Pizza Dough II

Hello again, friends! We’ve been having a busy week in the kitchen this week, so expect to be overwhelmed with an abundance of very yummy recipes sometime in the near future. Hopefully sooner rather than later, but that front bed still needs freedom from all of its entangling weeds…

Well, one of the yummy dishes served up from the kitchen this week was pizza! (More or less a once-a-week dish nowadays…which is definitely a good thing, as far as I’m concerned. ) Since it was a warmer Saturday and we don’t have access to baking stones here in my sister and brother-in-law’s beautiful kitchen, I thought I would pull out an old favorite pizza dough recipe that conveniently does not require you to heat the oven to 525 degrees Fahrenheit.

The recipe is originally from allrecipes.com, and can be made either in a bread machine or by hand.

(makes 2 14-16” circles of dough, although if you like thinner pizza crusts, I made one large rectangular one rectangular one that was about 10x16 and two smaller ones that were about 12-14” circles, so three pizzas in total. The large rectangular one fed all four of us, including two guys.)

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups water
2 Tablespoons olive oil
1 teaspoon salt
2 Tablespoons sugar
2 Tablespoons dry milk powder
4 1/2 cups bread flour
2 teaspoons active dry yeast
2 or 3 Tablespoons wheat gluten (optional)
1-2 Tablespoons dried oregano (optional)

If you’re making the dough in the bread machine, put all of the ingredients into the bread machine bowl in the order recommended by the manufacturer, and put on dough cycle.
If you’re making it by hand, then:

Mix together yeast and water in a large bowl and let them sit a bit while you whisk together (in a medium bowl) the flour, salt, and milk powder. Add the sugar and oil to the yeast mixture, then gradually add the flour mixture into the yeast mixture. Knead the dough, then place in an oiled pyrex bowl, spray the top of the dough with cooking spray, and cover loosely with plastic wrap. If you’re in a drafty kitchen (as in…one with lots of beautiful windows in it! ), then turn the oven on to warm for about 5 minutes. Turn the oven off, and slide the bowl of dough right into the oven and let it rise for about an hour and a half.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit

Divide the dough into 2 or 3 portions, depending on how thin you want it to be. Roll into balls and let rest for about 5 minutes. Begin rolling out, very gradually, waiting about 10 minutes in between attacking it with a rolling pin. This part is actually really important…don’t rush here! Plus, it’s an opportunity to do other things…like make cookies at the same time….which I did.

Put the rolled out dough on lightly sprayed pizza pans and let rest again. When it starts to puff up, brush with a little olive oil, and poke with a fork all over. Bake until lightly brown on top, about 10 minutes.

At this point, you can take the crusts out, let them cool on racks, wrap them in plastic wrap, and freeze them.

Or, you can proceed with the sauce, toppings, and cheese. Turn the oven down to 350 degrees Fahrenheit, and bake for about 15 minutes, until the cheese is melting and very lightly browned in some spots (it depends on how much cheese you put on there! )

For our toppings tonight, we put on sliced mushrooms, a whole sliced yellow onion, a red pepper, and cooked Italian sausage, with this recipe for sauce. It…was very yummy. We used a pint of tomatoes for our sauce, and a whole onion, and it was just the right amount of sauce for the big pizza. I would highly recommend not cooking it on an aluminum pan, however—and be sure to cover whatever roasting pan you do use with parchment paper!!)