My niece wrote to ask for my pizza crust recipe and I thought I would point her to my blog, but then I noticed I’ve written about pizza, but I haven’t really written about the crust. The basic recipe came from my mom, who probably saw it in a magazine somewhere in the 1970’s. I’ve adapted it over the years, but it’s essentially so easy that it’s hardly a recipe.
The basic recipe for 1 large pizza started with 1 cup of water. I’ve adjusted that over the years depending on how many people I need to serve and how big our appetites or pizza stones are. Roughly speaking, start with 1 cup of water and about a table spoon of yeast for the basic recipe. That called for sugar, but I started leaving it out when I learned the original Italian pizza probably didn’t have any.
Dissolve the yeast a bit, then add a little flour, enough to make a wet mixture the consistency of mud. Essentially, you just want some flour in the water to buffer the yeast when you add salt. Stir the flour a bit to mix well, then add a dash or two of salt and a tablespoon or so of oil (more or less depending on how many people you need to serve). Many pizza crust recipes have quite a bit of oil, so there’s nothing wrong with being a little liberal with it at this stage, but a tablespoon or so for one cup of water is probably about right. Add more flour until you get a soft dough. Pizza dough is very forgiving, so don’t worry if you get a little too much flour when you first start making it. Next time you might try for less. You just don’t want the dough to be so wet it’s sticky, but you don’t need to get it too firm either.
When adding flour, I usually start with white flour and then add whole wheat so that the mixture is about half and half. If I want a low-carb pizza crust, then I’ll use all whole wheat, which is surprising good. You just want to keep the dough pretty wet, since the whole wheat flour will soak up the moisture as it rises. It makes a thin, hearty crust. All white flour works well, too, and I’ve done that if I don’t have whole wheat, but we prefer a heartier pizza crust with at least some whole wheat flour. Bread flour is fine, as is pastry flour. I’ve even used Grano Arso (burnt grain flour) when our son gave me some as a present, and that was quite tasty and very dark. But a basic white and whole wheat blend is our go-to pizza crust.
Knead the flour for a bit on the counter once it holds together when mixing it in the bowl. Scrape out your bowl and knead in all the scrapings along with a little additional flour to get the consistency you want. Then pour a little more olive oil in the bowl, just a teaspoon or so, and roll the ball of dough around in the bowl to coat it.
Let the dough rise at least half an hour. Many recipes call for a longer rise, so it’s okay to let it sit for a few hours, even over night in the refrigerator. I often let it rise for an hour to an hour and a half. If I’m going to let it rise longer than that, I will cover the bowl with plastic wrap or a wet towel, though I don’t bother with that anymore if it will be a short rise.
That’s it. When you’re ready to put the dough on your pan or stone, just sprinkle a little corn meal on the surface and then press the dough out to cover. Before I put it on the stone I usually spread the dough out a bit by holding one edge and letting the dough dangle in the air, then moving around the dough ball until it’s more like a frisbee. I don’t toss the dough and spin it the way the do in some pizza restaurants, but it’s basically the same principle. It helps to have it somewhat disk shaped before spreading on the pan by pressing on the dough and moving the edges further out. Press from the center out until the center gets pretty thin, then work on getting the edges to the edge of the stone or pan. That’s hard to explain, but you’ll get the hang of it by trial and error. We have round pizza stones, but if you don’t have that, it’s fine to press it out on a rectangular baking sheet. It takes a little work to get the dough into the corners, but that just takes patience.
I bake my pizza at 425 degrees for 20 minutes or until done. Some recipes call for an even hotter oven. Some people use a pizza peel to put the crust on a heated stone, but I’ve found it works as well and is easier to start with a room temperature stone and put the pizza dough directly on it, then put the toppings on the pizza and put it all in the oven. Maybe that’s because I don’t have a peel and I always want to use every inch of pizza stone, so getting the fully made pizza on a hot stone just seems too complicated to me. I still end up with a light and crispy crust, depending on how much dough I make and how thick it ends up.
Kendall Dunkelberg 