How to Make Pizza Dough

Making home made pizza dough Today, we’re doing pizza dough, homemade pizza dough. There’s nothing better. Hopefully, you saw the pizza sauce demo. Here we go. Take one package of dry active yeast. It’s just right from the grocery store. One package of fresh yeast, that’s two in a quarter teaspoons. We’re going to make sponge. So, the first step here is you’re going to add two thirds of a cup of flour and three quarters of a cup of warm water. Now, not scalding hot water, not just barely lukewarm water, warm water. You’re going to give that a good mix and you’ll know right away, you’ll see little bubbles form if that yeast is good. Get some fresh yeast, not fresh yeast but a new package as if you have had it around for six years. And we’re going to set this in a warm spot for 30 minutes and it’s going to form what’s called a sponge. Now, while the 30 minutes are happening, we’re going to get the rest of our dry ingredients together. That’s a quarter cup of rye flour. By the way, all the ingredients will be in the site. Quarter cup of rye flour and then four cups of just regular unbleached flour, all-purpose flour. That’s all the flour and then very important here, you’ll need a teaspoon of salt at least, maybe a teaspoon and a quarter. People forget to put salt in a dough and it’s just flattened, the pizza dough -- it’s not pizza dough. All right, so make sure you have some salt in there. Give it a little mix and just set that aside. And there, 30 minutes later is our first stage of the sponge and that is alive. It’s so cool. Now, we’re going to make the sponge part two. Take a cup, approximately, a cup of the flour mixture. Add it to the first stage of the sponge. And now, we’re going to add one cup of cold water. We’re going to give that a mix with a whisk. And then we’re going to let that sit for another 30 minutes in a warm spot. It’s really going to get cool. So, give that a good mix. So, that was our first half hour sponge. We added a cup of flour and a cup of cold water. We switch to the spatula here. So, scrape down the sides and makes sure you don’t have any flour up on the sides of the bowl. You’re going to set your timer for 30 minutes and you’re going to let that sponge for another 30 minutes. So there we go, 30 minutes later. It is so cool. It’s like spongy and sticky and light and smells cool. It’s like a science experiment. Let’s make pizza dough. So, what I’m going to do is I’m going to take a big bowl. I like to do it in a stainless steel bowl. You can do it on a wooden cutting board if you want but I’m this less messed. I’m going to add about two thirds of the rest of the flour mixture, so we’re going to save about third. So, about two thirds of the flour goes to the bowl. I’m going to use my spatula. I’m going to scrape in the sponge on top of the flour. With your spatula, you’re going to just slowly incorporate the flour into that sponge. So, just take it and kind of fold it, just get it going and then you can just kind of stir it in. Now, don’t worry about deflating it. This is going to rise and double in size in the next stage. So, what we’re doing here is we’re just mixing that flour just until it’s mixed in. We’re not going to knead it yet, so just give it a stir. When most of the flour’s gone, what we’re going to do is we’re going to add in the rest of the flour and some olive oil. Now very important, the olive oil is going to give this pizza dough a nice texture, a little bit of flavor. So, in goes the last third of the flour and one third of a cup of olive oil. What we’re going to do here is we take our spatula again and just give this some mix and we’re just going to incorporate the olive oil and the rest of the flour. I just want this to kind of be together enough so I can get it on to the cutting board and start kneading it. So, keep mixing it up and again, it’s not going to come altogether, that’s pretty much good enough. Scrape down your spatula and on a floured cutting board, we’re going to start the kneading process. By kneading of course I mean pushing with the palm of your hand, kind of turning and rolling, pushing down with the palm of your hand. There will be a complete kneading lesson in the culinary academy if you decide to take our course. But anyway, most of you probably kneaded things or seen it on TV a thousand times. You can’t really screw it up, you’re just kind of pushing, turning it over, fold it in on itself and then just mushing it with your palm in a forward motion. It’s hard to describe kneading but you’ll get it. But basically five minutes later, five, six minutes, I get a beautiful, soft, elastic, slightly sticky dough. Then we’re going to cover it with a little olive oil, couple of teaspoons of olive oil, just so it doesn’t stick to the bowl and the top doesn’t dry out. Put a nice kitchen towel over the top, keep it drafted away from it. I don’t know if that does that thing; my mom always did that. And then put it in a warm place for two hours. It will double in size. Amazing! This feels so good. My favorite part of pizza dough is this where you get to punch it down and it just kind of deflates but we’re not deflated, we’re actually accelerated because we’re thinking about the pizza that this is going to make. It’s going to be incredible. So, here we go. We punch down our dough. Again, it rose for two hours in a warm spot. I’m going to kind of square it up here in the cutting board. And again, it’s flat. It’s flattened but that’s what we want and I’m going to take my pastry cutter or knife. Let me use this plastic pastry scraper and I’m going to cut this dough in six individual pieces because what I’d like to do is cure the dough, which means I’m going to let it sit for a little while. I’m actually going to make the pizza tomorrow. This gets a little suppler and a little tenderer if you let it go overnight in the fridge. You can make pizza now if you want. The pizza demo will be on the site hopefully tomorrow. What I’m going to do is to take a little olive oil in my hand. I’m going to rub each one of these individual portions of pizza dough that I formed into a nice ball. I’m going to put each one in a Ziploc bag and there we go. That’s going to go in the fridge overnight. Overnight, it kind of doubles its size again. We’re going to punch that down and make our pizza. But again, to work with the pizza, you want the dough to be at room temperature. So, if you’re going to put it in the fridge, in a Ziploc bag like I recommend, make sure you take it out and let it come up to temperature. When it does, you will check tomorrow’s demo. We’re going to make an amazing pizza. See that heart shape? That’s for all the ladies out there and my wife. Anyway, I hope you give that a try. It’s really fun, really easy to making your own pizza dough. I’ve been working on the new site of course, that’s why I haven’t been posting that everyday. So anyway, thanks for your patience and as always, enjoy!