Pizza Dough

Better than delivery, making your own pizza is rewarding because it saves you money and you can personalize it as much as you want. Making the pizza dough is rather easy if you are familiar with making bread. Pizza dough flour is available rather easily, but regular flour would be just fine. To be honest I don't know what the difference with the pizza dough flour. But I've used both and never noticed the difference.

The recipe is a lot like making bread. This recipe makes 3 medium sized pizza dough rounds.

1 cup (2.5 dl) warm water

2 tbs sugar

7 grams dry active yeast

3 cups (7.5 dl) flour

1 tbs olive oil

1/2 tsp salt

1.) Proof the yeast in the water with the sugar. Stir and leave for about 10 minutes until yeast is frothy.

2.) Add the flour, half cup at a time, adding the oil and salt before the dough becomes stiff.

3.) Adjust the amount of flour you add according to the feel. As you knead the dough you will feel whether it is still sticky or whether it is stiff. You want a dough that feels a lot like bread dough. No longer sticky, but not too dense or stiff. Knead for 5-10 minutes until smooth without lumps.

4.) Allow to rise until doubled, covered, about an hour in a warm place or overnight in the refridgerator.

5.) Divide dough into three equal pieces and flatten with a roller. If you're brave enough you can also try stretching and tossing the dough like they do in the pizzeria! (I did try this, but some parts became too thin and made a small hole in the dough round- I patched this up, but you can see where in the photo) Use extra flour while rolling and stretching as needed.

6.) Heat oven to 175C. While waiting for the oven to heat, you can add the pizza sauce and toppings as you wish. You can also bake the pizza crust by itself and freeze them to save for a later time.

7.) If baking the whole pizza, baking time will take about 15 minutes. If baking only the crust, you may want to shorten this baking time, so that when baking again later with sauce and toppings, the crust will not become too crispy (unless you like that, of course).

Other ideas would be to add crushed garlic or other herbs right into the dough. Whatever you like! Pizza topping ideas warmly welcome.