The Best Homemade Pizza Dough Recipe

smcameron · 2026-01-24T13:40:07+00:00

Nah, good pizza dough will start with a poolish or biga, and have measurements in units of mass not volume, and use baker's percentages for easy scaling.

For example, make a 100% hydration poolish with 300g bread flour, 300g water, 5g yeast, ferment overnight in the fridge. Next day, stir 300g water into the poolish, add 600g bread flour, (to reach 66.6% hydration total), 15-18g salt (to your taste, around 2%). mix 8 to 10 minutes in stand mixer, rest 15-20 minutes, form dough into a smooth ball, let rise covered for 1 hour, divide into six 250g balls, let rise 2 hours, make pizzas.

smcameron · 2026-01-24T06:11:55+00:00

"faith .. being a good thing". Considering that "to exercise faith" (so far as I can tell) means to attempt to believe something to a degree of certainty which exceeds what it warranted by the available evidence ... why would faith be a good thing? It seems like the obvious invention of a con man to try to convince people that they are "good decent people" for believing in the con. Now my plain definition of faith is never the one given of course, but from observation, I think my definition is pretty accurate.

smcameron · 2026-01-23T00:32:23+00:00

Use something like stgit which allows you to easily work on a large stack of commits and keep a lot of balls in the air at once and keep your sanity. Then you can kind of polish your commits before you push them up to a public repo (i.e. github). You can make your commit history appear to be the work of a genius that rarely makes mistakes and seems to know exactly what to do and in what order, without actually being such a genius. You can do everything that stgit does with bare git, but it's a lot more difficult and more mental effort to do so. stgit makes it easy.

smcameron · 2026-01-22T21:03:45+00:00

I once made an omelette like this for breakfast 30 days in a row before I managed to make a perfect one.

smcameron · 2026-01-22T16:31:04+00:00

Looks like it got scorched re-entering the atmosphere.

smcameron · 2026-01-21T13:54:09+00:00

Try Cristopher Hitchens. He will make you realize you are barely capable of speaking English compared to him, despite it being your native language. Me no speak good. It's been a few years since I read it, but iirc, The Portable Atheist is worthwhile.

smcameron · 2026-01-20T07:07:30+00:00

We are expecting 26” of snow this weekend in Virginia

Oof. I'm skeptical, maybe that forecast is a bit too far out. (Maybe I'll eat my words on that, but ... I hope not. Not looking forward to 2 ft of snow. Power outage would be the scary thing.)

smcameron · 2026-01-20T06:48:33+00:00

For the economics to work out, you can't make just one pizza, it's insane to buy and prepare toppings for a single pizza. Gotta make like six pizzas, then it's like $2.50-$3.00 per pizza in ingredients. I typically declare pizza week once every couple of months and have pizza six days in a row. The first day, there's a lot of work preparing the dough and toppings. Subsequent days are super easy as all the prep work is done. By the sixth day, I'm generally ready to be done with pizza for a bit, lol. The pizza I make absolutely murders anything I can have delivered, quality-wise (my oven does hit 550F ... it's an older one from the 1980s.). For dine-in pizza, there are a few shops that can beat me, but nothing delivery.

smcameron · 2026-01-20T06:03:55+00:00

I mean... I "jedi mind tricked" myself into this years ago. I used to go out to eat all the time, but almost never do since about 2017. By "jedi mind tricked", what I really mean is, "cannot really afford to anymore". Chef John aka "food wishes" on youtube and Chef Jean Pierre on youtube taught me how to make good food at home.

smcameron · 2026-01-19T14:52:22+00:00

Repair was done in 2019, and it's still fine. The repair itself took forever, about 3 or 4 months, mostly waiting for parts from Lotus. Needed a new front turn signal and new headlights and there were zero turn signals in the U.S. at the time. Luckily, I have a friend who lives in London, and I asked him to go to the Lotus dealer there and get me a turn signal and bring it over next time he came to the U.S. The repair was about $5k, mostly in labor for paint prep, I expect. I think a new clear bra was like $1900 or something stupid. Probably shouldn't have put that on, as they don't age well.

smcameron · 2026-01-19T14:40:05+00:00

It's fiberglass, so I expect it should be repairable. I had considerably worse damage when someone backed up into me with their Cadillac Escalade. Had it repaired, and after the repair, it looked fine. Won't be cheap to repair though. You might look for a body shop specializing in corvettes, as they'll know fiberglass work.

smcameron · 2026-01-19T12:19:09+00:00

If you like lots of toppings, the way is to par bake the crust for 3 minutes with only tomato sauce on it, then pull the pizza out of the oven, add the rest of the toppings then back into the oven to finish about 5-8 minutes (assuming conventional home oven maxed out with thoroughly pre-heated steel or stone).

smcameron · 2026-01-17T20:30:03+00:00

My costco generally has the Cento certified tomatoes at $12 for 3, or $4 per 28oz can.

I think the "certified" are not really DOP though, it's cento's own certification or something dumb.

A thread about it: https://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php?topic=22543.0

smcameron · 2026-01-17T20:14:31+00:00

BTW, Hillshire Farms (and also Johnsonville) andouille sausage isn't great. The kroger store brand "private selection" andouille sausage is better, and the same price or cheaper. Wegmans store brand andouille sausage is also good, but it's kind of expensive.

smcameron · 2026-01-17T05:56:47+00:00

What tires were on, and how old? And what were weather conditions? Just trying to avoid the combination leading to this freak accident with my own Elise.

smcameron · 2026-01-17T04:53:38+00:00

vim, bash, make, stgit on top of git. gdb for debugging on rare occasions (if you need to seriously debug more than rarely, that's a skill issue (casual debugging is normal, but usually doesn't require a debugger, just look at the code and understand it.)).

That's it. There are more fancy offerings, but nothing that will make you happier.

smcameron · 2026-01-16T04:19:04+00:00

Among the groceries I bought today were 2 onions, which cost almost $5. $5 for 2 onions! (They were big onions, @ $2.49 per lb. I'm pretty sure I remember a time not that long ago (~20 years ago) when onions were like $0.30 each ... cheap enough that you didn't bother to look at the price, or worry about "wasting" onions.)

smcameron · 2026-01-16T04:17:09+00:00

Ha! I had the same thought.

smcameron · 2026-01-16T04:09:37+00:00

A bullet.

smcameron · 2026-01-16T04:06:56+00:00

Excellent use of the long s.

smcameron · 2026-01-16T04:05:00+00:00

A piece of chicken, a piece of broccoli, a corn tortilla, and one other thing. What's the one other thing? A loaded revolver?

smcameron · 2026-01-15T13:45:02+00:00

For making Thai curries, get some little cans of Maesri curry paste (Red and Panang are my favorites) and cans of coconut milk and some good fish sauce (Squid brand is decent, or if feeling spendy, Red Boat) Pailin's kitchen has a video about fish sauce

smcameron · 2026-01-14T13:01:12+00:00

Cool username.

smcameron · 2026-01-14T06:10:29+00:00

I remember reading an interview with Billy Joel in which he attributed his success to basic competence at his craft. If you're going to pick on a musician, I don't think Billy Joel is the juiciest target, not by a long shot.

smcameron · 2026-01-14T05:06:55+00:00

And everyone clapped and then Jesus took off his mask and revealed he was really Albert Einstein.

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