johnliu- Personally, I'm not a fan of multiple rises. Yeast will only last so long and for each additional rise you are taking a chance you won't have enough "umph" left in your yeast for the ovenspring. I prefer a sponge, one rise (preferable at a very cool room temperature to develop flavor) and the final proof. Our flour is no longer bromated so it just doesn't have the extensibility it once had to accommodate multiple rises. Allowing your dough to rise to "double", and anytime you allow it to go past double, is over-proofing it. So you have multiple times you can be over-proofing your dough. Be sure to keep each of the rises to just UNDER double. Bread texture begins with mixing. Even while you are mixing by hand, as was already mentioned by jessica, let the dough sit for several minutes so the gluten has a chance to absorb the liquid, then continue adding more flour. "Experts" suggest the gluten proteins absorb water better and consequently make more gluten if the dough temperature at the end of kneading is about 80-degrees F. This is the temperature you'll find suggested in books in the U.S., but Europeans prefer 75-degrees F. So you can experiment by taking the temperature before and after kneading. Shirley Corriher adds 1/4 to 1/3 c. crushed ice to the sponge just before kneading, which lowers the dough temperature. She believes you get better water absorption and better gluten development with the addition of the crushed ice. Then knead it until it's 80-degrees F. There are two goals you need to keep in mind during kneading - incorporating air and stretching proteins. If your dough is "tight" or "firm" you can't achieve either of those goals. If your dough is firm, dip your hands into a bowl of water and add more hydration to your dough while kneading to keep the dough soft. This is VERY important if you are making dough for English Muffins and you want that open texture characteristic of English Muffins. Avoid adding a lot of flour during kneading. If you find you are adding copious amounts of flour because your dough is sticky, that means you did a poor job mixing. I'm another fan of kneading dough on a Silpat. You'll use very little bench flour. If you wait to add your salt towards the end of the kneading, that will also shorten your kneading time. It's much easier to knead dough before you add the salt. Once you add the salt those gluten strands really tighten up. That's another method you can incorporate. I never add salt until I see the gluten is developed - whether making bread by hand or in the bread machine. If you are using fat in your recipe, at what point in the mixing you add it will also affect the dough, gluten development, and the bread texture. If you add fat early in the mixing it coats the gluten strands and "shortens" them. Add the fat later, after the gluten has begun to develop, and you'll have a more open texture to the bread and a higher rise. Neither is right or wrong, but at what point in mixing you add the fat will help determine what your bread texture is. Add it early and you have a more closed, even, almost cake-like texture. This is great for bread you want to use for sandwiches. That texture will hold the mayo on top and won't fall apart when handled. Add it late and you'll achieve a taller loaf with a more open texture. Now you have bread that is great for toast. Those nice open spots will hold the butter and jam. If you are using a stand mixer for kneading and you use a fast speed and then switch to a lower speed during kneading, this is bad for the gluten strands. The dough will have the same characteristics as over-kneading - the dough will be sticky and no longer elastic. Bread scientists have termed this condition "unmixing". You can remedy this by going back to the higher speed until the dough is satiny and elastic again. By hand, good kneading takes about 10-minutes. -Grainlady

Gorgeous bagels Shaun! I'll take a poppy please. We like the no-knead dough for pizza, the Cook's Illustrated recipe 3 Cups AP flour 1 2/3 cups water, room temp 1 1/4 tsp salt 1 1/2 tsp instant yeast (I used my bread machine yeast and it was fine) 1 1/4 tsp sugar (I used agave nectar) 5 Tbs EVOO Mix flour, water & Salt in mixer fitted with a dough hook for a few minutes on low, just to combine everything. Let dough rest 20 min. Sprinkle yeast and sugar over dough. Mix on low speed, just to incorporate all the ingredients, scrape the bottom. Increase mixer to high for about 5 - 10 minutes (I only needed 5) until dough is smooth and glossy and pulls away from sides. Coat a large bowl with olive oil, transfer dough to bowl, turn dough over in bowl so it's coated, cover with plastic wrap and let it rise at room temp for 2 - 2.5 hours. You'll see large bubbles and it will have tripled in size. Before rising, I put mine in the refrigerator wrapped, then pulled it out about 4 hours before I needed it to let it come to room temp and rise all the way. Put a pizza stone in oven and preheat to 450. Let the over rest at 450 for a while, so the stone gets good and hot. Rim a baking sheet with oil and turn dough out onto the sheet, stretching it with your fingertips. If it shrinks back a lot, let the dough rest for a few minutes and stretch it again. Let the dough rest in the pan until a little bubbly, maybe 10 minutes. Poke the surface with a fork all over, sprinkle with salt and bake until golden brown, 20 to 30 minutes. Pull it out and top it with whatever makes you happy and put it back in the oven for a few minutes. Often though, I'll make a batch of half whole wheat half bread flour pizza dough in the bread machine. It's so quick and easy, less than 5 minutes to load the machine and then I stick a couple bags in the refrigerator for whenever we're going to have pizza that week. That pizza looks yummy Ann. I also love mushrooms and black olives. Unfortunately, I'm the only one here that feels that way. AM

I did a Bing search on - Jim Lahey's no knead pizza dough - and found recipes, information, as well as videos at the link below. Perhaps there is something there that addresses your questions. It's not one I've personally had any experience with. You might also check your local library and see if his book is available there, or through inter-library loan. I wouldn't hesitate using 1/2 a recipe. I used 1/2 recipes when I made recipes from "Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day" cookbook, which is another refrigerator dough. I would also take ann_t's suggestion to par-bake the crusts and keep a stack in your freezer. I suggest a tight wrap of plastic wrap over each par-baked crust, then place them in a freezer zip-lock bag. Some rounds of sturdy cardboard between the crusts might help keep them from breaking. Freezer yeast dough really needs to be specifically designed for freezer storage for the best results. Since freezing dough kills yeast, and there is very little yeast in this recipe, there is usually much more yeast in a freezer dough recipe to compensate. Freezing can also damage the gluten, so additional vital wheat gluten is often added to freezer dough, and all-purpose flour may not work as well as a high-protein bread flour since it has more gluten to begin with than all-purpose flour. The other thing about freezer dough, it only keeps 2-3 months, so you really aren't gaining much. -Grainlady Here is a link that might be useful: Jim Lahey's no knead pizza dough

00 flour won't make any difference if the dough is too wet, other than worsen the problem. The 00 flour is just ground a lot finer than other flour. What matters, regardless of the type of flour you're using, is the proportion of water, flour, and heat. If your dough is extremely wet, you can make it in a pan, but you'll have trouble using a peel. If your dough is not so wet, you'll be able to slide it off the peel having used only a slight dusting of flour. So the key is to get it as wet as possible but still have it be workable. If you want to use 00 flour, that works, but the mechanics are a little different because it absorbs water a little differently. In any case, look for a flour that has a fairly high gluten content. What makes your pizza dough spring is the sudden input of heat onto the dough surface. That heats the water in the dough, which creates steam, which blows up your dough. So you want your oven extremely hot and you want to put your dough on a material that transfers heat really fast. I have not used that Unii but supposedly it gets up to over 900 degrees F, which is fantastic and on par with many professional ovens. You should be able to make phenomenal pizza with that. For a home oven, I use a half-inch piece of steel directly under the broiler. My last stove would get the surface of the steel up to almost 700 degrees, which actually turned out to be too hot. I think the Unii has a stone in it rather than steel, which doesn't transfer heat as efficiently and which is a better material for the temps that oven can produce. in fact, it should be pizza heaven! We've made pizza at home a few times a week for many years and I've done it in a professional setting as well. There are lots of recipes for dough, but basically you want a slightly wet, but not too wet dough. You can start out with say, a cup of water and two cups of flour, and work up to around 2 3/4 cups of flour as needed, but you'll never want that much. Some people say to weigh the ingredients and go for a 65% hydration or even more if you can, but weighing or measuring really isn't the point - you need to be able to tell by feel and not by measuring. That's how people cooked for centuries anyway. A couple of other things - you should let your dough rest for a while once you mix in the water. It takes time for each granule of flour to become hydrated, and your dough will be a lot better if you give it some rest time. Anything from five or ten minutes to a few hours will help. Or do a sponge method, where you mix the yeast, water, and some flour a day early and let that bubble up, then add the rest of the flour, the next day. Remember that 00 flour absorbs water faster and it also burns faster in your oven, so you'll need to play with your timings and ratios. And if you use whole wheat for part of the flour, you can let the dough stay a little wetter than you might otherwise - the bran will take a longer time to absorb water and once it rises, it won't be so wet and sticky. So this is a long way of saying what someone above said much more eloquently - try adding a little more flour or less water. But be careful - you don't want too much flour or your crust won't be as good. Just a sprinkling of flour, work that, and if you need more, add another sprinkling. And remember that your dough will feel wetter when you set it to rise than it will once it's risen, particularly if you let it rise in the fridge overnight or for a couple of days. If you work with cold dough, it's a lot easier to handle. And finally it's your preference. Some people like a Neapolitan type crust, which is floppy and soft with a crisp cornicione, which is the thick part at the outer edge of the crust. Some people like what they call New York style, which is a thicker crust that you can hold up and which a lot of New Yorkers like to fold over lengthwise. That's a dumb move btw, and I can say that as a New Yorker, but you end up channeling the grease onto your shirt. Anyhow, best of luck!