How to ball dough

Hey everyone, hope you guys are enjoying the cold weather, because brrr its starting to get super cold outside. I can’t wait for halloween this weekend! What are you guys dressing up as? Anyways, today I am going to be covering how to ball dough. You may be asking, what do I do after I have made the dough? How do I turn this ginormous dough ball into individual dough balls? Well you are in the perfect place to learn! 

Step 1: Grab your scale and a rocker – style pizza cutter or something you can cut the dough with. Sprinkle flour across the counter you will be using and make sure you have a small bowl or container full of flour on hand. Depending on how big you want your pizza, you will cut off small chunks of dough from the giant dough ball and weigh it in grams on the scale. For a 12 inch smaller pizza make sure the weight of your dough ball is 210g – 230g. For a 14 inch bigger pizza make sure the weight is 240g – 260 g. Keep cutting and weighing out the dough and placing it on the counter top. Keep enough distance between your dough balls so they don’t touch & stick together. 

Step 2: After you have cut and weighed out the dough balls, you can now BALL the dough. To ball the dough, first grab the dough not from above, but underneath so it’s flat on your hand. Dip one side of the dough ball into the flour container. Next make sure the flour dipped side is facing you. The goal is to fold in the sticky side into one another, and to take out all air bubbles. Fold the sticky side, then turn it and fold the other side into the center. Keep folding & rotating each side into the center until it is formed into a ball. Make sure to pinch the bottom of the dough ball when you’re folding the sides into each other. Once you think the dough ball is tight with no air bubbles, pinch the bottom tightly and roll the dough ball into the flour container, until saturated in the flour. 

Step 3: Once you have your dough balls formed you can keep them on the counter until their is no more room! Once there is no more room put the dough balls carefully into a dough container. You can buy dough containers at Walmart or most grocery stores. Only put 5 dough balls into one container, so there is room for the dough balls too proof. Two in both corners, and one in the center of the container. 

Step 4: Once your dough is put into the containers, place them in a big cooler. DO NOT ice the dough yet. You can fit 8 containers into a big cooler. A good brand for coolers is Coleman. You don’t want to ice the cooler yet because you need to let your dough proof. If you were to put ice on right away, your dough would be super cold and would not stretch. Proofing is the time it takes for the yeast in the dough to rise into its correct size & shape. You can tell your dough is done proofing when the dough balls touch inside the container. At this time you would want to ice the cooler. Depending on the temperature outside, the time it takes the dough to proof varies. If its summer and its super humid outside like Wisconsin is, it could take as little as an hour. But when it gets to cooler temps in the fall and winter you sometimes don’t even need to put ice on the dough because the weather is so cold and it will take super long for your dough to proof. 

Step 5: Once your dough looks puffy, & is touching the other dough balls it is time to put ice in the coolers. You don’t need to keep putting ice on for a while. Just keep checking your dough to make sure they haven’t expanded too much. A lot of this is just self evaluation of what you think. It will take some time for you to understand the temps and visual cues on when or when not to put ice on your dough. The biggest advice I can give you is to let your dough proof until the dough balls are touching each other.

You now have dough balls ready to turn into delicious pizzas! Bring a cooler full to a family event, a public event like a farmers market, or any event in general that you want to make pizzas for! You are now fully prepared to stretch/ toss the dough, and make pizzas congratulations! When in doubt dough ball it out ? 

Talk to you guys next week!