recipe: pizza crust
When I saw a recipe in the Pioneer Woman’s cookbook for pizza crust, I was eager to try it out, with a few modifications. Little did I know I would be making several mistakes modifications.
I came home at lunch to make this today. I read the directions, but I didn’t quite follow them. Therefore, my dough did not look like hers did in her pictures.
The ingredients:
1 1/2 cups of warm water
1/2 packet of active dry yeast (I bought a kind that goes well with wheat flour)
4 cups of flour (I used wheat)
1 teaspoon of salt
1/3 cup of olive oil
I pulled all of my ingredients out, and then I essentially stopped reading. I didn’t have a hand mixer that is called for in the third step. And I overlooked the part where the water and yeast were to be mixed together in a separate bowl from the flour and salt. So…..
I mixed the water and yeast. I then added flour and salt, and mixed with a spatula. Since I then figured out I had gone off on my own, I added the olive oil to my mixture. At this point, the mixer should have been doing all of the work. I, instead, used my hands. I mixed it up, created a ball of dough, and left it in the bowl with a towel covering it the rest of the afternoon.
When I returned home, this is what my dough looked like:
Kind of lumpy. So I split it into two pieces, and started stretching one piece out on my pizza stone. I ended up taking a rolling pin to it, and it worked out great.
I added pizza sauce (half of a jar of Trader Joe’s pizza sauce) and mozzarella cheese, and then topped with turkey pepperoni.
I did preheat the oven, but it didn’t heat all the way to 500 degrees. I normally cook our pizzas on 450 degrees, so I recommend 11 or 12 minutes at 450.
Looks pretty good, right? It tasted GREAT!
The second half of the dough has been wrapped up, and we’ll make another pizza this weekend. Otherwise, you can freeze the dough for a few months.
I’m still working on being domestic, even if I don’t follow instructions well.
Looks yummy to me! And I’m surprised that the dough wasn’t really dense since you didn’t dissolve the yeast in the water to activate it.
I actually mixed the yeast and water first, before adding everything else. But it sat for a few minutes before I actually added the flour and salt, because I was looking for something and got side-tracked, so maybe that helped with the yeast?