You want to eat a delicious pizza, but you don’t want to spend a lot of time kneading the dough? Then I have just the right pizza recipe for you! Namely, the “No-Knead” pizza recipe from Jim Lahey’s book My Pizza*. No-Knead means literally “without kneading” and in fact this recipe doesn’t require any kneading at all! But it still results in a very tasty pizza. Now you’re probably thinking to yourself: that sounds almost too good to be true! To be fair, I have to say that it comes out in my opinion not as airy as a pizza where the dough was kneaded – but with the low work and force input I find that also completely justified!

For this recipe you should allow at least 24 hours. For those who are not in such a hurry, the dough can even rest in the fridge for up to 72 hours.

Ingredients

(for approx. 4 dough balls à 230 gr):

• 350 ml water (cold)
• 1 gr dry yeast (or 3 gr fresh yeast)
• 500 gr wheat flour (with high protein content)
• 16 gr salt

Mixing the dough

• In a bowl, mix the flour, yeast and salt.
• Add the water and with a wooden spoon or your hands mix all the ingredients well.
• Now cover the dough with cling film / a damp kitchen towel or even better with a lid and let it rest for 18 hours at room temperature (about 22 degrees). The dough should approximately double in volume during this time. It will take longer in a cooler room, and correspondingly shorter in a warmer room.
• You can see the before and after comparison of the dough below.

• After the 18 hours, flour the work surface and transfer the dough from the bowl to the work surface.
• Divide the dough into four equal portions and form into dough pieces. (You can see how to shape the dough in this video).

Resting the dough

• Then place the dough balls in a sealable container (alternatively: place on a baking sheet with enough space between them, brush the dough with a little olive oil and cover with cling film) and let them rest for 3 hours at room temperature. After that they are ready to bake.
• If you don’t want to use them right away, you can leave them in the fridge for up to 3 days. Then let them rest at room temperature for about 1.5 hours before baking.

Shaping, topping and baking the pizza

• Preheat the oven to 260 degrees. If you have a pizza stone, even better.
• Prepare a bowl or a deep plate with semola (flour will work as well).
• Sprinkle the dough with a little semola (especially on the edges) and take it out of the box with a spatula (if necessary with a spatula), put it in the bowl/plate with semola and turn it over.
• Then place the dough ball on the work surface and shape it by hand: if possible, starting from the center, press the air bubbles towards the edge and shape it into a round pizza, leaving a rim. Do not use a rolling pin, as this will destroy the air bubbles.
• Top the pizza.
• Carefully pull the pizza onto the pizza peel. Pull again on pizza peel to round shape.
• Place pizza in oven and bake for about 7 minutes (a little shorter or longer, depending on your own preference and degree of browning). Using a pizza stone can also shorten the time.

This is how the freshly baked No-knead Pizza looks like

Thanks for reading! If you have any unanswered questions, feel free to let me know in the comments.

Julia