King Arthur Neapolitan-Style Pizza Crust Vegan Recipe

Y’all. I can’t believe that I kinda sorta know how to make pizza dough now. I’m not necessarily a pizza snob but I do only have tolerance for “good” pizza and I would prefer to not eat cardboard.

The pizza dough recipe is adapted from King Arthur’s Neapolitan-Style Crust recipe and is split into two days – so it’s way more approachable for busy, overwhelmed mamas like me. I doubled the recipe as well so it makes four 10″ pizzas. I intentionally made this vegan by using organic cane sugar instead of the conventional sugar listed in the original recipe. That is important for me as I am vegan. But in general I have found King Arthur recipes to be good for baking novices like me.

Growing up, I was not exposed to “good pizza”. I was raised in the Bay Area and my immigrant family came from humble beginnings. So we would only go to pizza chains when it would be a “special” occasion. I grew up thinking Pizza Hut was the best pizza and then I discovered Little Caesars.

It’s what we had access to and what our family could afford. I was grateful I was even able to try it.

Then I graduated to independent pizza shops like Fat Slice in Berkeley after drunken show nights and then started really understanding good pizza when I tried out Arizmendi in Emeryville and Berkeley. I then moved to North Beach in San Francisco which is also called “Little Italy” and started trying out different kinds of pizzas in my neighborhood including Sicilian-style pizza at Golden Boy a few blocks from my Telegraph Hill apartment.

Once I started visiting New York to see family and friends, that was when I really discovered the new-to-me, hella good pizza in Brooklyn – Di Fara specifically. OMG. That was the best pizza ever to me. I haven’t been there in over a decade but I remember it being phenomenal and so worth the wait. For full disclosure, I have not been to Naples yet so some people might disqualify me for that but this recipe is supposed to be for a Neapolitan-Style crust!

Now I live in Portland, Oregon where we have some of the best pizza in the country (I admit I still think Brooklyn is better but who cares?). Yes. Even vegans can still like pizza. I don’t mind vegan cheese and to me, pizza is now about the crust, the sauce and the overall quality of the ingredients.

I served pizza using this crust to my family, including extended family (some who are picky and/or some who are real foodies) extended family loved it.

I have self-confidence when it comes to things but I’m humble enough to know that in general, I still have a lot to learn and practicing to do when it comes to working with dough in general (whether it’s breads, dumplings, empanadas, noodles, etc). I bow down to all the people from the cultures where the actual dishes are made that I am trying to recreate as respectfully as I can.

Anyway, the most important ingredient here is 00 flour, a superfine flour used for a chewy pizza crust.

This is a simple recipe that only has five ingredients: 00 pizza flour, warm water, active yeast (the original recipe says instant yeast is fine but I only tested using active yeast), organic cane sugar, kosher salt and warm water. I found that using a baking steel and wooden pizza peel to yield the best results.

This is pretty simple. We mix all the dry ingredients first so they are well combined. Then we add the water that’s between 100° and 110° and mix until just combined. Don’t overdo it.

We let the dough rest overnight, in a covered bowl, for at least 12 hours and up to 24 hours. This freed up my time to work on other stuff like making the pizza sauce, prepping the other toppings, etc.

For me, this was maybe 15 or 16 hours after I made it the night before. I mixed this up a bit more and added some 00 flour since it was a little sticky. Below is how it looked when I started to knead it and sprinkled more flour.

We flour a surface to avoid sticking and divide the dough into four pieces using a dough cutter. We don’t knead it the way we do vigorously with many breads. We simple take each piece and stretch out both ends and tuck underneath. Then we rotate and gently stretch out the other corners and tuck underneath. We place each dough ball in a floured bowl (in my case a casserole dish) and cover to rise for a second time – this time for only 45 minutes.

After 45 minutes, we are ready to shape our dough using our knuckles. There are animations here since I couldn’t photograph myself. I’ve been trying to use my knuckles for years to make dough and “letting gravity be my friend” (which is supposedly how you’re supposed to do it) but it actually takes practice and I gotta give props to all the people in the world who can do that. OMG. But yeah. We don’t quit. We TRY OUR BEST!

Once we get it so that it’s as close as we can to 10 inches in diameter even-if-it’s-not-a-super-perfect-circle, we put our sauce and toppings and bake this on a baking steel at 550° F in the oven with at least 8″ of clearance between the broiler and the pizza (to avoid fire).

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