I made my first pizza last week. I used store-bought dough and it came out pretty tasty, but it was rather chewy in the middle. I used a stone and let it come to temperature before throwing the pizza on, so I attribute the chewiness to either lack of freshness of the dough, or my over-kneading it. SO, I wanted to try making my own dough today, any suggestions for recipes/methods? Thanks cookit!
Posted Oct 3, 2010, 5:20 PM UTC
My roommate and I made a bunch of dough this week using this recipe. It came out tasting pretty damn good. The most important part I found was how he recommends baking the pizza. I used to do the "pre-heat your oven at 500° for one hour" schtick, but found all it did was heat up and smoke out my house. It' still not hot enough to get that beautiful charring on the crust.
My other suggestion is grilling the pizza dough. That is probably my favorite. Get the real lump hardwood charcoal and you get that beautiful wood-fired oven taste. I used a blowdryer to get the grill crankin' to about 800°. (I rolled over the thermometer actually, it was a proud day)
That's quite an accomplishment! Thanks for the recipe. I'd like to try grilling a pizza, but I have the Weber camp grill and it's not quite big enough. I could probably pull off a rectangular pizza, but there's not enough room between the grill and the grate for lump charcoal. Sounds great though!
I used a blowdryer to get the grill crankin' to about 800°. (I rolled over the thermometer actually, it was a proud day)
If you're a woman, I love you. If you're a man, I'd question my heterosexuality for you.
I offer the following recipe, which I find makes the best dough:
1 bottle of beer 3 - 3.5 cups of flour 1 tsp salt 1 tsp yeast pinch of sugar 2 tblspn olive oil
Microwave beer in measuring cup for 1.5 minutes. Add yeast and pinch of sugar. Wait 10 minutes. (alternatively use instant yeast, do not heat beer)
Put 3 cups flour in food processor. Add salt. Pulse to mix. Add olive oil to beer. Run the food processor, add beer mixture through feed tube. Wait for ball to form. Count to 30. The dough should be done. If it seems too sticky, add the extra half cup and remix.
Let rise 1 hour. It will not rise very much.
Roll into 3 pizzas.
Preheat oven to 500. Bake on lowest rack for 15 minutes. OR place pizza stone on grill, heat for 20 minutes on high. Bake pizza for 3 - 5 minutes.
THIS. Beer makes the best pizza dough ever.
What type of beer would you recommend?
I'm not up on my beer, I generally use Sleeman's Cream Ale (which I suspect is in Canada only), pretty much because it was left over from a party and worked well. Now I buy it exclusively for my pizza dough.
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That recipe looks pretty good. Can you halve it to make only one pizza, or should I just make the full amount and save the other half for later this week?
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I do a really simple bread dough recipe, but I don't let it rise much. So basically I start with 1 cup flour, 1 tbsp yeast, 1 tbsp sugar, 1 tsp salt; add a few tbsp of melted butter in about a cup of warm water, stir it in, and then gradually add more flour until I get a good consistency. Knead a bit, and let it rise just long enough to prepare the toppings and sauce and stuff, then good to go. I grease the pan with olive oil and bake it on 350. Depending on how thick you like your crust, you might want to bake it for about 10 minutes before pulling it out, adding all the toppings, and putting it back in. It's not gourmet, but it's always good.
Do you use active dry yeast or instant yeast? I just watched the good eats pizza episodes and he prefers instant. I've been making bread with active dry though.
Active dry. It's what I prefer for bread, and I can't be bothered to keep a seperate kind in stock just for pizza.
Here is the recipe that i use in my bread machine
Ingredients:
Instructions Add ingredients to bread machine in the following order - Sugar, Kosher Salt, Olive Oil, Water, and Flour. Make indent in top of Flour in pan and add yeast. Run the bread machine on 'Dough' cycle. Add herbs after first rising session during punch down. After cycle is complete, wrap and refrigerate overnight.
Either way you should refrigerate the dough for a few hours to stop the yeast from working.
Thanks! I assume you could hand-make this too, but it would probably take forever to knead it enough.
You probably could. My bread machine has a 90 min dough cycle, but i couldn't find how long the kneading and rise times are. I do know that it Kneads, then rises, then kneads again, then rises one final time.
Has anyone tried their hand at sourdough pizza? Been thinking about it for a while now and it just sounds so damn good!
Yup. Last time with yeast from a microbrew residue. I had the tiny amount of yeast and beer over in a container of water and flour, let it sit in the fridge over night and used that instead of yeast. Worked brilliantly. The trick is to go slow. I had the dough mixed, spending yet another night in the fridge before making the pizzas.
The recipe can't be simpler, really: Equal amounts of water and flour. Salt. Yeast (or sourdough). The latter two you can experiment with. The salt you need for chewiness, and it slows down the rising process. Besides adding flavor, of course. A tablespoon for half a liter water should be a good starting point. The amount of yeast/sourdough really doesn't matter. That only inflict on the speed, and as you want to go slow to let the flavors evolve, use little. If using yeast, I go for half a tablespoon of the dried stuff. Using sourdough, I use around 1dl sourdough when doing 4dl water.
1dl water serves one person.
Rise overnight in the fridge. The dough should be usable even after two nights in there.
I use Alton Brown's recipe from Good Eats S3E11. It can also be found here. If you use this recipe, be sure to stretch it out as thin as you can get it for maximum textural pleasure.
15 minutes at medium speed!! Isn't that an awful long time to work the dough, especially with a stand mixer?
According to Alton Brown, using a high protein flower and kneading a lot produce more gluten, and thus a chewier crust. In my experience, when you get this dough flat enough that translates to a lovely crispness.
From the book Ratio I made a dough which is just 3 parts water to every 5 parts flour.
So I weighed out 150 grams flour, and added 90 grams water (plus a couple shakes of salt and some yeast, though that isn't needed), mixed it up, let it sit for an hourish, and it's good to roll out.
Easy peasy.
Poke holes in the dough around the bottom with a fork before adding your sauce and ingredients. That should help the dough cook through a little more thoroughly.
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great info here. thanks
This sounds perfect. I just happen to have a 12-inch Lodge, and half the dough from last night's pizza - which was delectable - left over. I think I'll have to give the broiled pizza a try. Thanks!
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I like Mitch's basic dough.
That was not the Mitch I was looking for...
A bit off topic, if you have any of the store-bought dough left over, you may want to try heating the pizza stone, putting some dough on it, and baking it for about a minute before putting your toppings on and finishing the pizza. It should cook the dough more to your liking.
Definitely this. I always rub my dough down with olive oil and cook it fully before adding my toppings.
Never add a topping that isn't mostly cooked. All you should be doing is melting/browning so that things meld together, you should be (for example) cooking sausage on top of your pizza or something silly like that.
No dough in the world will come out tasting good if you expect it to solidify under a layer of liquid and toppings that are extruding liquid. Only a fully cooked piece of bread has even a chance to stand up to that.
I can't remember the one I use (and it's not to hand), but I'd recommend that whatever recipe you follow, use fresh yeast if you can get it. I may be suffering from confirmation bias but the dough always seems lighter and better and the pizzas tastier when I use the fresh stuff.
Coincidence is massively coincidental. I just ate the first perfect pizza I've ever made. this recipe + cut the cooking time to 14 minutes at 550 degrees + do it in a well-oiled cast iron skillet.
Not so much oil as to float it, but enough to easily cover the bottom of the pan in an 1/16th of an inch. Also, preheat skillet to just below the smoking point of olive oil. Alsoalso, use a mixture of olive and corn oils for exactly what i did.
Additionally after the alsoalso: It seems that freezing my dough after proofing, then thawing in a tupperware bucket double-boiler style in a pot of 110 degree water helped the dough reach a REALLY nice consistency which I will attempt to duplicate then improve in future cooking experiments. Rolling it didn't kill the air bubbles in the crust.
Best pizza I've ever eaten. Of course, my sauce was a specially crafted recipe of mine and the meat was a mixture of pepperoni, salami and capricolo with italian seasoning and parmesean + red pepper on top.
Mind sharing sauce recipe or tips? I've been struggling with sauce for a while now. Thanks
My recipe is as follows :
As Carpaltunnelsnake said, tast as you go to adjust the taste
Also, go easy on the sugar at first... you really don't need much!
Well, since I don't use a set recipe, I can't give you perfect measurements on anything. But I do suggest strongly tasting while you cook, using small amounts of sugar to cut the acidity and throwing in anything and throwing out anything that you feel like out of this:
I start with a can of tomato paste and a can of tomato sauce. Off-brands cost half as much and are the exact same thing. Use them, if you're limitedly funded or thrifty.
Don't use Ragu or some other terrible thing. They're TERRIBLE things. Make your own. I use a mix of oregano, sifted in a splash at a time while i taste. 1 clove or a little more of garlic, based on taste. Some salt, rosemary by taste, black and red pepper, and at the very end when it's all good and hot I throw in some parmesean cheese.
If you're tasting as you go and tailoring the sauce to your own palate, you can't fail.
I've been doing something similar, but it has way too many herbs and I just didn't know how to pare it down to what's actually supposed to be there. Thanks
Jeff Varasano's pizza napoletana recipe seems a bit more complicated than most (probably because his writeup makes it harder than it really is), but, man, is that good pizza dough. I love the nice subtle sourdough flavor and the nice lofty crunch of the crust that also stays chewy under the sauce. I've made it roughly 10 times now and it's always great, but since I'm not experienced with breads, I'm still trying to get a perfect handle on it. My wife laughs at me.
Only real tip is to make it a bit drier than he says because there's nothing worse than ruining the pizza you've been salivating over for days because it stuck to the peel!! It keeps well in the freezer and bakes up nice.
I've been using Robbies Recipe with a pizza screen with good success. That neopolitan recipe from pseudoesque looks pretty good too, I'll try that next time
Store-bought dough has ingredients to slow the proofing so it doesn't end up as a bag full of bubbly mess before you get it home to prepare. If you end up going the store-bought route again, try simply sitting it out for a while longer. That said, I think it's great that you want to get into home-made dough--it's easy to get better results than store-bought and there's the challenge of improving your product every time.
Looks like nobody mentioned it so far, you can also use the broiler and a cast iron pan to get very high heat with your oven at home. I tried this recipe with good results.
Quick Getter done Dough
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Makes for a heavier dough (easier to start on the rack) (fold mozz sticks into the crust for stuffed crust)
(adapted from http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Pizza-Dough-I/Detail.aspx)
This is the recipe I use. It is the same recipe I used to use when I worked in a pizzeria back in the eighties except on a much smaller scale. I like to add a little dry Italian herbs to mine to liven it up. You could also use whole wheat flour or add some whole grains or try whatever you think might work well. If you are trying to make pizzeria quality pizza at home you will need a pizza stone and a pizza peel as well. Good luck.
I concur on this one... 1 hr. prep vs. 8-24hr prep for a "proper" dough.
My recipe is almost identical to this. I work it by hand for about 6 minutes. It's enough to get the gluten up. I bake at 450 for 12 minutes on a stone. I stretch the dough out to the pan rather than roll it or spin it.
I sprung for the stone, don't have a peel yet. Maybe I'll search for one today. Thanks for the recipe!
I have a stone but no peel also. You can make do with a wooden cutting board if you have one.
I have a peel now! Kinda thick but it works with a generous sprinkle of flour.