Our 72-hour cold-ferment dough

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This is the dough we keep coming back to. Not because it’s flashy, but because it’s forgiving — it survives a humid July afternoon, a slightly under-temperature Ninja stone, and a host who forgot to pull the dough out of the fridge on time. It also stretches the same whether it’s about to land on a 700°F Ninja Woodfire stone or a 900°F Ooni deck.

The numbers

Baker’s percentages, for six 260g balls:

• Flour: 1000g (we use 80% bread flour, 20% 00 — we use Antimo Caputo 00 Flour→ Amazon )
• Water: 660g (66%)
• Salt: 28g (2.8%)
• Levain: 100g active starter (10%)

That’s it. No oil, no sugar, no commercial yeast.

The schedule

• Day 1, evening: Mix flour + water, autolyse 1 hour. Add salt and levain. Stretch and fold every 30 minutes for 2 hours.
• Bulk: 4–6 hours at room temp until ~50% rise and visibly airy.
• Ball + chill: Divide and ball into oiled containers. Straight to the fridge.
• Day 3 or 4: Pull dough out 2 hours before either oven goes on.

Two ovens, two adjustments

The same dough behaves a little differently in each of our backyard ovens, so we tweak just two things:

• For the Ooni (gas, deck at ~900°F): stretch tight, top light, launch fast. The pie wants to be in and out in 60–75 seconds. Turn at 30s. The cornicione will leopard hard.
• For the Ninja Woodfire (pellets + electric, stone at ~700°F): stretch a hair thicker, top a little more generously. Bake runs 4–5 minutes. The crust browns more evenly with less leoparding — that’s not a flaw, it’s just the oven.

Why three days?

Cold fermentation does three things for a hot-stone pizza:

1. Flavor. Tang, depth, a touch of sweetness from broken-down starches.
2. Extensibility. The dough opens easily without springing back — crucial when you’re stretching on a floured deck while a friend asks about toppings and the Ninja’s pellet hopper is calling for a top-up.
3. Schedule sanity. Mixing on Tuesday means you’re not chained to a timer when guests arrive on Friday.

A note on hydration

If your kitchen is humid (we’re looking at you, August in coastal Maine), drop water by 2–3% and you’ll get a dough that handles better on the peel. Pizza is a humidity instrument as much as a flour one.

Want to skip the hand-mixing? The Cuisinart CBK-110→ Amazon handles the mixing and first rise on the Dough cycle — pull the dough out, ball it, and cold-ferment overnight. Useful when you’re making six or more balls at once.