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Comment by JustSomeNobody | Hacker News Reader

I make pizza at home. If you let the dough ferment cold for at least overnight, the results are pretty darned good. I usually do a 3 day ferment in the fridge.

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This is the downside to pizza at home. Step 1 is always "go back in time 3 days and make dough".

My bread-machine dough takes 5 minutes of hand-on time and is ready in two hours. It's not as good as if you let it rest or do a fancier hand- or mixer-prep, but it absolutely will not keep your pizza from being better than any of the major chains (not that that's a high bar, but still).

Keep it in the freezer and that time comes down to "defrost overnight 1 day in advance", or you can try thawing it out under a tap or something.

Always nice having some frozen dough and sauce handy in the freezer.

You can get a nearly the same results in a couple hours if you keep a sour dough starter in your fridge and use the discard from that in your pizza dough. Add the discard to your warm water along with the yeast to warm it up.

For amazing flavor, yes. But the biggest upside to pizza at home is that it is almost literally impossible to make a bad pizza. You can definitely do same-day dough, or even just buy dough balls from the grocery. Its hard to shortcut letting yeast work their magic.

I've done fancy dough plenty of times, but mostly just use lazy bread-machine dough these days. It's serviceable same-day—not as good as fancier preparations, but not as far off as one might think—and does also benefit from a night in the fridge, if one thinks to make it the day before. Just have to let it get back up to room temp before cooking, or it won't rise properly. Takes like five minutes of hands-on time, which is all just gathering and measuring the ingredients.

I've pretty much come to this conclusion as well, but I do still often cook the pizzas on my 12" Ooni Karu woodfired mini-oven though.. you don't get the same level of "leopard skin" / micro-bubbles, but it's mostly there.

If I have a bit more time, but still relatively lazy, I'll use the stand mixer, but proof in my oven for an hour or two, which has a proofing mode which is basically a low temperature steam oven for a nice warm humid environment.

I've seen at least one preparation hack the yeastiness by pouring a little beer into the same-day mix too.

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