Pizza Dough!

I promised a lot of people I'd show you how I make pizza dough. My wife and I have pizza and wine night nearly every Friday.. ya, we're lame.. but after a long hard week, it's nice to have a night in to relax.

The recipe makes 3 balls, so I usually make it on a Thursday, so 1 ball is ready for Friday night and the other 2 can be frozen for the following Fridays.

Recipe:
1 packet rapid rise yeast
1 cup hot tap water
2 tbs. extra virgin olive oil
1 tbs. salt
1 tsp. sugar
1 1/4 cups ice cold water
5 1/4 cups flour (bread or all purpose)

Start by getting your cup of hot tap water and lightly mixing in the contents of the yeast packet. This needs to rest for at least 5 minutes to get the yeast to start doing their job.

While that's working, get 1 1/4 cups of cold water from the tap and drop an ice cube in to get it ice cold. You can also mix in the olive oil, salt and sugar. This time I used 1 tbs. + 1 tsp. of Penzey's Garlic Salt to add some garlic flavor to the dough.

Remove the ice cube if it's not melted by the time the yeast is ready.

Load your 5 1/4 cups of flour into your mixing bowl. I highly recommend a stand mixer with a dough hook, because kneading the dough is a lot of work, but it's not impossible if you don't have one.

Combine your wet ingredients together into one container, and slowly add them to your running mixer. I use a low speed, like 2 on my mixer.

Let the mixer run 10-15 minutes.. if the dough climbs up the hook, stop the mixer and push it back down. The longer you run it the better.. you want it to really knead the heck out of the dough. It should turn into a really smooth and somewhat dry ball. If it's wet, add just a little more flour to the mixer till you get a nice smooth dough ball wrapped around the hook.

You can knead by hand, folding the dough in half and pounding it together over and over till you get a really smooth ball like the mixer would have. It's just a serious workout for your arms!

Cut the ball into 3 even pieces. I use a food scale to get them even.. I don't want a small pizza one night and a large another!

 

Next you want to fold each of the pieces into a ball, making it smooth on one side and folding the edges in together to make a ball on the other side.

As you form the ball, the top side, where you're bringing the edges together to make a ball need to be pinched together so you end up with a nice tight ball.

 The bottom should look like this:

 And the top, the pinched side, like this:

Takes a little practice, but you'll get it!

Give them a light dusting of flour and put each one in a 1 quart zip lock bag.

Let them sit in the fridge for around 24 hours to rise. Use them then, or freeze them for another day. If you freeze them, take them out of the freezer and put them in the fridge 24 hours before use. 

Let sit on the counter 30-60 min before making pizza!

Once you get this down, you'll never want to order out again!

Good luck!

This book has a bunch of great recipes for dough and pizza. The above recipe is basically right out of the book. It's fantastic!

This is the mixer I use, and it's great for a lot of things, but making dough is the primary thing I use it for!