An Ironman Cooks!: Cooking: Pizza w/ Homemade Dough

One of my favorite meals of all time is pizza. Specifically, brick oven thin crust mushroom, pepperoni, and Italian sausage pizza. What better combination in the world is there than meat, bread, cheese, and tomato sauce? In my basic cooking boot camp class, we learned how to make challah bread as part of our "dessert" class. The instructor gave us an easy alteration to the recipe to make pizza dough. Considering I love pizza and am loving learning to make things from scratch, I thought this recipe would be a fun and satisfying challenge! I have made it a few times, and my coworker also tried it and loved it (grilling the pizza versus cooking it and an oven - an interesting twist I would love to try). The crust is relatively thin and a bit sweeter (which makes sense considering it was originally a sweet bread recipe).

One word of caution is that you have to let the dough rise for an hour or two once you have made it, so unless you want to eat at 9 (mistake #1) either start early, or make it the day before & let it rise in the fridge overnight.

Let's get cooking!

Ingredients (makes 4 2 piece servings):

2 teaspoons active dry yeast (1 package) - baking aisle
2 tablespoons sugar (reduce the sugar by half if you don't want a sweet dough)
1/2 cup warm water (about 110 degrees)
3 tablespoons olive oil
2 cups flour
1/2 tablespoon salt
1-2 cups prepared pizza sauce (I like the sweetness of Ragu and at some point will make my own)
Mozzarella Cheese
Any other toppings of your choice!

In a small bowl, mix together warm water, sugar, and yeast. Let sit for about 10 minutes.

After 10 minutes, the mixture should look like the above (foamy). If your mixture is not foamy, it may mean the water was too hot (i.e. boiling). I have made that mistake before & the yeast will not activate. If that happens, you might as well start over because your dough will not rise.

Add in the olive oil and mix well.

Add the flour and mix to form a ball of dough. I used my kitchenaid mixer with the dough hook attachment in the attached picture, but the first time I did this recipe and for the challah bread I used my hands and it worked out perfectly (and was more fun!).

Place the dough on a well floured board and knead (basically keep folding the dough mixture into itself) for at least 5 minutes. In order to know if the dough is ready, press your finger into the ball and then lift your finger.

You want to keep kneading until the dough bounces back so there is little to no sign of the fingerprint (the above dough needs to be kneaded just a bit more).

Once the dough is ready, put the ball into a bowl, drizzle it with a little bit of olive oil, cover the bowl w/ plastic wrap, and set it aside in a warm place for an hour or two until the dough doubles in size.

The dough rising is typically pretty noticeable. If the dough does not rise, it probably means the yeast was not activated properly in the firsts steps above.

Before you begin working with your dough again, preheat your oven to 450 degrees F.

Once the dough has risen, place on a well floured surface, and knead a bit more to get the air out. Roll out the dough until it is your desired thickness and size.