Tricia - That biga... gotta try it, thanks. Sounds like a viable solution while I work on my neverending quest to be able to plan a meal more than the morning of. What I find so interesting about pizza dough debates is that the ingredients rarely change. Like I said above, flour, water, yeast, salt. Maybe oil. From the site Ann linked, evidently sugar is a controvertial addition. I know my mom uses it; I do not. With such a short ingredients list, it's amazing what differing results people have. Obviously the treatment of these ingredients plays a huge part in the outcome. I also noted that while there were disagreements in the many comments following the article, in my quick skim I didn't notice a single one that discredited the benefit of a several day slow rise in the chill chest. The only time I tried a long rise was when Ann steered us to "Canadave's" recipe on the pizza making forum. IIRC, at the time she declared it the best crust ever. I guess she kept on experimenting despite having found the best crust, because these days her best crust is JC's dough. Good for her. Anyway, that was back in the day that I couldn't round out pie to save my life. Might be time to have another go at it. I'm pizza'd out right now, but in the next few days I'll stop by the place that IMO makes the best pizza I've ever had, anywhere, take a picture and post it. Though it's very close to home I don't go there often, probably not in a couple years. Too expensive and their use of a bag instead of box while probably environmentally friendly, results in a cold pie by the time it takes the short drive home. I find that annoying.

I've been reading these and all of trailrunner's post. They are just great. All the hints were great. I bake bread out of boredom, I rarely use a recipe, for better or worse and like the wet doughs as well as quicker higher yeast doughs for pizza. Someday I'll get that "super peel" with the cloth belt thingy. I am forced to pre-cook my thin pizza crusts without one- My favorite bread is an olive bread that is made locally in the East Bay and sold now only at the local Berkeley farmer's market- you can go to their bakery, and they will sell stuff to you, but it's not a store front, no sales help, no hours- if they are there they'll sell it to you- they're also fresh pasta makers- 'Phoenix Pastificio'- if you're ever in the area. I've never tried to make that bread, it's almost Holy to me...( although I know he uses a biga and those black Kalamata olives). It has a thin almost black burnt crust, with large ciabatta holes to the crumb and flavor to die for.

Zalco, I haven't been to Terun, their crust looks delicious! Thanks for the rec. FYI, I don't consider Round Table to be great pizza, but it's close to my house and nostalgic. Pizza Delfina is really good and Vesta in Redwood City is where I go for creative toppings. Now that I think of it, Menlo Park doesn't have any great pizza places but I live in the next town over so if I'm lazy it's there or Redwood City. I grew up in Palo Alto and love to reminisce about all the great restaurants up and down El Camino, University Ave. etc. that are now gone. It's amazing that Round Table is still going strong. I especially miss the "old" Mings before they switched to mostly dim sum. I think we went out for dinner more than a lot of families. I could name 50 restaurants from Mt. View to Menlo Park that are now gone. I miss the good old days! I bought a small pizza oven but making the dough from scratch seemed more trouble than it was worth. Never tasted as good as the better pizza places.

Did you make that recipe by the volume measurements or by weight? It looks like they messed up the conversion with the recipe. It says 3 cups (16 1/2 ounces) bread flour. Flour is 4.2 to 4.4 ounces per cup (depending which site you look up the conversion on). I generally use 4.2 ounces per cup when converting recipes to weight because it usually works and I find it easier to add flour to a too wet dough than to work water in to a too dry one. That would mean 3 cups is 12.6 ounces. Even at the high end, it would be 13.2 ounces. That's about 80% hydration so it should be a fairly wet dough. If you make it by the weight measurements, 10.5 ounces of water to 16.5 ounces of bread flour would be a very dry dough - 63.5% hydration. The recipe I usually use is about 76% hydration. A half tsp of yeast should be fine with a long enough rise. Maybe the dough being too dry inhibited it's action. I can't see why rehabilitating the didn't work. That sounds like either the yeast is dead (maybe not totally inactive but mostly inactive so with a small quantity you don't get enough active cells) or something is killing off the yeast.