An easy pizza dough recipe should be permanently in your collection. It is flexible and can be made fairly quickly! Obviously use it to make a pizza, but the same dough can be used for a vegetable topped focaccia or folded up into a calzone. And it’s a great first bread recipe! You are making homemade bread here, but it is way less daunting, way easier to achieve success, and the tasty results happen much faster than a loaf of bread.
Recipe Notes:
*Ellie’s mom’s teachings.
**Notes on rising: Alice Waters gives 2 hours for rising or proofing, another term for rising, but she has clearly never cooked in the heat of a pre-war NYC apartment building. As you’re starting out, watch your dough closely.
- A hot environment will make it rise very fast (in our Brooklyn apartment, we can have a finished pizza dough in 45 minutes).
- A cold environment will have it rising much slower.
It can also be nice to make your dough the day before you need it. In this case, don’t let it rise on the counter, place it to rise overnight in the fridge and take it out 2 hours before baking, allowing it to come to room temperature. The longer a dough rises, the deeper the flavor will be. So a cold, slow rise will make a better tasting dough.
Don’t over proof or under proof your dough. It won’t stretch easily and the finished bread won’t have a pleasant temperature. Try to adjust the heat of your environment so that you can get a dough that has doubled in size (but nothing more).
Pizza Dough
Ingredients
- 1 teaspoon instant dry yeast
- ¼ cup warm water
- ¼ cup flour (mostly white flour, a tablespoon or two of rye or wheat mixed in)
- 1½ cups white flour
- ½ teaspoon salt
- Scant ½ cup cold water plus 3 tablespoons of olive oil
Directions
- Step 1 In the bowl of your stand mixer, mix the yeast with ¼ cup warm water and ¼ cup of flour to “wake it up.” Allow to sit until bubbly, about 15 minutes.
- Step 2 In a separate, large bowl mix 1 1/2 cups white flour with 1/2 teaspoon salt.
- Step 3 Prepare your liquid: measure out just under a ½ cup of cold water, add a couple tablespoons of olive oil until your total liquid is ½ cup. This does not have to be perfect.
- Step 4 When your yeast mixture is bubbly, mix in the water and oil, stirring the two together to create a cloudy looking liquid.
- Step 5 Slowly sprinkle in the flour and stir until the liquid becomes a dough. It shouldn’t be too sticky to handle, nor should it be dry and flakey. You may not use all the flour or you may need a little bit more depending on the weather and your measurements.
- Step 6 Knead dough either by hand or in a stand mixer with a dough hook on low for about 5 minutes. The dough should be smooth “as a baby’s bottom,”* stretchy, and just ever so slightly sticky. You do not want a dry dough and you do not want to see any remaining flour, err on the side of wet and sticky. That being said, if it’s too sticky to knead, keep sprinkling flour until it is manageable.
- Step 7 Put your finished dough in a lightly oiled bowl, cover it with a dish towel or plastic wrap and let it sit until nearly doubled, 1-2 hours.**
- Step 8 Your dough is finished!! Make something delicious with it.
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