Where "NY style" means really very "NY style": thin and charred. If that's your taste, go for it...
But for those more into the traditional original bread-like Neapolitan style I strongly suggest using a sourdough based dough, like Tartine's[0]
Bear in mind: this is cooking, not engineering, not math. And, unlike New Yorkers seem to believe, pizza wasn't invented in the land of burguers and hotdogs.
Wherever there are Italian immigrants there are variations in pizza all over the world, from Chicago (deep dish) to Sao Paulo (stuffed border, "coroa de pizza"), from Liguria (piscialandrea) to Sicily (sfincione), from Rome (al taglio) to Naples, etc.
A simple & lazy bread machine dough (they have dough settings) will produce a damn good pie, given quality toppings. Best if you can rest it at room temp for a few hours after the machine's cycle finishes, but also OK if you can't. I've done fancier doughs, and it is better, but I mostly just do that these days. With that, you can either get some pizza-specific tools (peel, stone—you need the peel) or you can just make pan pizzas in a cast iron pan, no extra stuff needed—and that method's lower-mess. The down side is it's harder to do multiple pizzas quickly in a row, unless you have multiple cast iron pans, since you can't construct a second one while the first is using the pan, and when it comes out the pan is no fun to work on for a while, as it'll be quite hot.
Getting started making decent pizza at home is as simple and easy as a bread machine and a cast iron pan (or two).
(pro tip: get small cans of tomato sauce or crushed tomato [yes, use canned] and mix salt, way more black pepper than seems right, and some oregano [fresh is great if you have it, but dried is fine], directly in the can. Boom, nearly zero mess [one spoon, perhaps] sauce, on the cheap, and it's good. You don't need to pre-cook it, just put it directly on as is. You won't be able to beat this cheap, lazy method by too much unless you've got garden-grown sauce tomatoes)
[EDIT] other pro tip: you can build a pizza on your peel while another's in the oven provided you have a large cutting board. The pizza coming off the stone will be stiff enough that you can just shove it onto the cutting board. A peel provides little benefit for taking a pizza off a stone in a normal home oven, though it is very nice for putting it on. Further pro tip: avoid pretty, finished wood peels. Smooth-finished wood makes the dough stick way worse.
That's a weird recipe. '1 cup flour; 1 tbsp flour', '1 tbsp salt; 1 tsp salt', 'bread, 00, or all-purpose flour if neither of those are available'...
I somewhat understand the first, knowing that America has an aversion to mass-based (or even standard volumetric) measurements in recipes, so the alternative really is either an unreasonable number of tablespoons, or an unreasonably precise number of cups.
The latter however is pure nonsense. 'Bread flour', aka 'strong', is so named for relatively high protein content (gluten-producing capability). '00 flour' aka 'super-fine' refers to how finely it's milled; used particularly for pasta and has its proponents for pizza.
Orthogonal concepts. As a substitution chain it basically just reads 'flour' but in a way that implies any speciality is better than plain/'AP'.
> And, unlike New Yorkers seem to believe, pizza wasn't invented in the land of burguers and hotdogs.
Um, yeah. As a life long New Yorker I, and most anyone I know, are well aware of the origins of pizza. We just happen to have had a large Italian population so we have a lot of pizza.
> And, unlike New Yorkers seem to believe, pizza wasn't invented in the land of burguers and hotdogs
Which version of pizza are you talking about? Apple didn't technically invent the first smartphone, and yet it did create and popularize the smartphone as the world knows it today.
The US also didn't actually invent putting cooked beef between two slices of bread. It popularized and spread the hamburger globally. What the world came to know as a hamburger, came from the US.
Pizza, as with so many commercialized things, was popularized around the globe by the US, not by Italy. That's not something up for debate, it's not subtly the case, the US massively popularized pizza as the world knows it today. It wasn't the classic, bland Italian version of 'pizza' that stormed around the world, it was the amped up commercialized US approach to pizza: which involved an epic explosion of variation of every possible sort, delivered by chains. That's what rapidly spread pizza to every corner of the globe post WW2. The US created the modern pizza chain and spread it globally, using its vast economic reach and capital, introducing pizza to billions of people in the process. Pizza was popularized globally by the US in exactly the same way the US popularized hamburgers.
> The US also didn't actually invent putting cooked beef between two slices of bread.
If you're talking about ground beef, yes, they invented. The original prussian tartare steak was uncooked, made with horse meat and not served on bread. The american "Hamburguer steak" was invented in the Port of NY inspired but radically different from the dish served to immigrants coming from the Hamburg port.
> was popularized around the globe by the US, not by Italy.
Just no. São Paulo, Brazil and Buenos Aires, Argentina, already had pizza before Americans "popularized" it, because they have Italian immigrants since the 19th century. And to this day their pizza is closer to the original than to the NY style.
> classic, bland Italian version of 'pizza'
Go to Italy. Go to Sicily, Basilicata, Liguria, Lazio, Sardinia, ... their pizza is very far away from "bland".
> Pizza, as with so many commercialized things, was popularized around the globe by the US, not by Italy. That's not something up for debate, it's not subtly the case, the US massively popularized pizza as the world knows it today
You need to back this up. It is far from obvious.
Do you have any idea how prevalent "chain-pizza" is compared with "locally owned", in countries throughout the world? I hardly believe it was US that spread pizza throughout Europe. It was much more likely migration.
There’s a word for this effect which slips my mind. But in essence it’s a phenomenon where something is made in a place and it’s just considered ordinary or unremarkable by them. Then that thing finds in a new life in another place which finds it extraordinary and the place it came from picks up on that and then finds it extraordinary too.
Pizza is thought to be one of those things. Italians had it, New Yorkers went insane for it, and then Italians followed suit and made it a significant cultural identifier.
I don't know about around the world, but it seems like Italian migrants brought pizza to Germany[1]. Apocryphally, the first Italian restaurant which had pizza on the menu was initially serving mostly GIs, however they mostly requested spaghetti with meatballs.
I don't think many people here would associate pizza with the US, aside from pan pizza. If asked, people would probably say America invented the cheese-filled crust.
Chains exist, including Pizza Hut and Dominos and a few local ones, but the vast majority of sales are done by small, independent restaurants. Overall, the chain restaurant concept -- thankfully -- hasn't been working out in Germany, beyond bottom tier fast food.
But for those more into the traditional original bread-like Neapolitan style I strongly suggest using a sourdough based dough, like Tartine's[0]
Bear in mind: this is cooking, not engineering, not math. And, unlike New Yorkers seem to believe, pizza wasn't invented in the land of burguers and hotdogs.
Wherever there are Italian immigrants there are variations in pizza all over the world, from Chicago (deep dish) to Sao Paulo (stuffed border, "coroa de pizza"), from Liguria (piscialandrea) to Sicily (sfincione), from Rome (al taglio) to Naples, etc.
[0] https://food52.com/recipes/64201-tartine-s-pizza-dough
Edit: to open your mind I'd suggest "The wild pizzas of Southern Italy": https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-03-15/the-wild-...