Bobby Flay Has A Thorough Process For Making Pizza Dough
While Bobby Flay may be known for his Southwest-inspired cooking, he's actually from New York — which means he loves pizza. He even delivered it as his first food industry job. So of course the celebrity chef and restaurateur has a method for making sure that his crust comes out flawless every time.
In an episode of Flay's "Always Hungry" podcast, which he hosts with his daughter Sophie, he talked about the way he makes pizza dough. "It's three ingredients, mostly," Flay said — flour, water, and yeast. "The best way to measure [the ingredients] is by weight ... the temperature of the water that goes into it is really important ... which kind of yeast you use, and how you incorporate the yeast into the flour ... it all depends on the time of year it is," he explained to a bewildered Sophie. All kinds of things can affect your dough, Flay explained, including "the heat from the friction of the mixing of the dough ... the temperature of what the room is ... how you roll out the dough, how you pat it with your hands."
According to Flay, people think that because certain foods are simple, their cooking process must be, too, but that it takes great technique to churn out the best versions of any of those dishes. Thankfully, Flay's pizza dough recipe is on the Food Network website, so home cooks don't have to do all of the guesswork for themselves.
You don't need a pizza oven
In another episode of "Always Hungry" called "Oven to Table," Bobby Flay spoke about whether or not you really need a pizza oven to execute perfect pies at home. It turns out that even if you do have a pizza oven in your kitchen or use one outside, it's not as simple as just turning the thing on twenty minutes before you want to put your pie in and then baking — Flay says they can take up to three hours to preheat, and use a lot of energy.
"When I fire up my pizza oven I try to do a lot of things out of the pizza oven so I don't waste the energy," Flay said. Noting that if he makes pizzas, "I can also cook steak in a cast-iron pan ... I like to make little appetizers for the table as well." Basically, he emphasized that unless you're making pizza for a crowd, or plan on cooking other foods that can be made in the pizza oven, you might be better off baking the pies on a pizza stone in your regular oven, instead.