Tara Jensen Can Fit Pizza into Your Busy Schedule

Pizza dough can work around your schedule. Tara Jensen, the owner of Dough Baby bakery, is a longtime baker and author of three cookbooks—including her newest, Pizza Practice. She wants to help you perfect your pizza—not by managing a sourdough starter or buying specialized baking equipment, but with straightforward, reliable techniques. In her Milk Street class, Pizza Practice: Doughs, Techniques & Toppings on April 14, Tara Jensen will talk you through how to pick the right flours, hydration levels and temperatures for the best pizza possible.

Read on to learn more about what led up to Tara’s dedication to pizza, how she feels about dough hydrations, and her top tips for making pizzeria-style pizza in a regular home oven.

Do you remember a particular moment when pizza became your specialty?

Yes: when I had my wood-fired bakery. It was called Smoke Signals, and I spent a lot of time making hand-laminated croissants and bread and going to the farmer’s markets. One night, I hosted a pizza party at the bakery, and it just blew up. I was like, “oh, I can stay at home in my pajamas and then just have this pizza party, and it's actually more lucrative than going to the market.” So that was a little turning point.

I started doing it monthly, and it sort of became a big event. At that time, I was just using my bread dough—I sort of had one dough for everything. In the time since, I've learned a lot, particularly writing Pizza Practice and focusing on what pizza is specifically. I know there are so many different kinds, but I have pretty strong feelings about what pizza dough should be, like the hydration and the fermentation.

This is sort of like my third baking life. I moved here with my husband. We have three little children, and now it's all about pizza, and that just speaks to where I'm at—I had my monastic moment with bread and, you know, sitting by the fire—and now things are just chaos. So it made sense for pizza to be the primary thing, because it's quick, it's fast, it's easy. We eat it. It's dinner. It's good.

Tell me the secrets of double 00 flour, and how it works for pizza dough.

[Initially] I kind of scoffed at it—like, “it's unnecessary,” or “I don't want to import anything.” But when I started making a lot of pizza, I learned it has to do with the way that the flour is milled. It's milled very fine. [The] "00" doesn't correlate to the protein amount in the flour—it's not a classification, like all-purpose or bread flour. Rather, it has to do with the coarseness of the flour. So 00 [flour] could be a bread flour with a lot of protein, or it could be from a softer wheat and have lower protein.

And so it's milled very fine—I call it baby powder—the fineness of the grind correlates to how much water the flour can hold. Because you want pizza to cook quickly, you don't actually want a lot of water in your dough. This was a big shift I had to make because my bread doughs are like soup. I'm really big on high-hydration baking, and so I really had to change gears when I started making pizza. It was fine if I was using bread or all-purpose flour to have a higher hydration, because it needed it. But actually, in the shop, we switched over to using 80% double zero flour to get a nice, thin, crispy crust, and then we use 20% freshly milled spelt flour to give it some personality.

Once you get into 00 [flour], you start to understand it. But I sort of turned a cheek to it for a while, because it was confusing to me. We don't classify our flour that way here in the States, right? So it seems like it's a special Italian or European thing—which it is, but we could make 00 here just fine. We actually use the King Arthur 00 flour. That's just a domestic product and it's great.

“High hydration” is a pretty popular bread buzzword, but it isn’t preferred for pizza dough?

It can be hard to de-link these things in our mind, but yeah, it just can't hold a lot of water. That's the core thing to remember, whether the protein [percentage] slides up or down. For our pizza dough, it's around 60-62%, but some of the recipes in pizza practice are just with straight up all-purpose flour, and the hydration is a little higher on those because the flour isn't as fine. When you have less water in the dough, it's going to be crispier, and it's going to cook quicker. Maybe you've got a really blazing hot oven for the pizza, and you want it to be done in five or six minutes—you really shouldn't be going for a lot of water in your dough.

So all the boats are tied together—from the way that the flour is milled to the water [it holds], to the cook time, and if you like a crispier crust or a spongy crust. Our pizza is really thin and crispy in the middle, and then we've got a nice crown where we can check out the crumb there.

What are the best tricks for making professional-level pizza at home?

If you have a really wet dough, it's going to take a long time to bake, and you won't get that characteristic crispiness that you get from a pizza shop. I’d just encourage people to bring the hydrations down and get their ovens really hot as an easy thing to do to improve your at-home pizza.

The first thing I tell people is: Plan ahead at least 24 hours, and you can make pizza dough in one day. You can wake up on a Saturday morning and decide you want pizza that night. It's not a problem—but you have to get out of bed and get to it.

You know, folks will mix up a pizza dough an hour or two before they want to make the pizza, but there's still a fermentation process that needs to happen. Pizza dough can be mixed and then divided pretty soon thereafter, then it spends most of its life in the fridge. That's the best thing for it. So I tell people, if you want to have a pizza party on Saturday night, make your dough Friday morning, put it in the fridge and just forget about it until a couple of hours before your party. So that's my public service announcement: Make it a day early and forget about it in the fridge.

Look at what you have for your oven. If you have a standard home kitchen oven, a sheet pan is fine—I would actually encourage you to do a dough that's a little higher hydration and just bake it in the sheet pan, like a grandma pie or a Sicilian pie. Work with what you have. If you have a pizza stone or a baking steel, then you can do take a more pizzeria-style approach, with the hot hearth to bake the pizza. And if you've got an outdoor tabletop oven, then you can go with more of a Neapolitan-style dough and a smaller pizza. I encourage people to look at what they have and then make the choices based on the tools that they have. Then you're going to get the best results.

How is pizza fermentation different from fermenting a lean loaf of bread?

There's almost no bulk [fermentation], which is nice. You just mix up the dough and divide it. Some folks will divide it within a half an hour, depending on room temperature; here in the shop, we try to do it in 45 minutes to an hour. Then it gets shaped, and it goes right into refrigeration.

The next day, an hour or two before service, it's pulled out. It really does spend a significant amount of time in the fridge with very little floor time. So if you have a busy life, it's a little easier to fit into your schedule. It's maybe, like, two hours of active time between mixing and shaping, and then it's in the fridge, ready when you want it.

What are you most excited about sharing with people from Pizza Practice?

This is so silly, but the desserts chapter. It was so fun to do because my family just makes a lot of sheet cakes. The cakes are all the cakes that I make for my kids’ birthdays. They're very simple one-bowl [recipes] because with all this intensity around the pizza, I don't even want you to have to think about dessert. I want it to be something that can be made ahead of time. The cakes are really moist, and they can just be left out so you're not even thinking about it.

What recipes will you be teaching for your upcoming Milk Street class?

We're going to mimic the dough that we use here in the shop, so we're going to use 00 [flour] with spelt. I'm really excited to go over the process—how it's different from bread, how it's similar to bread, understanding the particulars of the flour and leavening, the things that you can tinker with and just how accessible it can be with what your schedule demands. That's really important to me—that people can fit it in. There are plenty of wonderful yeasted pizza dough recipes that are going to be delicious. And if this is not the moment in your life to tend to a sourdough, great, don't do it. Give yourself permission for that.

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Allie Chanthorn Reinmann

Allie Chantorn Reinmann is a Digital Staff Writer for Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street. She’s a Thai-American chef who earned her diploma for Pastry and Baking Arts at The Institute of Culinary Education and worked professionally for over a decade honing her craft in New York City at places like Balthazar, Bien Cuit, The Chocolate Room, Billy’s Bakery and Whole Foods. Allie took her know-how from the kitchen to the internet, writing about food full-time at Lifehacker for three years and starting her own YouTube channel, ThaiNYbites. You can find her whipping up baked goods for cafés around Brooklyn, building wedding cakes and trying her hand (feet?) at marathon running. She’s working on her debut cookbook and lives in Brooklyn, NY.