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 I’m new at making pizzas and got a pizza oven about a month ago. Wanted to say your beginner dough recipe has been the best I’ve tried so far. 67 percent hydration and the pizza is great. Maybe I’ll try your sourdough recipe next. Thanks. Love watching your videos
Hey John, I’m so happy to hear you are enjoying my recipe at 67% hydration! Thank you for writing in to share your experience. 🥰
hello! I am working in a pizzeria and I would like to know why when it comes to cold fermentation, it is very difficult for me to form the dough into balls.
Hey Badr-eddine, the dough becomes tense when it is cold, so that may be the difficulty you are having. Have you tried balling the dough before refrigeration?
Hi Feng, I’m still so in love with your sourdough pizza dough recipe!!! However, I thought I’d give this intro pizza dough recipe a whirl yesterday! Note I think my culprit is not having the milligram scale, which is now currently on order! Lol! So my dough doubles pretty quickly (28 degrees room) and now dough is in individual 2 cup Pyrex containers and it’s still growing in the fridge. My guess is too much yeast? So should I be taking the dough out and re-balling & remeasuring since I’m not using the dough for another four days? Any thoughts/suggestions? Who’d have thunk the simple recipe would have me stumped 🤔?! lol
Hey Nada! I’m so happy to hear you’ve continued using my sourdough pizza recipe! It sounds like your yeast is nice and active (also, around 28C happens to be yeasts’ favourite temp!) Good news: as you mentioned, you can re-ball to knock/tame it down to size and it’ll be good to use when you need it. Yeast is a lot more forgiving than starter because it’s a lot less acidic, which means even if you have to knock it down a couple of times by re-balling, your gluten network will stay intact! If we tried to do the same with sourdough the dough would be a lot weaker.
Hi Feng
I’ve just started to make my dough to make pizza following your instructions/ recipe. I’m currently at the fridge stage and unfortunately it’s not looking good 🙈. I adjusted the quantities to make 2 dough balls rather than 3 . When it came to shaping the dough into balls my dough was and still is very sloppy . Any ideas why this may have happened? Also will it be salvageable?
Thank you for your amazing content, I’m determined to make the prefect pizza dough eventually!!
many thanks
Rebecca .
Hey Rebecca! Oh no, it sounds like it could be one of three reasons:
1) Extra water in the dough, if there was an error in scaling
2) Not enough gluten-formation – either from the flour not having enough protein OR not kneading enough
3) Overfermentation (left out at room temp too long)
If you can deduce which it might be based on your conditions, that’ll be the ticket to solving for it!
To salvage, try adding more flour until you get a dough you’re more comfortable with and that feels easy to work it – be as generous with the flour as need be since the dough is so slack at the moment. Allow the dough to final proof at room temp for 4-6 hours (until dough has relaxed and almost doubled in size) before making pizza with it. Hope this helps and that you get some good pizza from this batch!
Hi Feng,
If I’m looking to make 10” pizzas in the Roccbox, what size (in grams) dough ball should I be aiming for?
Thanks,
Alan
Hey Alan, for 10″ pizze a 220-240g dough ball will work well depending on how thick you like to leave your crust. 🙂
can you use caputo manatoba 0 flour for your recipe?
Hey Keith, yes! I find that high protein flours like manitoba offer less flavour than weaker flours though, so you might want to try using manitoba for 30% of the total flour called for in this recipe and Caputo Pizzeria (for example) for the remaining 70%
Can dough be frozen and used later after the cold ferment?
Hey Matt, if you’d like to freeze your dough:
Follow the recipe as normal until step 3. After forming the dough balls, 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 in the recipe as if nothing happened. 🙂
Hope this helps and happy baking!
Hi Feng, thank you so much for sharing your knowledge about sourdough and pizza-making.In the pizza video you cold ferment after bulk fermentation, and then you do final proofing outside of the fridge.I was wondering, can we use the fridge at any point? Is it the same to do final proofing right after bulk fermentation, and then having it in the fridge ready to use?
Hey, the cold ferment after bulk fermentation is in the fridge. 🙂 It’s best to allow the dough to come to room temperature in the final proof at room temp otherwise it’s difficult to stretch and won’t be as airy if you use the dough straight from the fridge.
Thank you for such clear and detailed directions! Two questions:
Hey RB, glad you found my recipe helpful!
1. To adapt for a NY crust, I recommend adding 10g honey (2%) and 23g extra-virgin olive oil (5%) to make the crust crispier. Bake at low-flame in a pizza oven, if using
2. Gives the dough one more boost of strength before its final proof!
Hi, do you suggest any adjustments to your base recipe for altitude? I’m 5,280 ft above sea level and having difficulty getting much loft on my crust? I love a big, puffy, crunchy crust. Using Caputo 00 flour, Caputo yeast. Thanks!
Hey Steve, I haven’t tried baking at high altitude but theoretically, the following tweaks should help:
– Increase water to 350g
– Ferment as instructed in the recipe, being careful not to allow the dough to overferment
– If using a pizza oven, bake fast with a stone at 450C / 840F
You could also consider replacing 30% of the flour with Caputo Manitoba flour as higher protein flours help strengthen the structure of doughs made at high altitudes. Hope this helps!