I just discovered the last pizza dough recipe I used was 10 years ago and I haven't made pizza from scratch since! I decided to try this recipe by Kitchn which looked easy enough. The draw was using regular flour rather than bread flour and had minimal proofing. What you really want in terms of prep work on a weekday evening! I doubled the recipe to make 4 pizzas, so the dough can be made once and then eaten over 2 nights depending on the size of the eaters.
Ingredients (makes four 10 to 12 inch pizzas)
4C flour
1½C lukewarm water
2 tsp yeast
2 pinches of salt
Ingredients for pizza (eg tomato paste, salami, ham, pineapple, olives, pizza, etc).
Around 1 tbsp oil
Method
1. Mix the flour with the water, yeast and salt.
2. Knead for 5 to 8 minutes. Ball up the dough, then cover and proof for around 10 to 15 minutes while prepping the pizza topping. At this point, I saved half the dough for the next night in the fridge and proofed the rest.
3. At this point, the recipe recommends putting an upturned pan in the oven preheated to 220 deg C, and place the pizza on top. Afraid of dropping the pizza when placing it on an upturned pan either putting in or taking it out of the oven, I didn't bother. However it would probably have helped to either do this or bake the pizza base blind to avoid the ingredients making the base soggy.
4. Stretch out the dough as thin as possible, using a rolling pin to help. If the dough keeps shrinking, leave to rest covered for a further 10 minutes. I roll it out as thin as I could then placed it on in the pizza pan. I then used my fingers to push it outwards to the pan's edges so it made a tiny lip at the pan's edge.
5. Brush on a thin layer of oil on the base. Spread on the tomato paste then place the toppings. Try not to stack toppings on top of each other. I did lay a thin layer of cheese on top on tomato paste before my other ingredients, then finished off with another thin layer of cheese on top of the toppings. For wet ingredients like olives and pineapple, it's best to drain as dry as possible and even use a paper towel to blot dry.
6. Bake for 8 to 12 minutes, checking frequently after the 8 minute mark.
Feedback
- The dough is fine and easy enough to make. The issue perhaps is with the process. I removed the pizza from the oven once the cheese was nicely browned but just before it burnt, around 10 minutes. However because the pizza base wasn't pre-baked, 10 minutes only just cooked the dough but it was slightly soggy whereas the cheese has already melted almost to the point of burning. So especially after I used more soggy ingredients (olive and pineapples) on my second attempt, the base was more soggy compared to just chirizo, cheese and salami. I was afraid the oil from these meat products would make the pizza soggy but they didn't.
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