Poolish for Pizza Dough

By Paul Byrne

Using poolish, while by far the preferred method for making pizza dough, requires some planning and precision. Other tutorials focus on the ‘why’ of poolish but I’m going to presume that you are convinced and just need some help with process points.

Ingredients

Calculating ingredients is pretty simple if you follow a few rules:

  • Calculate the total amount of water to use, first. It takes about 100g of water per pizza.
  • This recipe is for 5 pizzas. Make your pizzas in multiples of 5, to keep thing easy. For 10 pizzas, double the values.
  • Yeast and honey are the exception. For quantities of up to 65 pizzas, keep your yeast the same. For 65 to 130 pizzas double the yeast and honey.

Poolish ingredients (day before)

  • 200g water
  • 200g tipo 00 flour
  • 5g yeast
  • 5g honey NOTE: If you are using dry yeast, some say you can use 2g of yeast (but keep 5g of honey). However, I use 5g of dry yeast.

Dough ingredients (day of)

  • 300g water
  • 550g tipo 00 flour
  • 25g coarse sea salt (or any non-iodized salt if not available)

Preparation and Planning

I’ve used a starting point of 6pm the day before to give you an idea of planning your timeline. You can obviously alter at will.

Day Before

Time Step Duration Elapsed
6pm Mix yeast & honey in water 5m 5m
6:05 Mix flour into liquid 5m 10m
6:10 Let rest at room temperature 1h 1h 10m
7:10 Put ‘poolish’ mixture in refridgerator min 16h 17h 10m
(up to 24h)

Day of (~16 hours later)

Time Step Duration Elapsed
11am Remove from refridgerator and let rest 1h 18h
12 noon Mix in salt, water and flour 5m 1h 5m
12:05 Let dough ‘relax’ covered - room temp 15m 1h 20m
12:20 Knead until dough ball is smooth 10m 1h 30m
12:30 Let dough rest covered - room temp 1h 2h 30m
Dough should roughly double in size
1:30 Make dough balls ~250g each 5m 2h 35m
1:35 Let dough balls rest at room temp 2h 4h 35m
3:35 start making pizza