Pizza attempts 9 & 10

A major milestone: my dough stretched super thin! I started out with 200g of bread flour and the usual recipe for the rest of the ingredients. I did the autolyse, 20 minutes this time, and then mixed with the hook on my hand mixer for 8 minutes. Then I gradually started adding 90g more flour until I couldn't use the mixer anymore, at which point I added the rest of the flour and started hand kneading for about 10 more minutes. Windowpane test, check! Into the fridge we go.

My wife pulled the dough out at 4pm and covered with a tea towel. At about 5:45 she checked on it and the dough was drying out. She turned them over hoping to keep them from drying out too much, and they just flattened out under the towel. So I arrived home at 6 to two collapsed, half dried out dough balls. Luckily, only the outsides were really dried out. Since this dough was pretty wet on the inside, I patted flour on both sides and started forming the crust. It stretched out beautifully without ripping, and I had a nice large pizza crust.

This pizza still needs some work, but I'm really happy about getting the dough to stretch out. As you can see in the picture, the crust didn't really rise much for the cornice. It wasn't dense really, it was just a little funky. This is probably in part because of the dried out parts of the dough. In any case though, I'm on the right track. I will try a little more flour in the next recipe and see if I can still get the dough to stretch out like this.

The dough stretched out nicely without tearing, but you can see how it's a little funky from drying out

The first pizza out of the oven