Pizza pepperoni, cheese

A careless shaggy dough is prepared the evening before. Covered and set aside. 

* 2 cups water

* 3 packed cups unsifted flour

* 1/2 teaspoon active dry yeast

It is a very wet dough. We baker types refer to this as biga, poolish, or a sponge, it is a prefermentation. 

Half this dough turned out onto a floured surface is cut out and rolled into a baguette. The remaining half is still too large for a single small pizza.  The remaining portion will be used for something else. 

Now that you've seen the baguette, I must ask you to forget about it because it is irrelevant to the pizza. Except were it not for this divided purpose I might not have forgotten the salt and I might have remembered I like semolina in the pizza dough.

This is the remaining portion for the pizza but it is still too much. A portion is reserved for something else. 

Look. I am saving space. 

The oven is preset to hot as it will go. There is a pizza stone in there getting seriously hot.

The parchment paper helps transfer the pizza to the oven, but I want the oven stone to contact the dough so the parchment is removed after a minute, after the dough inside the oven has set and won't be a problem to slip out. You can see where the oven scorched the paper within one minute. 

So the dough is touching the hot stone for 95% of the cooking time. The pizza bakes quickly because the oven is so hot.