Pizza dough resists you right when you need it to move. Pull it into a circle and it snaps halfway back, thinner in some spots than others, sometimes tearing where it's already thin. That resistance is elastic tension stored in the gluten network, and it doesn't go away with more kneading or more flour. It goes away with time — a short rest on the counter, or a long, cold one in the fridge — because gluten is a material that slowly gives up tension it's been holding, given the chance.
Gluten pulls two ways at once
Wheat flour holds two proteins that do nothing until water reaches them: glutenin and gliadin. Mixing links them into gluten, and the two pull in opposite directions inside that network. Glutenin behaves like a stretched spring — it resists being pulled and snaps back toward its resting length the moment you let go. Gliadin behaves more like a thick liquid, flowing and holding a new shape instead of springing back. A dough's balance of the two is what a baker means by elasticity against extensibility, and pizza dough needs more of the second than a sandwich loaf does. A loaf wants enough elastic pull to trap gas and hold a tall shape. A pizza skin has to stay flat, thin, and still in one piece.
Time is what relaxes it
Right out of the mixer, a dough ball is full of stored tension — the glutenin inside it has just been stretched and wound tighter with every fold. Stretch it immediately and most of that tension fights back. Gluten is viscoelastic, meaning it behaves like both a solid and a liquid depending on how long a force sits on it, and given time under no force at all, the tension inside it bleeds off on its own. That's stress relaxation, and it's the whole reason a twenty-minute bench rest turns a dough that won't cooperate into one that stretches with almost no resistance.
A long, cold fermentation does the same job more slowly and adds something a short rest can't. Over 24 to 72 hours in the refrigerator, enzymes already present in the flour clip a small number of the bonds holding the gluten network together, loosening it further while yeast ferments at a crawl instead of a sprint. Because fermentation is spread across days instead of hours, a cold-fermented pizza dough needs far less yeast to begin with — often under 1% of the flour's weight, against 1–2% for a same-day dough proofed for a couple of hours at room temperature. Time is doing the work that yeast quantity would otherwise have to.
Flour protein sets the ceiling
None of that relaxation matters if the network isn't strong enough to survive being stretched to a sixteenth of an inch and then loaded with sauce and cheese. That's a job for protein content, not technique. Bread flour and Italian "00" flour run 11.5–13% protein, enough to build a gluten network dense enough to hold together at that thinness under real weight. All-purpose flour, closer to 10–11%, still makes usable dough, but the ceiling is lower — push it as thin as a Neapolitan crust and it's more likely to split under a heavy topping or a rough stretch.
The crust has to set before the sauce soaks in
Getting the dough thin is only half the job. It also has to cook through in minutes, which is why pizza gets baked so much hotter than almost anything else in the oven. This site's own dough recipe calls for preheating the oven to 500–550°F (250–290°C) with a stone or steel inside for at least 45 minutes before the pizza goes anywhere near it. That heat has one purpose: get the dough's surface hot enough to dry out and set into a crust within the first minute or two of contact, before the water sitting in the sauce has time to travel down into the crumb. An oven that's too cool, or a stone that never came fully up to temperature, gives that water a head start. The crust is still soft and open when the moisture reaches it, and it stays soggy instead of drying out underneath the sauce.