Published January 1, 2001.
Giving the dough a long refrigerator rise and baking the crust directly on parchment paper produce a no-stick, crackling crisp pizza with big flavor.
Many pizzas are no more than puffy white bread under a sea of tomato sauce, or tough cardboard stamped into a circle. Some feature a mountainous antipasto glued to blistering cheese, while others are damp, molten, saucy, messy, or bready.
A slice of postmodern minimalism: a shatteringly crisp, wafer-thin crust with a deeply caramelized flavor that bears no trace of raw yeast or flour and toppings and are sleek, light, and off the charts in flavor.
Use a food processor for a dough that comes together quickly and easily, then let the dough rest overnight in the refrigerator for easy-to-handle dough that bakes up crisp and flavorful. For the thinnest crust possible, use a rolling pin. While Americans have a propensity for using high-protein flour, our research indicated that Italians use fairly soft flour. We produced good crusts using all-purpose flour at 11.7 percent protein, but found unbleached all-purpose flour, at 10.5 percent protein yielded uniformly light doughs that were as full-flavored as those made with the all-purpose.
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