Pizza Dough
Update: I started making quick pizza dough using bread dough and no breadmaker. It’s much lighter and tastier even though it’s not as nutrient-dense as the whole wheat flour.
This is a fairly dense pizza crust because I use mostly whole wheat flour. This recipe comes from my breadmaker with some modifications. I’m not a bread expert but I’m fairly happy with the crunch of the pizza crust. You could try leaving out the salt and sugar but sugar helps activate the yeast.
Ingredients (put all these in order in the breadmaker):
1 1/2 cups of water (80-90 deg. F) – You can heat up some water in the microwave. I just use warm-hot water from my tap (I have a drilled well.)
1 tbsp sugar
1/2 tsp salt
4 1/2 cups whole wheat flour. Last few times I substituted in 2 cups of bread flour to lighten it up.
2 tsp active dry yeast
Instructions:
Start the breadmaker. Mine runs for 1 hr and 20 minutes.
I take the bread of out of the breadmaker, divide in 2 and put on two circular pizza pans, sprinkled with flour. I cover with plastic wrap for about an hour. If you can leave longer that is better but I usually make at the last minute before dinner and am hungry!
Then I spread the dough out to cover each pizza pan, each one is 12″ in diameter and I make a little edge for the crust. Then I bake at 500 deg. F until it gets fairly firm, about 10 minutes. You want the crust to be firm enough so you can put toppings on it and put it back on the rack without breaking, but not fully browned. Remove from oven and put your favourite toppings on (sauce, etc) and bake for 30 minutes. These times are rough guidelines so the first time you do this, take note of what worked or if you needed more time for your oven. I use the upper rack so I don’t usually turn on the broil at the end, but you can do that if you want to make it extra crispy but be sure to watch and don’t let anything burn!
Artichoke pizza photo used with permission by www.plantplate.com
