Pizza Dough: a simple pizza dough that will work.

With an eye on showing that home-made pizza is easy and practical, we have separated the process of pizza creation into logical, discrete parts.

Episode 1 dealt with the “Composition” part of pizza creation, actually adding the layers of prepared toppings onto an already existing crust, and putting the pizza in the oven.

In this episode we will actually create the pizza dough we bought from the store in the first post, and then follow the recipe from that post to compose upon the pizza dough we will make today.

We can make a single pizza dough, or make a bunch to use later. We will start with a single pizza crust today, but we will aspire towards being able to create multiple ready-to-use pizza crusts that we can store for a day or so in the refrigerator, and up to a week in the freezer.

Towards our theme of pizza as ultra-practical, our goal is to prepare this dough today so it’s ready to compose upon, in less than five minutes, minus the time in the stand mixer.

Let’s get right to it!

EQUIPMENT
stand mixer
1 cup or more glass measuring cup
1/3 cup measure
2/3 cup measure
1 tsp measure
cast iron pan pan to warm liquid
butter knife to level flour in 2/3 measure

INGREDIENTS
2/3 cup all-purpose flour
1/3* cup warm water or orange juice
1 pinch apple cider vinegar
1 tsp sugar or honey
1 tsp dry active yeast
1 dash sea salt

PREPARATION
Add 2/3 cup flour to stand mixer bowl
add yeast to glass mixing cup
add sugar or honey to glass mixing cup
heat water or orange juice until warm
add warm liquid to glass mixing cup and stir
add apple cider vinegar and stir
add salt and stir
let bubble

add liquid to stand mixer bowl
mix on low for 20 minutes, after using spatula to integrate all flower from the sides of the bowl

add 1 tbs flour to cast iron pan and spread around with your fingers

put dough in cast iron pan

form roughly into a ball

cover with a kitchen towel

let rise for 20 minutes
remove kitchen towel

generously sprinkle flour over dough
flip dough over
generously sprinkle flour over other side

pick up the dough so its resting on the back of your hand

move hands apart once or twice to stretch the dough
THIS IS THE TRICKY PART AND WILL REQUIRE REPETITIONS

put the pizza crust back into the pan

push dough with fingers to form to the pan as needed

VIOLA!

In episode 1 we dealt with pizza Composition, the last step before the pizza goes into the oven. But we need something to compose upon, a pizza crust. That’s what we learned today.

It can be very intimidating to do any kind of baking or dough preparation, but as we saw today it’s actually very easy when you have a proper set of steps to follow. The way we prepared the dough today, letting it knead for 20 minutes, and letting it rise for 20 minutes, assured us of a very pliable dough which would turn into a proper pizza crust, even in a pinch, by simply stretching it in place with our fingers. We did stretch the dough with the back of our hands, but that was not necessary to form the crust exactly as we want it.

Stay tuned as we go learn the other official steps of captaincastiron pizza creation; Long Prep and Short Prep. We learned to compose a pizza with an existing dough, and then we learned how to make the dough to compose upon. Next we will learn how to process our ingredients and turn them into the prepared toppings with which to compose, those steps are Long Prep and Short Prep respectively.

See you next time!