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 
Hello! Thank you for this recipe, which I have used with much success! Just have a quick question! When making dough balls after bulk fermentation is complete, I’ve noticed that the individual dough balls would contain quite a bit of air bubbles, some of which would burst when I’m trying to shape the dough / create surface tension. Am I supposed to handle the dough gently to preserve as much air as possible, or does that generally not matter as the dough will puff up again during the second fermentation? Thanks in advance! 🙂
Hey Sam, I’m glad you’ve enjoyed using this recipe! It’s fine for the bubbles to break when you’re balling up as long as there is enough time for the air to build back up during final proof. 🙂 Happy baking!
What is the key to making puffy crust mine seems to be lacking a bit ? But am using the 65% hydration recepe you have ?
Hey James, it comes down to three things: your flour’s gluten strength + allowing enough time for air to build-up + being gentle when shaping the crust!
Hello! Do you have any tips for shaping into a circle before baking, I can’t seem to consistently get them round.
Hey Joseph, just after removing the dough ball from the tray and coating it in semolina, make sure your dough ball is circular before starting to press air to the crust. That goes a long way in helping you make a circular base. 🙂
Love the videos. Inspired to make great pizza. When prepping the pizza, you put the ball into a shallow bowl filled with some type of flour or corn meal and then press it into an initial shape wiht crust. Can you let us know what your preference is?
Hey Peter, thanks so much for watching! I use semolina rimacinata (fine semolina) to coat the dough balls. I like it for its flavour and also because it has a yellow hue, it gives the crust a golden-brown finish while white flour tends to finish a bit grey. Hope this helps!
Hi there! Absolutely loving your pizza’s and trying out your intro dough recipe which is bulk fermenting as we speak. After the dough-balling, do you add a little semolina flour on the bottom of the container before putting in your dough balls, or do you just put them in without? Thanks and keep up the amazing work, you’re killing it!
Hey Dempsey, thank you so much, I hope you got some great pizza out of this recipe! I put the dough balls straight into the container without semolina when balling up. I only use semolina rimacinata (fine semolina) later when it’s time to make pizza
Hey Feng,
loving your content, really brought my pizza making to a new level!
I have one question regarding the recipe though: When I put my dough balls in the fridge for cold fermentation they are “melting” apart (don’t know how to better describe it) and are becoming flat like a fried egg.
I’m still able to make a good pizza with it but I guess the quality still suffers and it’s harder to make a round pizza.
I used 70% hydration and the red Caputo flour.
Any idea what the reason for that could be?
Thanks in advance!😊
Hey Jonas, I’m so glad to know that you’ve found my tips helpful, thank you for your kind feedback!
It’s totally normal for dough to flatten out as it relaxes. Ideally, it continues to ferment at the same speed as the dough relaxes out, giving you a nice puffy dough ball that isn’t a fried egg or pancake. What’s happening in your case is that the dough is relaxing in the fridge but the rate of gas production from fermentation has slowed, causing your dough balls to flatten out.
To fix this, you could consider balling the dough just after removing it from the fridge for its final proof OR packing your dough balls closer to each other for support and then using a dough spatula to get them out of the box when it’s time to make pizza. Hope this helps!
Effortless pizza perfection with this slow dough recipe! A minimal 25-minute hands-on commitment for a crust that rises to the occasion, thanks to the magic of time and a touch of instant yeast. Letting flavors evolve in the fridge – because good things truly come to those who wait!
Thank you for taking the time to share such lovely feedback, I’m so happy that you enjoyed making pizza with my recipe!
Your detailed instructions and videos are amazing! Any tips on how to transfer the dough onto the pizza paddle? Mine seems to be bunching up when I slide the paddle underneath, or folding when I try and pick it up the pizza to help it onto the paddle.
I also had some holes forming on the base of the pizza when shaping the dough. I used a flour with just under 12% protein with the 70% hydration method. Any idea why this might be happening?
Hi Izzy, I’m so glad you’ve found what I’ve shared helpful! To transfer your base onto the pizza peel, this is the easiest way: https://youtu.be/0FypJssjdJw?si=ZTJxeu-EjnRyElT0&t=1019
Holes forming on the base of the pizza either means the dough is slightly weak. Flours with protein content of 12.5%+ is what I recommend in my recipe to help you make a dough that won’t be as likely tear at 70% hydration. The flour you’re using which is just under 12% will behave more reliably at 65% hydration. 🙂 It is possible to strengthen the flour you’re currently using by adding more salt or incorporating stretch and folds during bulk ferment to increase its gluten strength, but honestly, it’s a lot less effort on your end if you use a different flour. Hope this helps and happy baking!
Hi, thank you for your recipe. I’ve just purchased a Gozney Roccbox and am about to try my very first pizza dough. Your recipe is for 3 dough balls. To make 6 dough balls do I just simply double the ingredients in your recipe?
thank you.
Hey Rosa, congratulations on your new oven! That’s right, to make 6 dough balls you can double all the ingredients. 🙂 Happy baking and hope you make some wonderful pizze with your Roccbox!
Loving your videos, passion, and love for sourdough pizza.
Do you precook sausage or any raw meats before the bake? I’ve always par cook, but I definitely lose some of the “essence” of the sausage by doing that.
I have read that Kenji wholeheartedly promotes keeping it raw and rolling the pieces in a little bit of flour to promote browning. But, he was talking about pizza on steel in an oven – longer cook time.
Any advice would be great.
Thanks much – Marie
Hey Marie, thank you for your kind words of support! I also prefer using sausage raw on pizza. I like to break them up into smaller chunks, the faster the pizza takes to bake.
For example, 60% hydration dough will take 60s at high-flame, 400C stone temp while 70% hydration dough will take 90s at medium-flame, 400C stone temp in the Gozney Dome and Roccbox. I’d break the sausage into smaller pieces for the 60s bake and leave it chunkier for the 90s bake. I’ve never had any issue thanks to the high-heat of the flame. Hope this helps! 🙂