All pizzas are made up of 3 main components: the crust, the sauce and the cheese. By making each of the components on your own, you ensure that each is geared towards your taste, you know what is being put in each and everything is fresh! I will be posting each recipe separately.
Making each component requires us to look at the science!
Let's start with the dough!
Pizza dough:
To create simple pizza dough you only need 7 ingredients: all purpose flour, salt, yeast, salt, sugar, olive oil and water/whey. A lot of these ingredients you probably already have laying around at home! You might be wondering why a savory dish requires you to use sugar. Well one of the most important ingredients in pizza dough is the yeast! Yeast is what causes the dough to rise and gives in a soft, airy texture when you're done. In order for yeast to be active and get their job done, they need energy from the sugar! You wanna feed them! This allows them to produce gas that causes the inflation of the dough. Knowing this is important because it leads us to our next important step: Letting the dough rest! The longer you let the dough rest, the more gas the yeast can produce, and the lighter your crust will be. Use this information to determine how to achieve your desired crust density. For my crust, I did not let it rest too long. It is best if you let it rest overnight because that will produce a very airy crust, if this is what you like of course.
Ingredients used:
2 cups all purpose flour
2 1/2 teaspoon yeast
2 teaspoons sugar
1 teaspoon salt
chili flakes for flavor (optional)
dried basil for flavor (optional)
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 cup WARM water/whey
Directions:
Poor 1 cup of flour in bowel and mix yeast, salt, sugar, chili flakes, and dried basil together. Add in olive oil and water, I used whey (leftovers from the ricotta). Add in remaining flour slowly. Knead the dough to get everything incorporated, oil a bowl and place dough in, wrap with plastic wrap and let rest outside! Letting it rest outside helps with the reactions taking place and will give in a little bit of a tangy flavor. Punch out some of the air after an hour and let rest again. After 1-36 hours, divide dough into 4-8 balls (depending on how many pizzas you want to make) and let rest another hour. Ready to roll out the dough now!
This is a simple and great recipe! You don't have to use it just for pizza, you can also use it for calzones, empanadas, garlic knots, etc.
Comments