Chris Finally Figured Out Pizza Dough | "Easy-Stretch" Pizza Dough

This “Easy-Stretch” dough solves the problem of a hard-to-work with dough, which can lead to overworking it and resulting in a tough, dense crust. A couple things are going on here: as he says in the video, he took inspiration from flatbreads and added yogurt and olive oil for stretchiness, flavor, and chew. Secondly, this recipe incorporates a lesson we learned years ago from the world’s best focaccia, which our editorial director J.M. Hirsch learned from Panificio Fiore in Bari, Italy. Their dough was so wet that it was basically pourable, oozing from buckets before cut and shaped. The result was a chewy, open, airy crumb that made us high-hydration converts. The reason for this is that wetness weakens the gluten, which means weaker structure. This allows steam to tear through the gluten and produce bigger bubbles in the crust.