Overnight Thin-Crust Pizza Dough (With Baking Steel Instructions)

If you love a thin-crust pizza with perfectly chewy edges and a crispy, sturdy-yet-foldable crust, this is the thin-crust pizza dough recipe for you. A long overnight rise in the fridge makes my pizza dough recipe easy to stretch, and the low-hydration dough is designed to make fantastic thin crust pizzas your a home oven on a baking steel. The Practical Kitchen readers have told me it works well in outdoor pizza ovens like the Ooni, too!

My pizza dough recipe makes enough for 4 medium pizzas. You'll want to use or freeze the dough within 24-72 hours of putting it in the fridge for the final rise.

There are a lot of things to like about my overnight pizza dough recipe. But the most important thing, imo, is that it makes a great thin-crust pizza. The dough stretches whisper-thin with a gorgeously bubbly crust, is very easy to work with, and has a great pizza dough flavor.

If you're new to the world of dough — bread, pizza, or otherwise — this recipe is a great way to familiarize yourself with many commonly used techniques for mixing and developing dough structure. You'll learn what an autolyse is and why it matters, and how to knead the dough, and get used to measuring ingredients by weight instead of volume.

Overnight Pizza Dough is the Stretchiest Pizza Dough

While there are plenty of same-day or even one-hour pizza dough recipes out there, you just won't get the same flavor and elasticity from them that you'll get from an overnight dough with a long rise time.

The longer, slower rise gives the gluten network inside the pizza dough time to both relax and strengthen, allowing you to stretch the dough for a thin and crispy pizza crust.

An overnight pizza dough works well for most schedules — it only takes about an hour and a half of work at night (mostly resting time) and then goes into the fridge so it's ready to use the next evening.

I add a bit of olive oil to my pizza dough, which helps with browning and flavor but also slows down yeast activity. The slow overnight rise in the fridge is super important because it gives the yeast plenty of time to work before you use it!

Pizza Dough Ingredients

Here are the ingredients you'll need to make this overnight thin crust pizza dough!

I use King Arthur Flour's all purpose flour to make my pizza dough. King Arthur's AP flour has a higher protein (aka gluten) content than most all-purpose flours. If you're using a store-brand or generic brand of flour, you may find you get better results with their bread flour, due to the higher protein content. You can also replace half the flour in this recipe with a pizza-specific flour, like King Arthur's Pizza Flour Blend or '00' Pizza Flour.

A small amount of sugar and olive oil helps the crust brown and adds flavor to the dough. The olive oil also helps control the elasticity of the dough and gives more control over how it stretches.

High Hydration vs. Low Hydration

Hydration is the amount of water in a dough relative to the total amount of flour, expressed as a percentage. For example, a recipe with 100 grams of flour and 75 grams of water would be a 75% hydration dough.

My pizza dough is a relatively low-hydration pizza dough (65%) for a pizza made in a home oven on a baking steel. A lot of the pizza doughs you see these days are designed for home oven use are high-hydration doughs (70%+). This is because those recipe developers are trying to replicate those unpredictably bubbly, airy, thicker crusts typical of Neapolitan pizzas.

Neapolitan pizzas, which are typically made with a low-hydration dough (50-60%), bake up in 2-3 minutes at 900°F in a wood-fired oven. A home oven, even with a preheated baking steel, can only reach 500°, maybe 550°F.

This lower temperature means home oven pizzas take longer to cook (yes, 5-8 minutes is long when it comes to pizza), which means the water in the dough has more time to evaporate. Adding more water keeps the crust from drying out and contributes those giant, unpredictable bubbles.

But that's not the type of pizza dough I was after with this recipe.

I was chasing something a little closer to a New York-style pizza (also traditionally made with a lower hydration dough) for my thin-crust pizza dough recipe. I didn't want a thick, bubbly, ballooned pizza crust. I wanted a chewy, well-defined crust around the outside, with an evenly thin center and sturdy, crisp bottom all the way across.

Dropping the hydration to 65% and adding a small amount of oil and sugar (also typical of New York-style pizza dough) helps keep my thin-crust pizza dough from drying out, and keeps the dough from bubbling up where I don't want it to.

Autolyse and Why It Matters for Pizza

The first step step of this recipe is an autolyse step and you don't even need to know what "autolyse" means to do it, but I want to explain it so you know why it makes a difference. Because #KnowledgeIsPower.

Autolyse means mixing the flour and water together to give the starches in the flour a chance to hydrate and begin forming gluten strands (which make the dough strong!) before adding any other ingredients that would tighten up the gluten network.

Adding salt, yeast, or sugar right away would tighten the gluten network instead of helping it relax. And adding oil too early would prevent the starch molecules from binding to each other, inhibiting gluten formation.

So I mix the water and flour first, then incorporate the salt, sugar, and yeast in the second step, and finish by adding oil during the final kneading step, so it coats the gluten network instead of getting in its way.

It's a small thing, but allowing it to rest like this for just 10 minutes gives your pizza dough more flavor and makes it stretchier, which is really important for a thin-crust pizza dough.

While the dough rests in the autolyse stage, I mix together an additional bit of water with the instant yeast and sugar to give the yeast a head start before adding it to the dough.

The Pincer Method: Incorporating Salt and Yeast

To incorporate the salt, sugar, and yeast, I use a technique Ken Forkish refers to as "the pincer method." (You can see him demonstrate it in this video around the 1:50 mark)

The dough will be very wet and squishy. There will be embarrassing, funny squelching noises. It's okay, you can laugh about it. This is how we force that salt, yeast, and sugar to incorporate evenly into the stiff autolysed dough.

Grab one tail end of the pinched dough and fold it in half. It will be wet and slippery. It might tear a little. That's okay. Rotate the bowl so the folded edge is facing away from you. Then use the pincer method to pinch across the dough again.

Alternate pinching and folding until the water has absorbed and you don't feel the sharp granules of salt between your fingers when you pinch.

The abrasive sugar and salt and pinching process cut through the gluten network you started building in the autolyse stage. So before I add the oil, I like to give the gluten network another brief rest to relax, and reconnect.

Kneading and Bulk Fermentation

Finally! We have reached the last mixing step. It's time to add the olive oil. Prepare to be amazed by how quickly this dough goes from being a wet, sloppy mess to an absolute joy to handle.

Kneading is one of those hard-to-describe things that just takes practice until you get the hang of it. Fold the dough over itself, use the heel of your hand to seal it together, and rock it forward. Rotate the dough a quarter turn and repeat. Keep going until the dough feels smooth and soft.

If it's particularly dry, I like to drizzle the dough with about ½ teaspoon olive oil and use my hand to brush the oil all over the surface of the dough for this rise.

Cover and let it rest at room temperature (70°-75°F) for an hour. This stage is known as "bulk fermentation." The dough will rise but won't quite double in size.

Dividing, Pre-Shaping, and Overnight Rise

A previous version of my recipe called for letting the dough rise overnight and dividing it in the morning. But having time in the morning to divide and shape pizza dough balls isn't always practical.

So instead, I've started dividing and pre-shaping the dough at night. By the time I go to bed, the pizza dough is in the fridge and needs no additional attention until the next day when I'm ready to use or freeze it.

This change was inspired by Ken Forkish's The Elements of Pizza. He wrote about a visit with Neapolitan pizzaiolos in Naples, Italy, who showed him the benefits of dividing and pre-shaping the pizza dough about 2 hours into the bulk fermentation stage.

Shaping a ball of dough can take some practice — be patient with yourself if you're new to it. If you have a method of shaping dough balls you like better, you can absolutely use that too.

Once your dough balls are shaped, pop them into lightly oiled round 16 ounce deli containers with the lids on. The round shape of the containers trains the dough to stay in a circle shape as it relaxes, so it knows to keep that shape when you stretch it. The deli containers are also just easier to stack in the fridge.

Let the pre-shaped dough balls rest in the containers for an hour at room temperature before you pop them into the fridge.

The next day, take the dough balls out of the fridge about 60-90 minutes before you plan to stretch the dough and let it rest somewhere warm.

This room temperature rise loosens up the gluten network just enough to make the dough stretchy and elastic to work with, but not so stretchy that the dough tears when you handle it.

This final rise is when you'll finally see the dough double in size. It may not be as dramatic as what you see in the photo below (this batch of dough had exceptional main character energy) but you will see it rise and fill out the container even more as it warms up.

When to Freeze Overnight Pizza Dough

At any time after the overnight fridge rise, you can transfer the dough, in the plastic deli container, to the freezer. I recommend using it within 3 months of freezing, otherwise, you might notice the gluten network starting to break down when you try to stretch it. It's not impossible to use after 3 months in the freezer; it's just more likely to tear.

Defrost it in the fridge for 4-6 hours before use, and make sure to let it sit at room temperature for 60-90 minutes before stretching it.

How to Hand Stretch Pizza Dough

Hand stretching pizza dough is crucial to getting your pizza dough to bake up with a crispy thin crust. If you were to just plop the dough ball on the counter and take a rolling pin to it, it won't bake up as a thin crust pizza. So, yes, you absolutely can use this dough to make a pizza with a thicker crust.

But if you're aiming for a classic thin crust pizza with the defined crust and crisp bottom, how you stretch it makes all the difference. There's a lot more visual step-by-step guidance in my How To Hand Stretch Pizza Dough post if you need it.

Practical Tips & Recipe Notes - Timing, etc.

• This pizza dough, like all pizza doughs, is best when cooked on a scorching hot baking steel (use code TPK10 for 10% off!). If you have a pizza stone, you can use it the same way but baking steels get hotter and cook the pizza faster — just like wood fired pizza ovens do.
• I can't stress enough how important pre-shaping and hand stretching this dough is for getting a nice thin crust. Be patient, don't rush the shaping steps, give the dough plenty of time to stretch and relax, and you got this!
• Is this a New York-style pizza dough? I am not the authority on what makes something a New York-style pizza dough or not, so I can't claim true authenticity here. But this pizza dough recipe does have sugar and oil in it, which is more common in New York-style pizza doughs.
• Can you use this pizza dough with an Ooni or an outdoor pizza oven? I haven't personally tested it but Practical Kitchen readers have told me it works great. My understanding is that those ovens get much hotter, so you'll likely need to cook your pizza for a much shorter amount of time so the sugars in the dough don't burn. But it should work!

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