WRITTEN FEB 2021 · UPDATED JAN 2024
Leopard Crust Pizza Dough
If you’re looking to make pizza with spotty crusts and beautiful flavour, welcome! There are two main recipes for you, which I developed over the last 3 years and over 900 bakes as shared on my Instagram:
Intro Dough
A beginner-friendly recipe where you get a beautiful dough with minimal effort. Perfect if this is your very first dough or if you don’t have a sourdough starter and you’re not emotionally available for one right now.
Jump to recipe ›
The Sourdough Train
For those who have a sourdough starter and have already earned their baking stripes!
Hop aboard ›
Intro Dough
25 minutes hands-on effort
Prepare 1-3 days ahead
This slow dough is your ticket to getting a pizza with spotty crusts and beautiful flavour, with the absolute minimum effort. We’ll use a tiny bit of instant yeast, so make sure yours is still active if you bought it a while ago or you won’t get a rise. (How to check your yeast)
This recipe is about letting time do all the work for you! All you put in is about 25 minutes of work. Then, it’s over to your yeast and fridge to do the heavy lifting. Good things take time, and the more time you allow your dough to develop, the more flavourful it gets!
Ingredients for 3 dough balls (270g each)
| 468g strong 00 flour or bread flour with minimum 12.5% protein (100%) | High protein means your dough will be easier to handle (heaps less sticky) and also less prone to tearing (no holes in your pizzas). You can check the protein % on the nutritional info label on the packaging. |
| 14g sea salt (3%) | Strengthens gluten and brings out the flavours that the dough will develop naturally. |
| 1g instant yeast (0.2%) | The longer your dough takes to rise, the more time for flavour and aroma to develop within. Using such a small amount of yeast gives your dough the chance to reach its true, tasty potential. |
| 327g water (70%)1 | 70% hydration is a sweet spot. It’s fairly high, while still being decent to work with. If this is your first pizza and you don’t want to take any risks, start with 65% hydration (304g) so that the dough is easier to handle. You can switch to 70% for more tender crusts once you are confident in handling dough. |
10 minutes of work
1. Mixing
In a large bowl or container, combine water and yeast. Stir until the yeast has dissolved.
Add flour and salt3 and mix it all in with one hand, inside the bowl while your other hand holds the bowl in place. The dough will start out as a clumpy mess, but as you keep mixing and stretching, it will start to form a silky dough after about 5 minutes. Keep kneading, so that you’ve worked the dough for a total of 10 minutes.
Cover your bowl with a lid or cling wrap, so that the surface of the dough doesn’t dry out.
Nailing the fermentation
Before moving onto the next step, take a bit of dough out to put in a smaller container and mark the level at which your dough fills it. This allows you to easily keep tabs on how much your dough has risen, because it’s hard to be exact when eyeballing it in a bowl.
Can I use a KitchenAid or stand mixer?
Easily, here’s how4, along with a few tips to avoid overmixing and overheating the dough.
Yeast does the work
Takes around 16 hours if your room temperature hovers around 28°C or 24 hours in a colder climate. This also depends on how active your yeast is.
2. Bulk ferment
Now we wait and let the yeast do its thing! This is called bulk fermentation (BF). It officially starts as soon as you bring yeast and flour together, and we move on to the next step when the dough is almost doubled in size.
- Do not rush this step! Give the yeast time and your future, pizza-eating-self will be glad you waited.
- Don’t let the dough go past double, because you run the risk of over fermentation5 (which will leave you with a sticky mess).
- Don’t stress if you don’t see anything happening for the first 6-10 hours, especially if you already tested your yeast to make sure it’s active. Yeast grows exponentially, so it really picks up the pace after it’s had time to multiply.
How do I know when the dough is ready?
Your small test-dough should look something like this. You can see it has almost doubled in height, and developed lots of nice, little bubbles.
The surface of your main dough should be smooth and stretched out like a doughy balloon.
How long does BF take?
The time it’ll take mainly depends on how active your yeast is and your room temperature. Some people with very active yeast have reported that their dough doubled in just 6 hours!
Your turn again!
15 minutes of work
3. Dough-balling
Once the dough has doubled, it’s time to make dough balls. Divide your dough into 270g pieces, and roll them up into dough balls. Place them into an air-tight container.
- Individual 2-cup capacity containers work well and allow you the flexibility of using dough balls across a few days. I only recommend a dough tray if you have made enough dough balls to fill it6
- We want it air-tight, so that your dough can keep its moisture. If it’s drafty, it’s going to dry out and form a skin – not ideal!
Wait, but how?!
Here are 2 simple tricks for shaping your dough balls. If you’re not used to handling dough, you may find it a bit sticky at first, so check this out!
Fridge does the work
4. Cold ferment
Transfer your dough to the fridge. This marks the start of the cold fermentation process. Even more flavour development happens here, while you sit back and don’t do anything at all!
You can move onto the next step to make pizze with your dough whenever you like from this point. However, letting it continue developing flavour in the fridge for 2 more days is worth the wait!
The best day of the week
5. Pizza day
Take the dough balls out of the fridge to begin their final stage of fermentation: final proof. If they were kept in individual containers, give them a reball and place them in a dough tray with space between as they will expand. If you don’t have a dough tray, place each dough ball on a dinner plate and use a bowl to cover.
Two important things happen during final proof:
- Your dough relaxes and warms to room temperature making it easy to stretch
- The yeast gives a final push to make your pizza more airy and tasty!
As your room temperature affects the speed of fermentation, allow 3-4 hours ahead of pizza time in warm climates and 4-6 hours in cold climates.
Here are some visual cues for how to know if your dough is ready:
30 minutes before pizza time, preheat your pizza oven to 400°C / 750°F stone temperature. (If using a home oven, check this out!)
Every pizza maker has their own personal take on what an ideal pizza should be – and that’s what makes pizza so great. There’s SO much room to play around and make it your own! Happy baking and I hope you enjoy luscious pizza, made by you!
To stretch your dough…
Check out my tutorial on how to stretch your dough into a pizza base; focused on achieving a puffy crust! I tried to pack in as much useful info as possible, in under 5 mins!
Q&As
1 Why 70% hydration?
More water in your dough means more steam is created when the pizza’s in the oven, which then makes a PUFFY crust! On the flipside, the wetter your dough, the harder it is to work with and also the stronger your flour has to be to keep it together.
For reference, most Neapolitan pizza recipes are 60% hydration and then there are canotto-style pizzas that are 80%+ but a *#@& to work with unless you have the right flour, some experience and a brave heart.
2 What are the percentages?
These are called baker’s percentages. They tell you how much of all the other ingredients to use, relative to the amount of flour. This makes it easy to scale baking recipes up or down. For example, if you wanted to make 5 dough balls with this recipe:
Current recipe makes 3 dough balls, so to find the multiplier divide 5 / 3 ≈ 1.67
1.67x flour = 781g
Then multiply the total flour against the percentages of other ingredients:
Instant yeast (0.2% of 781g) = 1.56g
Water (70%) = 547g
Salt (3%) = 23.4g
3 Won’t the salt kill the yeast?!
Salt acts to slow down the yeast, but in this case, that’s a good thing because time creates flavour!
If your room temperature is winter-cold then it may be worth mixing the flour, yeast and water first to give the yeast a head start, before adding the salt.
Another reason why recipes advise adding salt later is to avoid overdeveloping the gluten, which leads to a rubbery pizza. In this recipe, we avoided that by hand kneading (instead of using a machine) and not performing stretch and folds during the bulk ferment. Plus, it’s more convenient to mix everything together in one go.
4 Can I use a KitchenAid or dough mixer?
Yes! For machine-mixing: combine water and yeast in the mixing bowl, stirring to dissolve the yeast. Add flour and mix on low speed for 9 minutes. Add the salt in for the final minute of kneading.
Be careful not to overmix the dough which will result in weakened gluten strands!
Machine-kneading also tends to heat the dough more than hand-kneading so it’s worth keeping an eye on the temperature of the dough to ensure it does not exceed 26°C / 78°F. If your dough starts to overheat, stop mixing and allow it to rest for 5 minutes before continuing. Then, next time, form the dough using cold water instead of room temp.
5 Help! My dough over fermented
This helpful video by Vito Iacopelli will have your dough sorted in 3-4 hours. You got this!
6 My dough balls flattened out into pancakes during cold ferment
If you cold fermented your dough in a dough tray (instead of individual containers) the dough balls will gradually flatten out as they relax. If there was too much space between the dough balls, they may relax to the point of becoming flat. To fix, give them a reball at the start of your final proof (step 5). Reballing gives dough a boost of strength while getting them back in shape. However, reballed dough requires a longer final proof time. The dough will need to relax again so you can stretch it easily and the yeast needs time to create more CO2 to replace the air that was knocked out.
Leopard Crust Pizza 
Hi!
May I ask how to handle sticky dough when kneading it? I thought I followed your recipe pretty well, but when I kneaded it I had to use a lot of flour. It still felt sticky.. and when I put it in the pizza oven afterwards, it resulted in a mess..
Grateful for any advice you can give me. And thanks for sharing your great work!
Hi Maron,
This is from my sourdough recipe, but here’s how I knead a high hydration dough: https://youtu.be/R2gXpyILzpE?t=281 – this method is how I knead doughs, even beyond 80% hydration. 🙂
You shouldn’t have to add flour while kneading. I don’t know the details of your dough, but some possibilities would be that the flour may have been too weak or more water than was required may have been added to that batch? Another option is to try making this dough at 65% hydration and then once you’re comfortable with it, bumping the next batches to 68% and then 70%.
Hope some of these suggestions are helpful and that you get some fantastic pizza!
Sawasdee Khrup Kuhn Feng
Hope you are well I see by your videos and instagram you are using your gozney rocbox and dome in Bangkok. How did you get the gas to be suitable to fit them as gozney aren’t available in Asia. Did you get a special adapter made for the type of options available in Thailand. I want to ship one to Thailand you see for my outdoor cooking area.
Also love your website and insta its great what you are doing.
If you have any info on the gas question and what gas you use would be great here in Thailand.
Khan Kuhn Khrap
Hi Pete,
Thank you so much, really appreciate your kind words! 🙏
You will need to buy a Thai LPG regulator (easy to get on Lazada, costs roughly 250 THB) and replace the US/UK/AU regulator that the ovens come with. It’s quite an easy 5 minute job, just make sure it’s very, very secure to prevent gas leaks. Any gas that’s available near you will be fine, since gas-cooking is so common in Thailand in homes, restaurants and on the streets.
โชคดีนะคะ hope you enjoy the ovens soon!
This regulator is the specific one I have, I like it because it has a pressure gauge! https://s.lazada.co.th/s.Qm2So
For the gas tanks, one thing I forgot to mention is that I like using the 4kg tank for the Roccbox (just for its portability and compactness) and 15kg tank for the Dome, as the Dome expends more gas. 🙂
Thanks the gozney sales team make out that its not possible to do this and then I saw your setup on the balcony apartment in Bangkok so it must be.
Much appreciated I will get one delivered to a freight forwarder and shipped over here.
All the best keep up the great work.
I’ve been trying for a while to find a recipe for this style of pillowy, crusty Naples style pizza dough and your recipe, with accompanying videos and explanations are so informative, suuuper easy to understand and produce absolutely dreamy results! The recipe for your beginner dough is so great and made up for the many, many failed attempts I’d had prior to finding your account. I really enjoy watching your videos and practicing your techniques. My only question is how long can you still use the dough balls after cold fermenting in the fridge? I know you say 2 days is prime but what’s the max?
Keep up the video content and when will you have a book I can buy?!
Hi Chris, I’m overjoyed to know that you’ve made some great results pizza using my recipe and tips! Thank you for sharing the lovely feedback!
How long the dough can be kept in the fridge will mainly depend on the strength of the flour you are using. If you want to make dough that can last for many days, I recommend ending the bulk ferment and putting the dough in the fridge before it’s doubled (when it’s risen by 70%) and then continuing as normal. Doing this, I’ve managed to make pizze out of 10 day old dough. 🙂 (It tasted really nice!)
The main differences in using dough that’s several days is old is that you’ll find the dough more fragile to handle and will need to be more gentle, and the final proof will be slightly shorter (an hour to two hours) as compared to a ‘younger’ dough.
Hope this helps, happy baking and stay tuned for my book dropping in 2030…?! 😁🤷🏻♀️
Hi there, first attempt- quite delicious! can you freeze this at any stage? Thank you!
Hey Annabel, I’m so glad to hear you enjoyed the result of your first attempt!
To freeze dough:
Follow the recipe as normal until portioning the dough in Step 3. Roll them loosely into dough balls (just for easier handling) and give each a light coating of extra-virgin olive oil. Put each dough ball into its own zip-loc bag or air-tight container before transferring them to the freezer. (If using a zip-loc bag, try to leave as little air in the bag as possible before sealing.)
To thaw:
The day before you want to make pizza, take the dough balls you need out of their bags/containers and place in a lidded dough box or individual air-tight containers (with a little room for them to grow) in the fridge to gently thaw. Continue from step 4 onwards. When you take the dough out of the fridge for their final proof, you can give them a reball for one last boost. The dough should final proof as normal and develop air.
Happy baking! 🙂
Hello your awesome my dough came out a little stick during kneading time and I did have to add more flour any suggestions I did this twice with same results? I just love your videos!
Hey James, thanks so much for watching my videos!!! Dough feels sticky when the gluten hasn’t been developed, so giving it a good knead should help to make it feel less wet. If you’re using a strong flour (high protein %) it’s definitely going to be able to hold the water better. Finally, if you use damp hands to handle the dough during the balling stage, it helps to prevent the dough from sticking. Hope these tips help and that your next batch is amazing!!
Hi Anne, Feng here!
To freeze dough:
Follow the recipe as normal until portioning the dough in Step 3. Roll them loosely into dough balls (just for easier handling) and give each a light coating of extra-virgin olive oil. Put each dough ball into its own zip-loc bag or air-tight container before transferring them to the freezer. (If using a zip-loc bag, try to leave as little air in the bag as possible before sealing.)
To thaw:
The day before you want to make pizza, take the dough balls you need out of their bags/containers and place in a lidded dough box or individual air-tight containers (with a little room for them to grow) in the fridge to gently thaw. Continue from step 4 onwards. When you take the dough out of the fridge for their final proof, you can give them a reball for one last boost. The dough should final proof as normal and develop air.
Hi there, I enjoy your content and have had good success on a couple tries with your Intro Pizza Dough recipe!! One question, though : I notice you suggest approx. 16hr bulk ferment @ around 28C – just wondering if a typo as I’ve found the dough is doubling in size at more like about 10-14hr @ room temp (I’d say around 20-22C in Canada)?
Hey Jason, thanks so much for the lovely feedback, I’m so glad you’ve found my recipe helpful!
The fermentation speed depends on several factors (temperature being a main lever but not the only thing) and timings provided are to give rough guidance and set the expectation that a long ferment is totally cool. In your case though, it sounds like you may have a very active brand/strain of yeast!
If you’d like to prolong the ferment, you could use even less than the recipe calls for; but if the 10-14h ferment works better for your schedule then just keep doing what you’re doing. 🙂 Happy baking!
Hello there 🤗
Just got my new gozney dome an i m suoer excited!!
I wonder if there’s a way to freeze the 72 hours pizza dough at some point and use it as back up for my small restaurant that i wanna make pizza for my lovely customers and friends…
Thanks a bunch!!
Hey Despina, congratulations on your new Dome!!!! Your friends and customers are so lucky! 🥰
To freeze dough:
Follow the recipe as normal until portioning the dough in Step 3. Roll them loosely into dough balls (just for easier handling) and give each a light coating of extra-virgin olive oil. Put each dough ball into its own zip-loc bag or air-tight container before transferring them to the freezer. (If using a zip-loc bag, try to leave as little air in the bag as possible before sealing.)
To thaw:
The day before you want to make pizza, take the dough balls you need out of their bags/containers and place in a lidded dough box or individual air-tight containers (with a little room for them to grow) in the fridge to gently thaw. Continue from step 4 onwards. When you take the dough out of the fridge for their final proof, you can give them a reball for one last boost. The dough should final proof as normal and develop air.
Hello!
Amazing videos and website! Really love you passion on this!
Quick questions:
1. can we use this Autolysis method and then incorporate the yeast & salt after 1-2 hours in the dough?
2.Do you recomend to bulk ferment for ~10% growth (as you did on your sourdough pizza recipe and then go to cold bulk ferment or making balls and cold ferment?
Hey Nick, great questions:
1. Absolutely! To incorporate the autolyse, save about 5g of water from the total so that you can dissolve the yeast in it later when it’s time to add it, knead for 2-3 mins, then mix salt in for the last 2 mins of knead to prevent overdevelopment of the gluten (i.e. rubbery pizza 😭)
2. Yeast is a siiignificantly less prone to overfermentation as compared to starter, so the longer bulk fermentation of this recipe is specifically made for yeast! If you still feel like shortening the bulk ferment when using yeast, I recommend letting it rise to ~25% but your final proof will take longer on pizza day.
Balling before cold fermentation v.s. on pizza day depends on a few things:
– Would you like to use the dough balls all at once? Y: Ball first for convenience – N: Ball later
– Is your dough tray airtight? Y: Ball first, if you like – N: Ball later to prevent the dough from forming a skin
– Do you have space in your fridge for a tray of dough? Y: Ball first, if you like – N: Ball later, more space efficient!
Hope this helps you decide what’ll work best for you! 🙂
Hey so quick question.. if I wish to do cold fermentation do I still need the dough to double in size before refrigerating it or do I just put it an air tight container and straight in the fridge?
Also should I let it rise a bit at room temp before refrigerating?
Thanks :)))
Hey! This recipe incorporates cold fermentation (step 4) so please let it bulk ferment at room temp according to step 2. 🙂 Hope you get some great pizza!