My obsession with pizza continues. For the last several months, I’ve been experimenting with different dough recipes in an attempt to achieve a pizza with a crust that’s both soft and crunchy. Key to realizing this goal is finding the right percent of hydration, or the ratio of water to flour. Although it sounds pretty easy to do, it’s not. As the quantity of water goes up, the dough gets stickier and more difficult to work with. Sure, you can add a little flour as you go to make the dough more manageable, but add too much, and there goes the balance.

An outdoor pizza oven, where the temperature hovers around 900° F, requires a higher hydration than a home oven, which typically maxes out between 500° F and 550° F. One of the most best dough recipes for indoor ovens, and with good reason, is Roberta’s Pizza Dough, which has acquired quite a following ever since it was featured in the New York Times. It uses a hydration level of 65% (306g flour/200g water). Compare that, however, with one of the most vaunted recipes for an outdoor oven, Vito Iacopelli’s “Next Level Pizza Dough,” which requires 70% hydration (1000g flour/700g water). This higher amount of water combined with the extreme temperature of an outdoor oven creates the steam that gives the baked pizza dough its puffed up crust.

To date, I have had my best luck with Andrew Janjigian’s “Outdoor Pizza Oven Pizza Dough,” which uses a 67% hydration. The dough has the sought after soft-and-crunchy texture, is relatively easy to knead and stretch, and owing to its 48-hour cold proofing, delivers great flavor.

However, when I created a post about my success with it on the Ooni subreddit, it was met with mixed reactions. Among those responses that were less favorable was one that suggested using Ooni’s Classic Pizza Dough recipe that was far easier to make since it has a hydration of 60% and requires no more than 4 hours before it was ready to use.

Elsewhere on Reddit, I found a video recipe by renowned pizzaiolo Massimo Nocerino for making a small batch of dough with a 67% hydration that required only 6 ½ hours, which made it perfect for making the dough and cooking the pizza on the same day. As does Iacopelli’s dough, it uses a highly fluid preferment, or starter, called a “poolish.”

So on Sunday, I decided to give both same-day recipes a try. On my iPhone’s Ooni app, I entered the number (2) and weight (250g) for the dough balls and used the recommended proofing times (3 hours) from the recipe.

I followed its method for using a stand mixer, which significantly facilitated the prep. The dough was relatively easy to stretch and yielded decent enough pizzas, but they lacked the puff and far less flavor than Janjigian’s dough, perhaps due respectively to the lower hydration and shorter fermentation.

The poolish in Nocerino’s recipe, with it 4-hour proofing, addressed both these issues: the higher hydration and longer fermentation gave the dough the texture and savor that were lacking in Ooni’s.

These improvements, however, came at price: a soft and sticky dough that was difficult to knead and stretch. I got around this problem by flouring both my kneading board and my hands, which may, or may not, have affected slightly the hydration level.

Nevertheless, I believe that with a little more practice I shall master higher hydration dough making and eventually work my way up to Vito Iacopelli’s “Next Level” pizza dough. In any event, the training should prove to be a tasty ride.