S'kat's Easy Pizza Dough

s'kat's Note:

Throw away your coupons, put the local greaseries to shame! It's easy to make pizza dough at home! Prep time includes rising time.

• Total Time: 2 hrs 8 mins
• Prep Time: 2 hrs
• Cook Time: 8 mins

Ingredients:

Yield: 2 pizzas

• 1 ½ cups water (test on inside of wrist, like for a baby bottle- that's the right temp!)
• 1 (¼ ounce) packet dry yeast
• 1 teaspoon sugar
• 3 -4 cups bread flour
• 1 tablespoon cornmeal
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 3 tablespoons olive oil , plus additional as needed

Directions:

1. Stir together the water, yeast and the sugar.
2. Let rest until the yeast foams, about 3 minutes.
3. Place 2 1/2-cups of the flour, salt and cornmeal in a mixing bowl and combine.
4. Add the yeast mixture and olive oil and stir together to form a sticky dough.
5. Remove from bowl and knead, adding the remaining flour a little at a time until the dough becomes smooth and elastic, about 5 minutes.
6. The longer you knead, the more texture your dough will have.
7. Turn the dough into a lightly oiled bowl.
8. Cover with a dry towel and place in a warm, draft free area.
9. (I usually stick it in the oven. If your oven is cold, very briefly- about 1 minute- turn to highest temp, then off again, well before placing bowl in oven. Let's not melt any bowls, eh?) Let rise for at least one hour.
10. When dough has doubled in bulk, punch back down.
11. At this point, add any of the optional ingredients at end of recipe, or as desired.
12. Let the dough rise again, until almost doubled, about 30 minutes.
13. Or, if there were no extra additions, shape and add toppings.
14. Bake at 500°F for about 8 minutes.
15. Optional, but worthwhile: fresh herbs (I use basil, oregano and thyme), chopped minced garlic, parmiagiano-reggiano and extra cornmeal for texture.

Reviews

[spatchcock]

This was fantastic. I hated having to wait for it to rise (that's ALWAYS my problem with making bread of any sort!) but, wow, wow, wow, it was really worth the wait! I will print this and put it in my recipe binder and make it many times. I added garlic salt (out of fresh garlic), basil, and oregano to the dough, and for toppings I used sauteed onions, thawed frozen spinach, yellow squash and sun-dried tomatoes. EXCELLENT!!!

[russ durand]

it was all right,it is alot of work for all right

[Roosie]

Absolutely, hands-down the best pizza dough I've tried thus far. The cornmeal gives it the real "pizza crust" texture as opposed to a lot of other pizza dough recipes I've tried that have a much more bread-like texture. I actually used this to make calzones, not pizza, but you better believe that I will be using this recipe to make pizza in the immediate future. One minor sub- I didnt have any bread flour, so I used King Arthur Brand white (which is higher in protein than most other white flours, so it worked quite well.) Thank you a million for posting this- After a pretty long search, I think this is *the* pizza dough for me.