Pizza Dough Mix vs. Making From Scratch: An Honest Comparison

I've been making pizza dough from scratch every week since I launched the Baking Steel in 2012.

That's not an exaggeration. For a couple of years, I was probably making more pizzas at home than almost anyone on earth. It was my job, learn everything, test everything, teach our customers. I kneaded dough by hand for the first five to seven years. All of it. As the batches grew, I'd be working through 3,000 gram batches by hand, six times our home recipe, before I finally bought a commercial spiral mixer.

So when I tell you I know how to make dough from scratch, I mean it.

How It Started: Jim Lahey and the No-Knead Method

Early on I made a trip to New York City to meet Jim Lahey at Sullivan Street Bakery. I loved his no-knead recipe and wanted his blessing to share it with every Baking Steel customer. He agreed. For years, Jim's recipe went into every Baking Steel box.

His baker's percentages became our foundation. Simple, elegant, and outstanding on the steel.

But as we kept making pizzas, week after week, year after year, our recipe evolved. We learned that bread flour holds fermentation longer than all-purpose. We learned that the "no-knead" dough actually benefits from a little kneading. And we learned that fermentation is everything. A 72-hour cold ferment produces layers of flavor and texture you simply cannot get from a 12-hour dough.

The Case for From Scratch

Making dough from scratch is deeply satisfying. You control every variable, flour, hydration, salt percentage, yeast quantity, fermentation time. When it works, it really works.

But here's the thing nobody talks about: it requires a scale. Full stop. Dough is science. You cannot eyeball a hydration ratio and hope. Water content is everything, too much and your dough won't hold shape, too little and it won't stretch. Every serious recipe is written in grams for a reason.

And the flour matters more than people think. Most home bakers grab all-purpose flour at the grocery store and wonder why their dough doesn't behave like the videos. Wrong tool. Protein content, grind, and absorption rate are what separate a great crust from a mediocre one, and generic AP flour misses on all three.

That means before you make a single pizza, you need a scale, you need to source quality bread flour, you need to measure everything precisely, and you need to start three days ahead. That's a commitment. And if you procrastinate on making dough, if you skip Tuesday because it felt like too much, you're not having pizza on Friday.

I've watched that happen to home bakers for 13 years.

Why We Built the Dough Pack

The friction was always the measuring.

Not the fermentation, people love that part once they experience it. Not the stretching, that becomes meditative. The friction was standing at the counter with a scale, weighing flour, water, salt, yeast, hoping the ratios were right.

So we asked: what if we could eliminate that entirely?

The Baking Steel 72-Hour Dough Pack is organic unbleached flour, sea salt, and dry yeast, pre-measured, pre-proportioned, ready to go. The only thing you measure is 1¾ cups of room temperature water. Pour the mix into a bowl. Add the water. Mix it up.

That's it.

And that flour isn't a compromise ingredient, it's Central Milling Organic High Mountain bread flour, the exact flour I use for every pizza I make and every class I teach. I sourced it on purpose, because it nails the protein, grind, and absorption that make a crust great. The mix solves the flour problem before you even know you have it.

No scale. No sourcing flour. No math. Twenty-four, forty-eight, or seventy-two hours later, you have world-class fermented pizza dough ready to stretch and bake on the steel.

I've made dough thousands of times. Using the dough pack still puts a smile on my face every single time. Not because it's easier than scratch, though it is, but because it removes every reason not to make pizza this week.

So Which Is Better?

If you love the process, have a scale, and want complete control, make it from scratch. Jim Lahey's method is still in our DNA and it's still outstanding.

If you want world-class fermented dough without the friction, grab the dough pack. Same 72-hour cold ferment. Same flavor depth. No scale required.

Want to Go Full Scratch? Here's My Flour.

I'll make this easy: if you'd rather build your dough from the ground up, buy Central Milling Organic High Mountain bread flour, the same flour that's in our mix. That's not a typo. I'm the guy who sells the mix, and I'm telling you exactly how to skip it.

Why? Because the goal was never to sell you a pouch. It's to get legendary pizza coming out of your oven. The mix just gets you there with zero measuring and zero guesswork, same flour, pre-portioned, add water. Pick whichever path fits your life. Either way, you're baking on the good stuff.

And either way, use the Baking Steel. That part isn't optional.

About the Author

Andris Lagsdin invented the Baking Steel in 2012 using steel from his family's Stoughton Steel Company in Hanover, MA. a shop his family has run since the 1970s. What started as a Kickstarter project (backed after an endorsement from Kenji López-Alt on Serious Eats) has grown into the go-to tool for hundreds of thousands of home pizza makers. Every Baking Steel is still made at the family shop.

Before launching Baking Steel, Andris trained under renowned chef Todd English and spent 15 years in the family steel business. He's the co-author of Baking with Steel with Jesse Olson Moore.

Today he teaches thousands of students how to make pizzeria-quality pizza at home through his free online classes and recipes.

In 2026, Andris launched the 72-Hour Pizza Dough Mix the same recipe he's been teaching for over a decade, now in a bag. Just add water.