Beginner Friendly Pizza Dough
I started using this recipe when I decided it was time to stop buying store bought bases and I've never looked back.
Ingredients
- 7 g baker's yeast
- 1 tbsp sugar
- 1 ⅓ cups hot water (as hot as your tap will go)
- 3 ½ cups baker's flour (if you want to get spicy, substitute 1 cup for a different type of flour, I used rye for this dough)
- 2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil (+2 tbsp for rising phase)
- salt
Instructions
- Whisk hot water, yeast and sugar in a bowl. Cover and leave sit for 5 mins. When it's done resting it should be bubbling like:
- To the bubbly goodness, sift flour, oil and salt. Mix with a wooden spoon until mostly combined.
- Flour the bench, then tip the dough out and knead it for 5-7 minutes. When you can poke the dough and it inflates slowly back up, you're ready to rise. See the notes for another method of seeing if the dough is ready to rise.
- Put dough back in bowl, pour over remaining olive oil and roll the dough ball around until it's entirely covered and the sides of the bowl are also covered.
- Cover with a tea towel and put in a warm spot for 1.5 hours. We normally put it in our bedroom with the door closed.
- When 1.5 hours is up, the dough should have more than doubled in size. Here comes the fun part - punch down in the middle of the dough to release the air bubbles.
- Cut in half and shape for pizza or wrap each half up and store in the freezer. VIOLA
Notes
Another method of seeing if the dough is ready to rise: tear of a little bit and stretch it out slowly. If it doesn't tear and when you hold it up to a window you can see the light through it, it's ready to rise.
I make our pizza dough on the weekend and freeze it so it's ready to eat during the week. We normally make all the dough and share one pizza for dinner and have the other one for lunch!
One of the two dough halves stretches out very generously to the size of a baking tray (yes we eat rectangular pizza, no I will not change.) I cook it on 200 and it comes out so yummy and crispy.