Pizza Dough

One of Andrew's favorite things is pizza, but I'm really not a huge fan of delivery pizza or frozen pizza so we decided to try our hand at making it.  We started off making pizza with store bought dough, Prego spaghetti sauce, shredded mozzarella cheese, and whatever toppings we felt like - usually pepperoni or sausage and mushrooms.  And it was pretty good, much better than delivery in my opinion.  Then I started getting into baking bread and decided to give homemade crust a go.  There was no turning back.  It was leaps and bounds better than store bought.  Then I decided to try real mozzarella rather than pre-shredded* and I mean the stuff in a log in the specialty cheese section of the grocery store.  Ooooh man it was good.  And do not make the mistake of buying the generic, store brand whole mozzarella because it isn't really any better than preshredded (it's very grainy).  Get name brand cheese.  It's more expensive than generic or pre-shredded cheese of course, but the price is worth it.  Recently, I've also tried my hand at making pizza sauce which I'll discuss later.  As you can see, pizza making in our house has been through quite an evolution.  It's definitely one of those things that I always feel like I can improve on and I rarely make it the exact same way twice.

There are several recipes involved with making pizza so I think I'll do them one at a time instead of overwhelming one post with three different recipes.   But if anyone is particularly antsy to try their hand at making homemade pizza, email me :)  

I still really really want to learn how to do this, but I need to find a stretchier dough recipe than the one I'm currently using.

I've yet to find a dough recipe that just blows me out of the water but this recipes is pretty good.  It's a compilation of several different recipes that I've added and subtracted from.  This dough recipe is a work in progress but it's a great starting point.

Pizza Dough

Makes 2 medium pizzas

 

Ingredients

1 package yeast (or 2 1/4 teaspoons)

1 cup warm water

1 tablespoon sugar

3 cups all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon of garlic powder**
1 teaspoon of dried basil**

2 tablespoons olive oil

Directions

1.  Pour sugar and yeast into the warm water, stir gently, and let sit for 5 minutes.  After the 5 minutes are up, it should have started to foam a little.  Be careful with your water temperature here - cold water won't do anything and hot water will kill the yeast.
2.  Combine the flour and salt in the bowl of your stand mixer with the dough attachment (or you can mix this by hand).  Pour the water, sugar, yeast mixture in and then add the olive oil.  Mix until it forms a ball and has picked up all the flour.  At this point, you could skip on to making the pizza if you're in a hurry but letting it rise really gives it a better flavor.
3.  Remove the dough ball from the bowl, coat the bowl in a little bit of olive oil, and put the dough ball back in.  Roll the dough ball around in the bowl to get it coated in the olive oil.  The dough ball will probably be really sticky at this point so just do the best you can.  If it isn't 100% covered, it's no big deal.  If you really don't think you can get it out of the bowl, just smear a little olive oil on top.  Cover with a bit of saran wrap (press the wrap down in the bowl to the top of the dough and seal along the inside of the bowl) and place in a warm place to rise for at least 30 minutes but up to 2 hours.
4.  Remove from mixing bowl and divide into two equal portions.

*Rachel posted something about pre-shredded cheese not long ago on her blog and it certainly got me thinking about it.  I stopped buying pre-shredded cheese oh.. maybe 6-8 months ago and I'm not really sure what took me so long.  I didn't realize this until Rachel mentioned it but store bought, pre-shredded cheese pretty much has sawdust on it to keep it from sticking together.  Ew.  Buying a block of cheese and shredding it yourself does take a little more time but it is so worth it.  The only thing that I will still occasionally buy is the shredded mozzarella for lasagna because shredding a log of the stuff is sometimes difficult because its so soft.  Any suggestions on shredding logs of mozzarella?

**You can omit these spices for a traditional crust or change them to whatever you prefer.