Hi, Ron; welcome to Le Gourmet Tv , in this segment we’re going to make pizza dough and this particular pizza dough makes a really good thin crust pizza. I’ve already mentioned that all of my ingredients in fact, I’ve waived them which is pretty much the only way to do this if you’re going to be making bread that you really, the way your ingredients. So we’re going to start off, I’ve got my hot water here, to that hot water I’m going to add just a little bit of sugar and then I’m going to pitch in my yeast. And you want to put the yeast in the water with the sugar, just give it a little bit of a stir and then let it bloom. Really what you’re looking for is just to kind of prove that the yeast is active and it’s good. So you put that in, you give it a little bit of a stir and then you let it sit for 5 or 10 minutes, it’s going to froth up and that’ll let you know that the yeast is good to use. Great, so your yeast has bloomed so it’s time to move on to the next step.
We take a little bit of salt and we pitch that into our bread flour which is a, it’s hard flour; it’s got a little bit more gluten in it. You’re not going to get the same quality of dough if you’re using all purpose flour. So you just kind of mix the salt in there, that’s great; now we’re going to put the whole thing into our kitchen aid mixers, so in goes the flour and in goes our water and yeast mixture. So the first thing we want to do here is just to kind of mix the liquid and the flour together and then we’re going to let it rest so you don’t want to turn it up too high, jus put it on. Great, so now I’ve got a ball of dough that I’m going to let rest for about 5 minutes. More to liquid in the flour really marry together; this is going to help out later and give us a higher quality dough. So about 5 minutes and then we’ll move on to kneading.
Great, so the dough has rested for about 5 minutes, now we move on to kneading. So this has been kneading in the machine for about 5 minutes on speed 3 for this particular machine and it’s time to take it out; usually what I do at this point is I put out onto the counter top, just a little bit of flour, you don’t really want to incorporate much flour but I just put it out and knead it by hand a little bit. Just to kind of make sure that it’s at the right consistency. I really do think that you need to feel the dough, and that you need to have a connection to it, to know if you’re at the right stage, maybe it needs just a little bit more kneading at this point. This feels pretty good; it’s a good feeling dough. So we let this dough rise now for about an hour, an hour and a half until it doubles in bulk. I’ve got a bowl that I’ve coated the inside with some olive oil, so we’re going to put that in there just pour a little bit of olive oil over the top of the dough just to keep it moist. We’re going to cover this with a damp cloth, we’re going to put it somewhere warm and once it’s doubled in size we’re going to come back and move on to the next step.
So just a little over an hour has passed our dough has doubled in bulk, and now it’s time to punch it down and turn it out. So you just punch it down what you want to do there is you want to release the gas just really quickly and I’m going to lightly flour the counter top. You don’t want to put too much down and it’s really just there to keep it form sticking to the counter top. So, turn it out into the flour and just, you don’t really want to work it but you just want to kind of feel it and figure out if it’s good. And this is some good feeling dough. And that’s something that overtime you’re going to learn what the dough should feel like. And you know if the first few times it doesn’t work out perfectly, don’t worry about it, just keep practicing because it will come to you eventually and then it’s just going to seem so easy. So at this point, I’ve got the dough and typically with this recipe I get four portions of dough so at this point I just take a dough knife and cut it into four, now I don’t use the dough right away. Typically what I do is I take it and I put it in the Ziploc containers, put the lid on; now I just stick this to the fridge and then let it rest for at least an hour before I move on to the next step which is pulling it out and actually making the pizzas. But you can also leave this in the fridge for 3 or 4 days, so you could make this dough on a Saturday afternoon or Sunday afternoon and then when you come home from work during the week you can pull this out, let it come back to room temperature and then work it into a pizza. So this really is a recipe that you can make ahead of time and it does benefit in flavor form sitting in the fridge for at least a day. So you can use it for dinner tonight or you can use it for dinner 2 or 3 days from now. And don’t worry about it rising too much in the fridge and you know, escaping form the container, that’s not going to happen. The temperature in the fridge is going to slow down the yeast quite a bit. It’s still going to rise, it’s still going to grow but it’s not going to grow that much and you’re going to develop just an absolute incredible flavor in this dough. It doesn’t take all that much time; it is something that you have to plan ahead though. So come on back and we’ll actually turn this out and cook some pizza.
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