Shadowing Practice: How To Make Perfect New York Pizza - Learn English Speaking with Video

Nick: If your kitchen doesn't look like this after you've made pizza, you probably didn't make pizza. We'll start off by making our dough.

Now can you go to the supermarket and buy some pre-made dough?

Yes. Do I think you can make better dough at home?

Definitely. All you need is a bit of bread flour and some salt, and just a little bit of yeast. And once you whisk that all up to make sure it's evenly combined, add in your water... then toss on that dough hook attachment!

Make sure it's locked in there! You never want to lose it inside of whatever's in your bowl. And we'll close it down and continue to mix.

I'm gonna use a rubber spatula now to make sure that we incorporate all that flour.

And right now my mixer is on the lowest setting that it can possibly go.

I don't want to overmix anything.

I'm not trying to tear this dough apart or beat it up in any way.

My goal is to get it to pull all together into one.

Sometimes it's good to stop your mixer for just a moment.

Careful with your fingers! And just lift it around over onto itself!

Make sure everything's evenly combined! This helps to speed up the process a little bit.

And then hook back on...

We can keep it going. If you watch carefully here, you'll see that once in a while my mixer sort of lifts up like that, as it's kneading this dough.

And the reason is: I've left it unlocked on purpose.

You can use this trick as long as you're careful.

But what happens sometimes if you're kneading dough...if the mixer is locked in as it burns out the engine in your mixer.

So what this does is: it allows it to sort of bounce up and down like this as it kneads, and it doesn't ruin the motor that's inside here. After about 2 to 3 minutes of mixing, our dough is looking great.

So I'm gonna loosen it up from the bottom of my bowl.

And we could allow it to just rise in here.

But a lot of people at home have a metal mixing bowl, and you don't really want to proof any kind of dough in metal.

So instead, I'm gonna add some olive oil to the bottom of a plastic container, and then I'll drop my dough ball right in.

You can feel free to spread it out just a tiny bit, but it's gonna do most of that work on its own. Then on goes our lid, and we'll rest this at room temperature for 24 hours. 24 hours later...

Sometimes I use a little bit of magic in my recipes.

...here is what our dough looks like.

You can see it's beautifully jiggly.

You can smell the development of that yeast. You can see all of these really nice air bubbles starting to form, which is gonna give us a really nice crust. And if you wanted to use this dough right now and make pizza, you could just toss it in the fridge, until it kind of cools down a little bit, and then it'd be ready to go.

But as much as I'm sure you'd love to make a few pizzas with this dough right now, the lid's gonna go back on, and it's gonna go into the fridge for 1 to 2 more days.

And what that does, aside from developing flavor, is give a really nice chew to the texture of the dough.

It's a very important step, and I promise it will be worth it.

And with a bit more magic, my dough has now been sitting in the fridge for 2 days, developing all of that delicious flavor and texture.

So yes...technically, if you want to be making this dough from scratch and you want to make pizzas on a Saturday, you'd need to start making the dough on Wednesday. And I know that sounds like a lot of planning ahead for some of you. So that's why I said if you want to buy pre-made pizza dough, you can definitely do that. The next step is quick and easy. We need to portion out our dough. We want to go for about 300 grams per ball of dough, so I'll cut off what I think looks like a nice generous chunk.

Throw it on down. Oh, my gosh! I nailed it!

301. I promise there was no movie magic there.

Normally if I hadn't hit the perfect number there, I would be adjusting and pulling off a bit of dough or adding some more....but since this one's already perfect, I'm gonna sort of roll it into itself to create this nice ball.

And if I flip this over, you'll see what I'm doing here is basically just pulling that dough from the outside and pressing it to the middle underside.

And what that does is: it kind of forms this tension on the top of the dough, that creates this nice little perfect ball. Fold...

press. Fold, press. Fold, press.

And eventually you're left with a nice pre-portioned dough ball like this. Once it's rolled out, this is gonna be perfect to make about a 12 to 14 inch pizza.

Now I'm just gonna lightly flour up a baking sheet, and that ball is gonna sit on there, until we're ready to make our pizza. And then all you do now is measure out the rest of your dough. Before I put it down, let's see how close I can get to nailing that same thing again! Boom!

That's too much, I think. 318. I'll take some off.

Oh, that's 300. Good. It's looking like I'm gonna get 3 nice big dough balls out of this. But if you want to make more pizzas that are just smaller, you can always portion your dough out to a lower amount.

There are our dough balls. If you've just gone through the process to make all this dough from scratch... First of all, great job. Second of all, if your dough looks like this with those little nice air bubbles that are forming all over the top of it, that is a sign that you've done a really, really great job making the dough.

Those little air pockets that we're gonna get in the cross section of our pizza crust, once we cut into it later... that provides amazing texture and airiness in each bite that we get. And that is one of the keys to a good pizza. Once we finish making our dough balls, we're gonna cover these up, just lightly. And because this is still cold from being in the refrigerator, I'm going to let it sit at room temperature, until I've got all the rest of my ingredients ready to go...and at that point it should be ready. Our dough is done, so now we can move on to making our tomato sauce. Pizza is only made of 3 basic components.

You've got your dough, your sauce, and your cheese. So we need to make sure every one of those components taste right.

For the sauce, you'll want to grab a can of whole peeled tomatoes.

I got the ones with basil in them, because they have a little bit of extra flavor. And I'll pour these off into a bowl.

And to this I'm gonna add a little bit of dried basil, just to continue boosting that basil flavor. I've got a few red pepper flakes.

It's really up to you to make it as spicy or as mild as you want.

And we've got a light dusting of garlic powder. And then this here is a really special ingredient. This is dried oregano.

But it's still, as you can see, on the stem.

And all I'm gonna do to take it off is... basically just press the leaves off from between my hands, and it'll fall right into my sauce.

I don't expect you to go and find oregano that's still on the stem, but because I found it, and because it does pack a bit more flavor, I'm using this instead of that classic dried jarred oregano, that I would normally use for something like this. The only other thing I'll do for now is add a few pinches of salt. And then I think this is my favorite part about cooking pizza, besides eating the actual pizza. I'm gonna get in there with my hands, and start to break all of these tomatoes apart.

If you're gonna do this, just remember to squeeze them away from you!

If you turn your hands up like this and then squeeze, you're gonna get hit right in the face with tomato juice. So if that happens, just don't say I didn't warn you! There are 2 reasons I like doing it this way. The first is that you get these nice differences in texture. For example, if I lift up some of this sauce, you can see that some of the chunks of tomato are larger.

And what that does when you eat the pizza is: give these slightly different pockets of texture. Some might have a little chunk of tomato, while others are gonna be a little bit more smooth, with less of a bite to them. This might make a little bit of a mess in your kitchen if you don't use a big enough bowl, so just keep that in mind as well!

Before you set your sauce off to the side, give it a little taste! And there are a few things you can and should do here. First, if it doesn't have enough salt, make sure you add more salt! Remember, there's gonna be some salt in the cheese, but you do want this to be well balanced on its own.

Then the other thing I'm looking for when I'm tasting it is acidity. I've got some sugar here, because sweet can balance out acidity, and depending on how ripe the tomatoes were, when they put them in the can... or what time of year it is, when you buy those tomatoes, they're gonna taste different. And whenever we think about food, we need to think about balance. So adding in just a touch of sugar can balance out that acidity to make the perfect tomato sauce.

Time for cheese. We've got 2 types of cheese for making our pizza.

The first is a classic mozzarella.

This will give our pizza that iconic stretchiness and maltiness.

And here we have fontina.

This cheese here melts smoother than mozzarella, and will give us this mild but nutty punch of flavor.

Most of the time I do eat the Rhine when I eat cheese, but I don't think anyone's gonna want a label on their pizza...

so I'm gonna slice these off.

I'm gonna make sure I get as close to the edge as possible on this last one here, because I don't want to lose any of our cheese. If I still had a hamster, I would have given him these as a snack. And now I'll start by grading my mozzarella. By the way, I almost forgot to mention: these just came out of the fridge. That's the only reason the mozzarella is grating as easily as it is right now.

If this was room temperature, it'd be a sloppy mess in my hands.

So remember that: keep your cheese in the fridge! If you've already watched a bunch of my videos, this goes without saying, but...grate your own cheese!

Do not buy pre-grated cheese, especially if you're making pizza!

The reason is: it's filled with all kinds of starches that make it harder for the cheese to melt. So by grating our own cheese, we can make sure that it's gonna melt super, super well. The one other important note that I have here with my mozzarella is that I'm using low moisture mozzarella.

And the reason for that is: that if you use a mozzarella that has a high moisture content, it's gonna make a really watery pizza.

And do you like watery pizza?

I'm gonna guess probably not.

I don't think anybody does.

As I grate my fontina, I'm gonna grate it the long way.

That's gonna give us these nice, really long strands of cheese, instead of grating it the short way, like this.

So when you think about that cheesiness and that texture on top of the finished pizzas, part of that is gonna be because we got these nice long strands of cheese.

Attention to detail when it comes to cooking is so, so important. All these little differences that I'm talking about add up to such large changes in the final product.

So if you're really careful and purposeful, while doing all these steps, your pizza is gonna be that much better. To stretch our dough, we'll start by tossing some flour down into the bottom of our cutting board... and I'll grab one of my pre-portioned dough balls. Remember, this has come to room temperature now.

And as a first step, I'm gonna press it down.

But I'm gonna try not to pop those air bubbles.

I have a really cool Fun Fact, that I'll tell you about those air bubbles later. I'll keep stretching it lightly on the board, and then when it looks about this size, I'm gonna pick it up, put it on the back of my hand...

and then we're just gonna let gravity do all the work.

I'll do a light stretch by the edges and spin. Light stretch... If I need to set it down once in a while, I can reposition it a little bit.

We don't want any one part of this dough getting too thin, and see we're keeping all those awesome air bubbles on there. Lift, stretch, then I'll rotate.

I'm leaving a little bit of extra dough on the edges there for the crust. You can use your knuckles, or if you're being really delicate with it and you're trying to do sort of finer stretches, you can use your fingers.

Just be really, really careful!

And the goal here is to keep moving it around and stretching it, until you feel like you've got yourself a nice pizza dough. I'm just looking for any thin spots, that I can see light through. For instance, you can see here, when I lift up, that there's a nice big light spot right there... and I don't want to stretch that part anymore, or the crust might rip. So I'm avoiding that.

I'm spinning it around to make a nice even pizza crust.

It's okay if your pizza's not in a perfect circle at home.

The people that are making pizzas in restaurants or places you might get delivery from, they've been making them for a long time, and it's really, really hard sometimes to get it into a perfect circle.

I'm almost done. Gentle with the dough.

Work it, work it, work it.

This looks good. Look at all those little air bubbles!

I'm happy with that. This thing here, it's called the pizza peel.

What we're gonna do is: dust the bottom of our pizza peel with some semolina flour.

If I were to take a microscope and show you this flour really up close, basically, a bunch of these tiny little beads that are gonna help the pizza dough roll around to make sure it doesn't get stuck anywhere.

If you've ever played that game "Shuffleboard", it's almost exactly that.

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And now you can use whatever method you want to do this, but lay that dough over the top of your pizza peel...

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kind of re-stretch it out to fit the edges, but don't push down or break the crust in any way! And the very first thing we do before we do anything else, before we put on any toppings, anything...is: we give it a little shake. That makes sure that you don't build your entire pizza, and then lose it, when it gets stuck to your peel, before you launch it into the oven. Now all that's left is to build it.

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I'll go down with a little bit of my tomato sauce.

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Not too much at the start.

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You want to just sort of spread it around and gauge how much you have. And I like to take mine all the way to the edges, but not over the edge.

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If there's any extra large chunks of tomato in there like this that you just don't want in your pizza, you can either eat them or put them back in here.

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You can leave them too, but...I don't like any chunks to be too big.

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When you're building a pizza like this, another really important thing to remember is that less is more. Don't overload this thing with toppings, and especially not cheese!

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You want just enough that there's coverage. But remember, it's all gonna melt together, when you put it into the oven. So don't go too crazy during this step! If it makes you feel better, this is our test pizza. The first one that you put in the oven is probably going to be the worst one that you do.

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You're dialing in the temperature of the oven, you're figuring out how much of each topping you should put on there. It's totally okay for your first pizza to be your test pizza. One more time before the cheese...a little shake.

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See how it almost got stuck there? That's why we do the shake. It's very important. And now mozzarella cheese. I'm not doing very much.

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Just a little bit, because we have some fontina and because less is more.

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Usually if I'm making pizza at home for my family, for my friends, I'll make a test pizza, before anyone really can notice or pay attention.

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That way you get all the mistakes out of the way, before anyone tastes or sees anything.

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Mozzarella cheese is on there now. I'll go down with some fontina. I'm not gonna put as much fontina as I put mozzarella, just enough.

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I'm literally talking about putting down a few strands. And now this is my added touch that you don't have to do, but I love.

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I'm gonna add some olive oil all around the crust.

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This is gonna give me a beautiful, shiny, delicious, flavor packed pizza crust.

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Nobody should be wasting the crust on a pizza.

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You should want to eat the crust on a pizza.

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So if you want to get creative, throw some everything bagel seasoning on this olive oil! Do something that makes the crust exciting for you or whoever's eating this pizza! I want this pizza to stay pure, so I'm just gonna season with a bit of salt all around the edge.

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One more little shake.

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You need to add some extra semolina flour.

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You don't want anything getting stuck. This is not the time to get anything stuck. A few more shakes. Make sure it's nice and loose on there! Don't go too crazy! Don't want to lose the pizza. Oh! Let me show you my oven before I bake!

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So my oven here is currently at 550°F.

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And what I have here are 2 really nice pizza stones.

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These are called baking steels.

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And what it is are 2 heavy steel plates that are working together to almost mimic an "at-home pizza oven". Launching a pizza is all about confidence.

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I'm going to open my oven.

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I want to do this quickly, so that all the heat doesn't escape. I'm gonna shimmy the pizza all the way to the edge of the pizza peel.

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Then I'll bring it to the back of my pizza stone and I'll go like this. Since it's a little hard to see, I'll demonstrate that same movement right here with this plate. So pretend the plate's a pizza!

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What you want to do is first shake it to the edge of the pizza peel.

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So it's just like that. And then if this is the surface that we're gonna bake it on, you'll want to go all the way towards the back, and then tilt.

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And once it starts to drop down, just shake!

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And then pull at the very end!

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And you should hopefully let your pizza sit right in the center, without getting folded over itself or looking all weird.

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But you gotta do it with a real pizza and not a plate.

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When I'm making pizza like this, I tend to sit in front of the oven the entire time and just watch it.

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Especially the first pizza.

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And every single oven is gonna be different, so I can't give you a specific time. But what I can say is: get your oven as hot as it can possibly get!

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You'll need it to be super hot, in order to mimic a pizza oven.

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Speaking of which, I think this is ready for a spin. Get under there.

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Just give it a spin. The reason I keep spinning is because the oven is filled with all different kinds of hot spots. So by spinning it around, we make sure that every single part of the pizza gets equal love. Gotta be focused, so you can't be on your phone right now.

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Not the time. <i>(Whispers:)</i> Alright.

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Let's see how we're looking! Nick: For our first pizza, we nailed the crust. I can tell you that without lifting it up to look at it.

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Just listen! Oh! But I should put it on a wire rack, so it doesn't steam itself and get soggy. I almost broke one of the basic rules of pizza.

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If you're gonna cut it, you can put it on a flat surface. But until then, keep it raised up!

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Keep the air circulating under it!

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Alright, I'm gonna cut it. Again...this is our test pizza.

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So this is when I can iron out all the different difficulties with it. Before I eat my test pizza... that fun fact that I was gonna tell you is that those little black spots on there, those are called "leopard spots" on the pizza.

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And that's why we don't pop our air bubbles, so that you get those nice dark, almost black spots that have this crunch, this crisp, that you can't get anywhere else or any other way. And also they just have the iconic pizza look to them.

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They're amazing. As far as my test pizza goes, I think I put a good amount of cheese on there. Looks like the slice can hold up on its own pretty well. And then if we fold it...

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It's got the right sound to it.

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I'm usually not very happy with my test slices, but...I'm super happy with this. There's one more touch on the pizza that we didn't do yet...that I have to do, when I make a pizza. I'm gonna make the finishing touch, which is just simply some melted butter.

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If you want to make it brown butter, that's optional and that's advanced...and you can do that. But this is the final touch that I'll paint around the crust. And it adds this really nice final layer of flavor, that will make anybody eating this pizza say it's the best slice they've ever had. Just trust me here! I know you probably don't want to cook or do any more steps here.

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You just want to make and eat pizza. You definitely can. But that last little kiss of butter on the crust is what really brings this pizza home.

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I like the nuttiness that's in the brown butter, so I'm gonna bring this all the way up to that light golden brown color.

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But even if you just take a few seconds to melt a little butter, that's all you need to do here. Once it foams up like this, that's usually a pretty good sign that I've developed some of the flavor that I want to develop. So if I leave this here, it should be ready to go, when we come back, to paint it on our real final pizza.

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It's our second pizza. It's a real pizza now. Since we've moved past our first pizza, there are no more excuses.

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I'll do this one faster and more at a normal pacing, which may make it even easier to understand.

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To prepare the dough, I'm twisting and then stretching...

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each time...using the back side of my hand, so that I don't accidentally push through the dough. And remember, always be looking at the dough to make sure you're not pulling too far in any specific area! The real key here is to work smarter, not harder. Let gravity do all the work, and let technique just guide the dough to where it needs to be! Once I feel pretty good about my dough, I'm gonna lay it out. Try to make sure it looks as much like a circle, as you can possibly get.

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But again, don't be upset if it's not a circle! That's okay. Then I'll grab my pizza peel and hit it with that semolina flour, and then we'll lift up and pull it right over the top. Remember, here we just want to stretch it out, so that it sort of takes up the shape that we want it to bake at.

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And then before anything...quick shake.

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First...lay down your sauce!

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I never mentioned this before, but you can even make the sauce with just tomatoes and a tiny touch of salt.

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It doesn't need all these extra herbs and spices in it either. Don't worry about not having all the right ingredients! It's one of the easiest and most basic things you can make anywhere in the world. Because at the end of the day, there are really only just a few ingredients.

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So look! My sauce is spread out all nice here...

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right up to the edge, but not over it.

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Then down with my mozzarella cheese.

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Not too much. You should still see some tomato sauce through it. And it's a mistake I made early on, when I was making pizzas, where I would put way too much cheese...because I thought I had to cover everything. And that could not be further from the truth.

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You need so much less cheese than you actually think you do.

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Once we have our mozzarella, we'll add some fontina. Just a couple strands. Lay it all around the pizza. I think I had pretty much the perfect amount of cheese last time, so I'm not really changing the amount of cheese that I put down. Quick shake. Make sure nothing is stuck! And I'll paint my brush with olive oil and go all around those edges.

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And now this one's gonna be even better, because we have all that delicious butter to work with after. Try not to let that oil leak off the edges as you make this!

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Try to keep it all on the pizza!

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One more shake...and let's toss it in the oven!

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This time I'm gonna toss it on that top one, so that you can see it much easier.

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Get to the back. Start to lightly shake it. Once it grips...

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3, 2, 1. Pull! The only difficult thing about making pizzas like this at home is: there's no true replacement for that beautiful, classic wood fired pizza oven that you might see in a nice restaurant...that gives tons and tons of flavor, and also gets up to ridiculously high temperatures.

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But this, for me is a close second. And this is the closest that I've been able to get at home, in terms of replicating the perfect pizza.

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Quickly now with my new pizza here, which you can see is a little bit of a longer shape this way, than I wanted it to be.

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And that's because of the way that I pulled it out, when I dropped it in there. But that's not gonna change anything about the pizza. That's just me being extra picky. I'll take some of my beautiful brown butter, and I'll paint it over the edge of the crust to get that nice golden shine.

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See how right away that crust already looks a lot better than our first one?

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The only thing I think I really need to work on now, which I believe I can nail in the third and final pizza, is the shape. Yeah, this is a pretty darn perfect pizza. It's gonna be hard to beat this.

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Look at that beautiful cross-section that we've gotten...with the little air pockets in there. That's one of the several results of waiting so long for it to ferment in the fridge. And look at the bottom of the crust on this now!

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Like I said, something about the second pizza is always going to be better than the first.

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We got those nice black speckled spots, and I'm sure even the sound on this one will be better. Listen! That was even better.

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I'm not just saying that. It was like 3 times better. There's a better balance of cheese. The crust...is perfect.

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I can taste the brown butter on the crust.

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There's just enough oil on there, but not too much.

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I'm not gonna show you the whole process of making the third and final pizza. I am gonna show you that you can just continue getting better, as you continue to make them.

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There it is. There's my third pizza. You guys vote in the comments below if that's the best looking one, or if one of the other 2 were better. Fun Fact: I'm actually an Italian citizen...and dare I say, this pizza is better than what you can get in Italy.

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I probably shouldn't say that. I hope none of you watching are Italian.

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing Practice: How To Make Perfect New York Pizza - Learn English Speaking with Video

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Step-by-step Shadowing Guide

What is the Shadowing Technique?