Welcome to the Workshop

Welcome to the Workshop

Saturday, March 31, 2012

Pizza Pizza!

A few years ago, my lovely friend gave me her pizza dough recipe. It is so incredibly simple and fabulous, I thought I'd share it with y'all. This is what you'll find us eating most Sundays. It's great to get the whole family involved in the kitchen.

Here are the ingredients:


2 tsp (7g) dried yeast
1 tsp sugar
1/2 tsp salt
3/4 cup warm water
1 1/2 cups (375g) plain flour (pizza or bread flour if you have it)
3 tbsp olive oil

(I usually double the quantities so there's some pizza for lunch the next day. Last weekend we had friends for pizza so I quadrupled the dough, there was heaps and it worked fine.)


Got that? Ok, here we go.
Mix together your warm water, yeast and sugar in a jug. Cover and set it aside (somewhere warm is better but if the yeast is yeasty enough it's ok on the bench) and go do something else for about half an hour to an hour.




 Now the mixture should look like this, frothy and alive!  If it's not doing anything, you're yeast is kaput and you need to start over.




Mix your dry ingredients in a bowl (sifted, if you prefer but I'm usually too lazy) and then add the wet ingredients. Combine them, then turn onto a clean, floured surface.




Give it a bash for a couple of minutes to thoroughly combine and get the yeast going, but you don't need to go nuts.




Make the dough into a nice little ball and place it in an oiled bowl. Cover and leave it be for at least an hour, usually I leave it for the afternoon. Again, a warm spot helps if you have one. This is when I clean up floury mess part one in preparation for floury mess part two.




Your dough should at least double in size. Lots of lovely air holes are a good sign too.




Give it a punch for some drama, then flour your surface again and get back to the kneeding.




This time you can work the dough for a few minutes, get it into a sausage shape and then divide it into chunks. A handful of dough will do one large pizza. Then you can gently press out the dough into whatever shape fits your oven trays. I use a combination of my hands and a rolling pin to flatten it. Certainly haven't gotten the knack of tossing it into the air yet. Plenty of time for that later.




Line your baking trays with either paper or flour, or oil (but that's messier to clean up) and spread out the pizza bases. You can work with them straight away, or leave them to rise a little for half an hour if you prefer a thicker crust.




Insert preferred pizza toppings here.




And into the oven they go! Around 200 Celsius (390-ish F) is a good temp. They are usually cooked somewhere between 12 and 15 minutes, depending upon your oven and your preferences for chewy versus crispy dough. I don't have pizza stone, but so far I haven't felt the need to buy one. This dough comes out just right for us.




Carve it up and munch it down. Just see if you can stop before you've eaten a whole pizza!




1 comment:

  1. Mmmmm, sounds yum! Thanks for sharing, & thanks to your friend too :)

    ReplyDelete

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