Domino’s thin-crust pizza has a cult following. Here’s how to make your own.

When it comes to pizza, I’m all about the crunch. That means that as delicious as Neapolitan-style pies can taste, they’re not my favorite because of their floppy, almost soupy center. Detroit-style is high on my list because of that thick crust that gets crunchy around the edges partly from fried cheese, but my top pick is something thinner.

Honestly, the thinner, the better.

Since this opinion seems to go against the grain of food snobbery, I generally keep it to myself. But I felt vindicated a while back when I read in Hanna Raskin’s great newsletter, “The Food Section,” that some of my favorite Southern chefs have a thing for Domino’s pizza. Not just any Domino’s, though. They are exclusively into the chain’s Crunchy Thin Crust variety, so much so that it’s their go-to order for their sometimes-raucous after parties.

I hadn’t tasted a Domino’s pizza in years, so I started talking to colleagues about it. Turns out, there are other devotees of this particular Domino’s offering, so I ordered a few — and we devoured them. I marveled at that crust’s flakiness, which makes it superlight yet sturdy. (This is not a pizza whose slices can be folded like the New York standard.) The base is more cracker than bread. Better yet, the Domino’s pies had very little (if any) decline in quality over the following hour or two.

The tasting set me on my own R&D path. Ultimately, I wanted to see if I could create a flaky, thin-crust pizza I loved that could be made in my own kitchen on any given weeknight.

After scouring books and the internet for recipes, I chose as a starting point one from Amy Thielen’s wonderful 2013 cookbook, “The New Midwestern Table.” She describes her favorite Midwestern pizza as “dramatically flat.” It’s cut into squares “so that when you look down on it you might as well be looking from the window of a plane flying over a checkerboard of farm fields. … There’s not a hill or a dough bubble in sight.”

In a phone interview, she told me pizza was one of the misconceptions about Midwestern food she wanted to set straight. “I would read about Midwestern pizza and it nearly always referred to Chicago deep dish,” she said. “I had never had Chicago deep dish growing up in rural northern Minnesota, in a small town, so the only pizza I knew was this style, a thin, crackery, crispy-crust pizza that’s cut into pretty small squares.” It’s much closer to what’s known as tavern-style than deep dish — but even thinner.

“I tried the recipe so many times,” she added. “I was like, I have to get it, I have to get it.”

To achieve her ideal, she cycled through “all the possible permutations of flour, water and heat,” she writes, before realizing that the key would be to eliminate the yeast altogether. I was grateful that a food writer with as much credibility as Thielen had done so much of the trial and error for me, because when I made her “cracker-crust pizza,” it was very close to what I was after.

The only thing I was missing was that telltale flakiness, but the solution was fairly obvious: I’d try lamination, a process of folding and rolling the dough around fat to create the same kind of layers you can get in biscuits or puff pastry. And using olive oil instead of butter, I figured, would prevent steam (traditionally from the water in butter) from separating those layers.

It worked beautifully. Without any yeast, the dough doesn’t need to rise, making it weeknight-friendly, but it does benefit from a half-hour rest so it doesn’t resist when you roll it out.

I followed an America’s Test Kitchen technique for the laminating, then Thielen’s instructions for rolling out the dough between sheets of parchment paper. That allows you to get it extra-thin, so thin you need to leave it on the bottom piece of parchment for transferring to the oven. I used my own quick tomato sauce, adding some sugar to approximate that slightly sweet tang of the Domino’s pizza. And I baked the pizza on a preheated stone or overturned sheet pan — for a spell on the parchment, then once it released along the edges, sliding it off to brown the crust some more. Unlike Neapolitan, which benefits from pro-level pizza ovens that can get up to 900°F or higher, baking it in 90 seconds, this dough works best at 450°F — well within reach of any home oven.

The result had everything I wanted. As with the Domino’s pizza, I couldn’t stop eating it, and neither could anyone to whom I served it.

Let’s get one thing straight, though. As quickly as this pizza can come together, I will never compete with Domino’s on speed alone. But when I’m in the mood to cook and want to control all the elements of a thin-crust pizza, I know I can make this instead of pulling up an app on my phone.

•••

Domino’s-Style Thin Crust Pizza

For the dough:

¾ cup cold water

5 tablespoons olive oil, divided

2 teaspoons granulated sugar

1 teaspoon fine salt

2 cups plus 2 tablespoons (265 grams) all-purpose flour, plus more as needed

For the pizza:

1 cup no-salt-added crushed tomatoes (from one 14-ounce can)

1 tablespoon plus 3 teaspoons olive oil, divided

1 teaspoon granulated sugar

½ teaspoon dried oregano

½ teaspoon fine salt, plus more to taste

6 ounces low-moisture, whole-milk mozzarella cheese, grated (1½ cups), or pre-grated cheese

Position a rack in the lowest position of the oven and preheat to 450°F. Place a pizza stone, inverted large sheet pan or rimless cookie sheet on the rack to heat along with the oven. Have another large sheet pan or pizza peel on hand to transfer the pizza to the oven.

Make the dough: In a large bowl, whisk together the water, 4 tablespoons of the olive oil, the sugar and salt until combined. Add 1 cup (125 grams) of the flour and whisk until smooth. Switch to a wooden spoon, and gradually add the remaining 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons (140 grams) of flour, stirring until the dough comes together. Turn the dough out onto a clean, dry surface and knead until smooth and supple, about 5 minutes. The dough should be tacky but not sticky; add more flour as needed.

Shape the dough into a rough disk, cover with a clean kitchen towel and let rest for at least 30 minutes and up to 3 hours, so the dough relaxes and becomes easier to work with.

Roll out the dough into a 6-by-12-inch rectangle. Brush the remaining 1 tablespoon of oil on the surface of the dough. Starting at the short end, roll the dough into a tight cylinder. With the seam side down, cut the cylinder into three equal pieces. Working with one piece at a time — keep the other pieces covered with a clean kitchen towel — roll it out into a 4-by-8-inch rectangle. Fold into thirds like a letter, then pinch the seams together and pull them into the center. Flip the dough over and form a ball. Cover the dough balls with a clean kitchen towel.

Make the pizza: In a small bowl, stir together the tomatoes, 1 tablespoon of the oil, the sugar, oregano and salt. Taste, and season with more salt, if desired.

Roll out one portion of the dough between two pieces of parchment paper into a round about 10 inches in diameter. Peel off the top piece of parchment. Use a fork to prick (dock) the dough all over, and brush with 1 teaspoon of the olive oil. Spread about one-third of the sauce (a heaping ⅓ cup) on top of the dough, going almost all the way to the edges. Top with one-third (about ½ cup) of the mozzarella.

Slip a pizza peel under the paper, or slide the paper onto the back of a sheet pan. Use the peel or sheet pan to transfer the pizza to the heated stone or sheet pan in the oven. Bake for 7 to 8 minutes, or until the crust’s edges start to curl up from the parchment paper and very lightly brown. Use tongs and oven mitts to slide the pizza off the paper directly onto the stone or sheet pan. Bake for another 7 to 8 minutes, or until the cheese is browned on top and the crust is golden brown around the edges.

Use the pizza peel or tongs to transfer the pizza to a cutting board. Let rest a few minutes, then cut into 12 squares and serve hot. Repeat with the rest of the dough, sauce and cheese.

Servings: 3-6 (makes three 10-inch pizzas)

Substitutions: To make it vegan, use nondairy mozzarella-style cheese shreds or Miyoko’s pourable plant-based mozzarella. For crushed tomatoes, use tomato puree. For dried oregano, use 1 tablespoon fresh chopped oregano. For whole-milk mozzarella, use part-skim mozzarella.

Make ahead: The dough can be prepared and refrigerated for up to 3 days, or tightly wrapped and frozen for up to 3 months before baking. Let the dough sit at room temperature for up to 1 hour before rolling it out.

Nutritional information per serving (½ pizza), based on 6: 409 calories, 22 g fat, 6 g saturated fat, 40 g carbohydrates, 703 mg sodium, 22 mg cholesterol, 13 g protein, 3 g fiber, 3 g sugar.

— Joe Yonan; dough based on a recipe in “The New Midwestern Table” by Amy Thielen (Clarkson Potter, 2013)