Quick Yeasty Wholemeal Pizza Bases

These are some very tasty pizza bases and best of all they are wholemeal bases that cook perfectly.

• Ready In: 40 mins
• Serves: 2

Ingredients

• 1 1⁄2 cups warm water
• 3  tablespoons sugar
• 1  tablespoon  yeast
• 1  tablespoon olive oil
• 3  cups flour, wholemeal
• 1  teaspoon baking powder
• 1⁄4 teaspoon salt

Directions

1. Put the warm water in a bowl and stir the sugar in until it's dissolved.
2. Sprinkle on the yeast.
3. Leave it somewhere warm for 5-10 minutes until it's foamy.
4. Add the oil. Stir.
5. Tip in the flour (sift it if you can be bothered - I can't).
6. Add the baking powder and salt.
7. Stir the mixture until it becomes too hard to keep stirring.
8. Sprinkle some flour on your bench.
9. Tip the dough onto your bench and knead it. Keep adding just enough flour to stop it from sticking. If you're using mostly wholemeal flour, knead for a couple of minutes. If you're using mostly high grade white flour, knead for about ten minutes until the dough is springy.
10. Set your oven to 'Bake' and turn it up to high.
11. Halve the dough and roll it out into two pizza bases about 30cm across.
12. Transfer the bases to two well-greased oven trays (or pizza stones if you want to get fancy).
13. Turn the oven off. An oven that has heated for three or four minutes is perfect for rising dough. Make sure it's only just warm though - if it's too hot it'll kill the yeast and start to cook the dough.
14. Put the trays in the oven and leave the bases to rise for at least 20 minutes and up to one hour.
15. Near the end of the rising time, take the bases out of the oven and pre-heat it. You want to get the oven as hot as it will go. The crappy old oven in my flat takes about fifteen minutes to get hot enough, which gives me time to prepare the toppings.
16. Top the bases with whatever you like!
17. When the oven's hot enough, put ONE of the pizzas inches It should be done in less than ten minutes, then you can eat it while you cook the other one! Don't put both in at once or they'll cook unevenly (unless you have one of those flash fan-forced ovens).