What makes our pizza dough so good: a kitchen deep dive

At The Approach, the kitchen starts moving well before the first pint is poured on a Friday night. While the front-of-house team sets up screens for the football and the bar staff polish glasses, the dough for Saturday and Sunday's pizzas is being mixed, portioned, and tucked into the cold room. That quiet, floury ritual is the reason our pizzas taste the way they do — and it is the part of the operation we get asked about most often by regulars and curious passers-by.

A great base isn't built on a single trick. It is the result of small, repeatable choices made every single day: the bag of flour we open, the temperature of the water, the hours we let the dough rest, the way a ball is stretched under the hands of a pizzaiolo. In the sections that follow, we'll walk through each of those choices the way we'd walk a mate through our kitchen after a long Saturday arvo service — honestly, with a bit of banter, and without skipping the bits that actually matter.

The flour that starts everything

Every pizza begins life as a seed of wheat in a field somewhere, and the choice of that wheat sets the ceiling for everything that comes after. At The Approach, we work with a blend built around an imported Italian "00" flour, combined with a strong high-extraction bread flour to give the crumb more structure. The "00" gives us a soft, supple dough that stretches thin without tearing; the bread flour lifts the crust so it can hold a generous spread of toppings.

Australian kitchens tend to default to a different flour landscape — local mills like Manildra and Laucke produce pizza-specific blends that perform well at high heat. When we talk to chefs from Melbourne and Sydney, we often hear them discussing protein content in W-values. The same idea applies here: a flour around W280 to W320 gives us dough that develops strong gluten without going rubbery. Cheaper supermarket flour works in a pinch, but the difference shows up in the chew, the blister, and the way the base holds its shape under a heavy topping.

We also keep a close eye on freshness. Flour that has oxidised loses the subtle sweetness that good dough carries into the oven. Our team rotates stock carefully, and we never keep a bag open for longer than a couple of weeks in busy service.

Water, hydration, and the mineral story

If flour is the skeleton, water is the muscle. The hydration of a dough — the percentage of water to flour by weight — is the single biggest variable in how a base feels in the mouth. We work around 65 percent hydration for our classic bases, climbing closer to 72 percent for airier specials. That extra water takes longer to absorb, but rewards patience with a dough that puffs and chars beautifully in the oven.

Water quality matters more than most home cooks realise. Hard water changes the way gluten tightens; soft water can make dough feel slack and sticky. In the UK, regional water profiles vary dramatically — the famously soft Scottish water behaves differently to the mineral-heavy supply across the Midlands. In our kitchen, we filter the water before it ever reaches the mixer, both for consistency and for flavour.

Australian cooks will recognise the same debate. Melbourne water is famously soft, while Perth, Brisbane, and much of South Australia sit at the harder end of the spectrum. Some of our Sydney-based mates swear by a simple jug attachment, while others in Adelaide have told us they add a pinch of calcium to their dough to compensate. Whatever the postcode, the principle holds: know your water, and adjust your hydration accordingly.

Cold fermentation and the slow magic of time

The most underrated ingredient in our dough is patience. Once mixed and kneaded until smooth, the dough goes straight into covered trays in our cold room at around 4°C, where it stays for a minimum of 24 hours and often closer to 72. During that long, slow rest, enzymes break down starches into simpler sugars, yeast activity settles into a quiet rhythm, and organic acids build up in the dough.

The result is flavour you simply cannot fake with shortcuts. A same-day dough tastes bready and flat; a properly cold-fermented base tastes faintly tangy, almost nutty, with a complexity that holds up against bold toppings like nduja, gorgonzola, or our spiced chicken special. It also improves how the dough behaves in the oven — the long ferment relaxes the gluten so the base stretches without springing back.

There is also a very practical reason that works: a cold ferment buys us scheduling flexibility. We mix large batches on a quiet morning, and the dough is ready when the kitchen hits its peak on Saturday night. It is a bit like mapping out a wedding day timeline — front-load the work, then let things unfold calmly rather than scrambling at the last minute.

Salt, oil, and the smaller details

Salt does more than season the dough. It slows fermentation just enough to keep the dough on schedule, tightens the gluten network so the base holds its shape, and lifts the flavour of every other ingredient on the pizza. We use a coarse sea salt rather than table salt, both for the clean taste and for the small texture it leaves on the crust when a pinch is scattered across the rim before baking.

Olive oil plays a supporting role. A small addition to the dough tenderises the crumb and adds a whisper of fruitiness that comes through in the finished slice. We use an extra-virgin oil, and on slow weeks we have been known to swap in an Australian single-estate bottle from somewhere like McLaren Vale or the King Valley — the grassy, peppery notes give the base a character you do not get from a generic supermarket blend.

A few of our team add a tiny pinch of diastatic malt or a splash of honey to the mix. It is not essential, and purists will rightly say it is unnecessary with good flour and a long ferment, but it gives the crust a touch more colour in a busy oven and helps the dough recover when the dough ball has been handled a bit too enthusiastically. None of these additions are heroes on their own; they are seasoning for the dough itself.

Shaping, stretching, and the heat of the oven

The final piece of the puzzle is the moment the dough meets the bench and the heat. We portion the cold-fermented dough into tight balls, let them come to room temperature for an hour, and stretch each one by hand — never with a rolling pin, which would knock out all the gas the ferment has built up. A gentle press from the centre outwards, lifted over the knuckles, lets gravity do most of the work. The rim stays thick and pillowy; the centre stays thin and even.

Oven temperature is where many recipes fall apart. Our pizza oven runs at around 380°C at the deck, with the dome a touch hotter. A home oven cannot match that, but a preheated pizza stone or steel, cranked as high as it will go, gets surprisingly close. The base should blister and char in 90 seconds to two minutes, not slowly dry out over ten. Australians cooking at home in a standard electric oven should expect to push the door-ajar trick or invest in a small bench-top oven if pizza is going to be a weekly ritual.

For those who want a quick comparison between the styles of dough we have experimented with over the years, here is what we learned.

Dough style Hydration Ferment time Texture Best topping match
Classic 00 blend 65% 48–72h cold Chewy, balanced, with crisp rim Pepperoni, margherita, ham and pineapple
High hydration 72% 48–72h cold Airy, open crumb, lighter base White pizza, mushroom, ricotta
Same-day dough 60% 4–6h room temp Tighter, more bready Simple tomato and basil
Wholemeal blend 63% 48h cold Nuttier, slightly denser Roast veg, goats cheese, caramelised onion
Sourdough starter 68% 24h cold + 6h room Tangier, complex, rustic Nduja, olives, cured meats

Tips for pulling better dough at home

Reading about dough is one thing; feeling it bake is quite another. Our kitchen team is happy to chat through these details on your next stop in, and the pizzas out of our oven are the honest answer to this whole deep dive. Pull up a stool, order a round, and judge the base yourself while the football plays across the screens. For more behind the scenes, have a look at the approach s 6 entry on our journal — and when you are ready for your next visit, you know where to find us, right off the tram line and within easy reach of the city centre.