High-Hydration Pizza Dough

This pizza dough is a wet, high-hydration dough (about 76 percent hydration). It also starts with a preferment—which, in this case, is a mixture of bread and semolina flours, a little sugar, yeast, salt and water that’s left to stand for an hour at room temperature, during which time it becomes active and bubbly. The preferment then is mixed with more bread flour, olive oil, salt and water, then the dough rises for about 1½ hours. The end result is a pizza crust with a rustic, open crumb; a chewy-crisp texture; and bubbles that char in the oven, forming the spotting that’s characteristic of high-end pizzeria pies. The flavor is wheaty and complex yet clean, not yeasty and boozy like drier doughs made with an abundance of yeast. For make-ahead and storage convenience, there are a couple good stopping points in this recipe. After 30 minutes of room-temperature rising, the dough can be refrigerated for up to 24 hours. Or, after dividing into four portions, the dough can be allowed to rise at room temperature for 30 minutes, then refrigerated for up to 48 hours. For topping and baking instructions, refer to specific pizza recipes, but keep in mind you will need a peel for shuttling the pies into and out of the oven and a baking stone or steel. Before baking, we heat the oven and steel (or stone) for an hour at 500°F or 550°F to build up heat, but prior to shaping and topping pies, we switch the oven to broil. The upper heating element browns and chars the surface of the pizza while the hot steel crisps the bottom crust.