Northeastern Pennsylvania-style (NEPA) Pizza Dough

Northeastern Pennsylvania (NEPA) has its own thriving pizza scene. Thick, rectangular pan-cooked crusts are what define many of the most popular pies in this region. 

When creating our go-to NEPA-style dough recipe, we turned to Jim Mirabelli, the owner and chief pizza officer at NEPA Pizza Review, a guide to all things Northeastern Pennsylvania-style pizza. He created this dough as a homemade ode to the pizzas at some of his favorite spots like Ferri’s and Happy Pizza. Used as the base for Old Forge-style cheese pizza and mashed potato-covered Pagash pizza, it’s a buttery dough that gets crispy on the outside while staying chewy on the inside.

Jim’s recipe calls for General Mills Full Strength Flour, a bread flour (12.6% protein content) that comes in 50-pound bags, typically used in professional settings and pizzerias that make this regional style, but you can use King Arthur Bread Flour (12.7%), Ceresota (12%) or another bread flour with a comparable protein content (11 to 13%) for similar results. 

This recipe appears in A Love Letter to Northeastern Pennsylvania-style Pizza by Jim Mirabelli. 

Difficulty

Servings

2 x 450-gram dough balls

Prep Time

6 hours

By Ooni HQ

NEPA pizza dough

Note

If using baker’s percentages instead of following the recipe exactly, percentages are as follows: flour (100%), water (62%), instant dry yeast (1.25%), salt (2%), unsalted butter (5%) 

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