I use this dough almost exclusively for pizza. It's my go-to, it's what I make more than anything else in my own kitchen. But I want to say something to anyone who's ever been intimidated by making dough at home: it's a lot simpler than it looks.
We took all the measuring away. Flour, salt, yeast, all pre-portioned. All you do is add water. That's it.
This pack is the base. And to show you just how versatile that base actually is, I bumped the water up a smidge from what's on the bag and made three completely different things: pizza, ciabatta, and my personal favorite, English muffins.
The one change
Our dough pack calls for 1¾ cups of water. For everything you're about to see, I used 2 cups instead, just a slightly higher hydration. Same pack, same measuring-free base, one small adjustment. That's the whole trick behind all three of these.
Pizza
This is the expected use, and honestly it's still the best one. Same 72-hour ferment, same fold-don't-knead approach we always talk about, launched on a preheated steel for that crisp, blistered crust.
Bumping the hydration slightly here gives you a touch more openness in the crumb without changing how you handle or launch the dough. If you've made our pizza dough before, this will feel completely familiar.
Ciabatta
Same pack, same water bump, and it turns into this.
![Three golden, flour-dusted ciabatta loaves on a wood board branded with the Baking Steel logo]
That craggy, floured top and open, airy crumb is what ciabatta is supposed to look like, and it comes from the exact same bag of pre-measured dough you'd use for pizza the night before. No separate ciabatta recipe, no separate flour. Just a slightly wetter dough, shaped long instead of round, and baked hot.
This is the one that surprises people. If you've never made bread before and pizza feels like your ceiling, this is proof the same base can go a lot further than you'd think.
English muffins
This is my favorite of the three, and it's not even close.
Same dough, same hydration bump, but instead of the oven, these go onto a griddle. Completely different cooking method, completely different occasion, this isn't a dinner thing anymore, it's a make-a-batch-and-eat-them-all-week thing.
Once you see a pizza dough turn into breakfast, you start looking at the pack differently. It's not just what you reach for on pizza night anymore.
One pack, three ways
Same 72-Hour Dough Mix, same technique, same weekend. Pizza for dinner, ciabatta for the bread basket, English muffins for the rest of the week. The only thing that changed across all three was a quarter cup of water.
There's no right or wrong way to use this pack. I'm still finding new things to make with it myself. Try the hydration bump, see where it takes you.
I invented the Baking Steel in 2012 after reading a single paragraph in the Wall Street Journal about Modernist Cuisine. I was standing in my family's steel fabrication plant in Hanover, MA and thought: steel conducts heat 18X better than ceramic. What would that do to a pizza?
Twelve years later I'm still in the kitchen, still obsessing over dough, and still convinced that the best results come from removing complexity, not adding it. That's the whole idea behind the 72-Hour Dough Mix too, one mix, pre-measured, no guesswork, just the same dough I make at home.
One mix. One mess. Just add time.
