fired oven. All you need is a pizza screen, a mixing bowl, tongs, and your standard home oven.

How Much Does It Cost To Make Homemade Pizza?

The best part about making these pizzas is that it only costs around $5 each to make a homemade 18″ cheese pizza. Considering the average American eats around 40 pizzas a year, and some places charge upwards of $20 for a pizza depending on where you live, you can save quite a bit of money by making pizza yourself, that’s like $600 a year. At the time of this writing, bread flour is around $.67 a pie, cheese about $3.65 a pound, and a can of tomato paste is about $.60. Pizza night with the kids just got a heck of a lot cheaper and a lot more fun!

Recipes For Making Pizza

This recipe combines two recipes: Homemade Pizza Dough, and Zesty Pizza Sauce. The homemade pizza dough recipe makes two 18″ pizza doughs, but you can make just one pizza from it and freeze the other dough until you’re ready for another or divide the recipe to suit your needs, extra dough will keep in the freezer for up to a month. You could also use two doughs to make deep-dish pizzas, use one dough for two medium calzones, a stromboli, or even chop it up into homemade garlic knots. It’s extremely versatile.

Where To Buy Pizza Dough

If you’re not up for making pizza dough yourself, you may be pleasantly surprised to discover that many local, non-franchise pizza places are more than happy to sell you their dough for just a few dollars. It’s not something they usually advertise, so don’t forget to ask!

How To Add Flavor To Pizza Dough

Sometimes I like to switch things up and replace the salt in my pizza dough with flavored salts. I’ve tried mushroom seasoning for a savory flavor, and Flavacol (the butter-flavored salt used for movie theatre popcorn) for a delicious buttery taste. It’s subtle, but any way to add more flavor to pizza is a win in my book! Just replace the salt in the pizza dough recipe with any flavored salts, and whisk it into the flour before you add the liquid.

Note: I don’t recommend adding anything large like herbs or chunks of cheese, this can cause holes to form in the dough when you stretch it.

How Can I Tell When Pizza Dough Is About To Tear?

If you’re stretching pizza dough thin, the easiest way to tell if pizza dough is about to tear is when the proteins in the dough get taut. If you can imagine it like you’re stretching a rubber band, the more you stretch a rubber band the tighter it feels right before it breaks in half. Pizza dough is similar but a little softer and easier to tear. You’ll get a better feel for it the more pizzas you make.

How Do I Fix A Hole In Pizza Dough?

You can try to pinch the hole closed by lightly wetting your fingertips and pinching the dough together where the hole is, or pinch a bit of dough off the crust and add it to the area where the hole is to add a little extra dough there, then pinch it together with lightly wet fingertips to close the hole. Then just dust it with a little more flour after you’ve closed it. That should do the trick, but it may still open while it’s baking.

If this worries you, maybe opt instead to turn that pizza into a stromboli by adding the toppings to one side of the stretched dough and folding the other side over it, pinching the crust together. Then just fold half of it over itself again, slice a few cuts in the top with a knife to make a few vents for steam and now you have an unbaked stromboli that you can bake for the same time and temperature that you would have baked the pizza.

What Is Pizza Cheese Made Of?

A lot of people assume pizza cheese is just mozzarella. This is not always the case. Everyone seems to have their own perfect cheese blend for pizza. Some use a blend with provolone, others add cheddar, and others a mix of a few different kinds of cheese in different ratios.

My favorite blend: 50% Mozzarella, 25% Monterey Jack, and 25% aged White Cheddar.

Mozzarella adds a nice texture and classic flavor. Monterey Jack adds creaminess and a softer cheese pull so you’re not pulling the cheese off the pizza with one bite. Lastly, the aged white cheddar adds some flavor depth and complexity.

Pre-Shredded VS Block Cheese

Some Ideas For Pizza Toppings

This cheese pizza recipe is open to your favorite toppings! To ensure everything cooks evenly with the extra toppings, you may need to cook the pizza on a rack closer to the top of the oven for a few extra minutes or finish it off under the broiler for a minute or two. This is especially important for toppings that take longer to cook or lose water, or for toppings like pineapple which can slow down the cheese caramelization process which creates those golden brown spots on the cheese.

At A Minimum, You’ll Need:

An 18″ pizza screen to place the stretched dough over, and to build the pizza on top of. After placing the dough and adding sauce and cheese, you just place it directly on the middle rack of your standard home oven to bake it. The large holes allow more hot air to circulate under the pizza, letting it cook more evenly. With these types of screens, you also don’t have to stress over shoving the pizza onto a hot pizza stone with a pizza peel and risk messing it up. It just makes it so much easier.

A large mixing bowl for pressing the dough into a round flat shape before you stretch it. I just place a handful of flour in one of these along with the dough and use my fingertips to press down all over the dough. If you’re a beginner to making pizza, you can also flip the bowl over and use the half-dome shape to help stretch it out.

Tongs for rotating and removing the pizza from the oven. You’ll want to rotate the pizza at least once while it’s in the oven for even cooking.

A pair of oven mitts rated to 550°F for safety. These are the ones that I use. They’re silicone covered, so they won’t absorb heat as quickly which is ideal, and the silicone also prevents them from getting wet and transferring heat to your fingers.

Not Required, But It’s Nice To Have:

How To Make A Pizza – Step By Step

Making a pizza starts with stretching the dough into a circular shape and placing it on the pizza screen. The stretched dough is then topped with a thin layer of tomato-based sauce and sprinkled with cheese. Additional toppings such as vegetables, meats, and herbs can be added, depending on preference. The pizza is then baked in an oven until the cheese is melted and the edges of the crust are golden brown. Once finished, the pizza is removed from the oven and cut into slices before serving. Let’s break this down:

Stretching Pizza Dough

STEP 1 – Add It To A Bowl With Flour

STEP 2 – Press It Flat With Your Fingertips

STEP 3 – Stretch It With Your Knuckles

Give both sides of the dough a nice dusting of flour and pick it up, resting it on the back of your hands with your hands facing each other and your thumbs closest to the end of the dough. To stretch out the dough, you’re going to gently pull one hand away from the other and bring it back in a vertical circular motion, working your way around the dough in circles using your knuckles to stretch it. Keep doing this until the dough is evenly stretched out, flouring as necessary, then place the dough on the counter. Pick up the side of the dough with your fingers, and gently stretch the crust of the dough working your way around it. Repeat as necessary, adding a dusting of flour as needed, until it’s stretched as thin as you want it.

STEP 4 – Place It On A Pizza Screen

When the dough is stretched out enough to fit an 18″ pizza screen, lay the dough over the screen and then you can proceed to add sauce and cheese as described in the next steps.

Adding Pizza Sauce

Now that you’ve gotten the hard part out of the way, it’s time to move on to making and adding homemade pizza sauce. You can make it in advance, but it also only takes a few minutes.

How To Make The Pizza Sauce

Making homemade pizza sauce is very easy and it’ll take you all of five minutes. All you need to do is combine all the ingredients for my homemade pizza sauce recipe in a small bowl with a whisk.

For a more traditional NY-style cheese pizza, just use plain ol’ crushed tomatoes and add a little salt and sugar to taste.

How To Add Sauce To Pizza

To add sauce to a pizza, pour it in the middle of the stretched dough and use a serving spoon or ladle to spread it outward in a circular motion until it’s about half an inch to an inch from the end, making sure to leave some space for the crust!

How Much Pizza Sauce Should You Use?

• Light Sauce: If it’s a really thin layer of sauce and a lot of the dough is visible through the sauce, that’s a light sauce.
• Regular Sauce: A standard pizza should be sauced enough that you can just barely see the dough through the sauce.
• Extra Sauce: If the sauce is so thick you can’t really see the dough at all, that’s an extra sauce.

How To Put Cheese On A Pizza

It’s best to start by sprinkling your cheese to cover the area closest to the crust first, then fill in the center with the rest. This way, you don’t over-cheese the middle and then run out of cheese for the area closest to the crust. For an 18″ pizza, you can use anywhere from ten ounces to a full pound of cheese. For a 16″ pizza, you can use between eight to twelve ounces of cheese. Use however much makes you happy.

How To Add Toppings & Bake

After adding cheese, add on any toppings that you’d like and then bake it in the oven for ten to fifteen minutes, placing the pizza directly on the center oven rack, taking care not to let the pizza touch the back of the oven. Rotate the pizza with tongs at least once while it’s baking for even cooking. If the bottom is nice and golden brown, but the top isn’t cooked as much as you’d like, just place it under the broiler on high for the last minute or two.

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