Comments on: Homemade Pizza… ERROR

By: agnespterry

agnespterry — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 17:28:47 +0000

On a great pizza recipe . . . I know this is belated but I stumbled across your blog and this entry google-ing and thought I would add a comment. Hope you don’t mind. Good luck with homemade pizza, and I hope you have not given up on it!

Here is a Focaccia bread crust that works really, really well. I have used it for years and you can have supper in about 50 minutes, and most of that time is waiting for the rise. It is a recipe passed down from my Italian family– super easy.

Pizza Dough:

1 cup warm water
1 packet yeast, or 2 and 1/4 t yeast
1 teaspoon sugar
1 T oil
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon salt

To test if your yeast is good: add yeast to warm water (think the temp you would serve milk to a baby- hot, but not so hot it is uncomfortable for your fingers); add sugar and oil to promote the yeast to eat. If the yeast is alive it ought to start to sort of foam-bubble at the top after about five minutes or so.

Once that is done, stir in a cup of flour and THEN the salt, then the other cup of flour. (Salt can kill yeast with prolonged, *direct* contact. Flour is a good buffer.) If the dough seems too sticky, add in more flour while kneading the dough. Let sit in an oiled, covered bowl for 30 minutes to rise. You can skip this if you are in an extreme hurry, but the pizza will not be quite as good and you will have a smaller, thicker pizza.

Turn on oven to 400 degrees. Spray a pan, dump the dough onto the tray and oil your hands. Spread out the dough until it is as thin as you like. Add pizza sauce (I use Hunt’s Zesty Tomato sauce), cheese, +toppings. Bake 15 to 20 minutes until cheese is browned.

If you were to make traditional Focaccia, like the kind my great-grandfather would make, you would skip the pizza toppings and instead use 1/4 cup olive oil, salt, cracked pepper and pressed garlic; you would spread out the dough, dimple it with your fingers, spread out the oil and add the other topping to your taste and then bake it for the same time period. Delicious served with spaghetti!

By: A Homemade Italian Feast - Veggie+Meat Lasagna, Homemade Italian Bread » Joyful Abode

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 13:01:41 +0000

[...] tried to make homemade bread dough several times, mostly for pizza crust. First I had a major ERROR, then a success with the help of the bread machine, and then another bread-machine-less ERROR. It [...]

By: Homemade Pizza - Success! » Joyful Abode

Homemade Pizza - Success! » Joyful Abode — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 18:00:31 +0000

[...] The last time I tried to make homemade pizza, it resulted in a sad looking product that had my husband saying, “Well, it’s not totally disgusting.” [...]

By: BreadBox

BreadBox — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 01:35:36 +0000

Doug is right about the salt: it can even kill the yeast if you are unlucky. I’d recommend checking out the website of A Year In Bread at http://ayearinbread.earthandhearth.com/
They have lots of good recipes, and in particular some good pizza stuff. I’d also be happy to send you some recipes I wrote up when I was teaching breadmaking on a semi-regular basis. Email me if you want them.

A tip for cutting the prep time after a long day at work: make the dough a day or four ahead of time, put it in a ziplock bag in the fridge (make sure that there is enough room in the bag for the dough to expand!) Take it out a half hour or so before you want to bake it: let it relax, stretch it or spin it, top it and bake it.

By: yayanana

yayanana — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 12:10:17 +0000

Absolutely on the whole milk mozzerella! and for the sauce, if you make a seasoned sauce based on tomato paste, you might be real happy.

By: charlie

charlie — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 20:58:43 +0000

Ditto on the whole milk mozzarella. It’s better anyway.

When I made pizza dough, I’d put it in the bathroom to rise while a shower of only hot water was running with the curtain open. Obviously I’d turn off the water at a certain point, but the hot moistness is achieved very easily that way.

By: Sarah

Sarah — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 19:11:08 +0000

I’m a big fan of the pizza dough recipe in How to Cook Everything — works every time!

By: Doug

Doug — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 17:46:59 +0000

Unless it is a recipe which explicitly needs a slow rise, starting your yeast separately as you described should be a defaut action. I’d even hold off on the salt until I knew the yeast was started (foamy). Salt slows the little guys doing their job.

By: Stormimay

Stormimay — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 15:38:38 +0000

Hey, someone else with yeast issues! lol I was a good cook/baker for years before I managed to figure out yeast; I felt like such a failure there. I learned by starting with yeast-based sourdough starters from allrecipes.com I know that using yeast in sourdough starter is cheating, but it works and it’s easier.
I just use plain spaghetti sauce for pizza.
Whole milk mozzarella is much better if you want strings. You may have to look for it in a different section of the grocery store. I haven’t tried it packed in water. I like adding shredded colby/jack to my pizzas too.

By: mub

mub — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 15:11:23 +0000

http://www.fabulousfoods.com/recipes/breads/yeast/pizzadough.html

That’s the recipe I always use to make pizza dough, but it really does take awhile for it to rise… I just toss it into my breadmaker on the dough setting and don’t mess with it until it beeps. I use basic spaghetti sauce (without meat and chunks of onion) for my sauce and it works out really well. I only get stringy cheese when I use mozzarella packed in water. I don’t know if it’s because the pre-shredded kind has such a low moisture content or what.

I am curious about the recipe you used for the dough, because sometimes I want a thin crunchy non-yeasty recipe!