You don’t need culinary expertise to make your own pizza dough. You don’t need much time, equipment or complicated ingredients either.
Making your own pizza dough is a lot less expensive than buying those ready-to-eat pizza crusts that you find in the supermarket. And besides that, when you make the dough yourself, you know there’s no artificial ingredients or preservatives. The pizza dough recipe I’m using is the fastest and easiest one I’ve come across, and best of all, it tastes great!
Here’s a quick snap I took of the pizza we made last night:
Okay, are you ready to try it? Do you have your favorite toppings in the fridge? Do you have a cookie pan, pizza pan, or a cake pan? Do you have a rolling pin? If so, then you’re ready to get started!
The dough recipe I use is not my own. It’s Melissa A. Trainer’s recipe, and if you click on the link below, you’ll see that Melissa mixes her dough in a food processor with a metal blade. That’s fine if you want to do that; however, I just put my ingredients in a mixing bowl and mix the dough by hand with my fingers.
No Rise Pizza Dough by Melissa A. Trainer
(Adapted from Abby Mandel’s Thin Crust recipe)
Ingredients for the Dough (makes one pizza for two people without big appetites)
-1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons warm water
-2 1/2 teaspoons active dry yeast (1 package)
-1 teaspoon sugar
-1 1/2 cups plus 2 tablespoons bread flour (or you can use all-purpose flour if you don’t have bread flour on hand; however, I think the bread flour works a lot better. Using all-purpose flour made the bread rise up too much.)
-3/4 teaspoon salt
-1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
Instructions for making the dough
- Preheat your oven to 425 degrees.
- Mix the yeast, sugar, and water together in a coffee cup or glass container.
- Put it in a warm place free of drafts and let the yeast rise. I usually just set my yeast mixture on the warm stove. It will take about 5-10 minutes, depending on how warm your kitchen is. It took about 5 minutes for me.
- While the yeast is rising, put the flour, salt, and olive oil in a mixing bowl.
- After the yeast mixture rises, pour it into the flour mixture.
- Mix all the ingredients. I just mix everything with my hands, but you can use a spoon if you prefer.
- Knead the dough a little on a floured surface. If you’ve never kneaded dough before, don’t worry; it’s real easy. You just basically punch the dough down with the heel of your hands several times. For this pizza dough, you only have to knead it a few minutes.
- Your dough shouldn’t be too sticky or too dry. It should look something like this:
I needed to add a little more water to my dough than what the recipe called for because it was too dry. Then I had to add more flour because I put too much extra water. It’s no big deal. If it’s too sticky, just add a little more flour until you get the right consistency. Adding more water and a little more flour won’t hurt anything.
One other thing to keep in mind is that the dough recipe only makes one pizza. It may be enough for two people…depending on your appetites and depending on the toppings you have on it. A single batch really isn’t enough for me and my husband, but we don’t load our pizzas down with toppings nor do we use meat. We make veggie pizzas which aren’t as filling as pizzas with meat.
Anyway with our appetites, it’s better to make two batches and have leftover pizza that we can nibble on for breakfast the next day.
Preparing the Pans and Rolling out the Dough
- Oil the pizza pans you plan to use. I use olive oil, but vegetable oil is fine too.
- Roll your dough out with a rolling pin until you have it to the desired thickness and at about the right size to fit your pan. (We made one with thin crust and one with thick crust. However you like it is fine.)
- Transfer the dough to your pan, and then stretch it and press it into your pan so it covers the pan completely.
Adding the Sauce and Toppings to Your Pizza and then Bake
This part is easy. Make your pizza with whatever sauce and toppings you like. Just put your sauce and toppings directly on the uncooked dough.
The pizza that we made last night that you see pictured had pasta sauce, goat cheese, feta cheese, sliced tomatoes, sliced green olives, fresh basil, and a little Parmesan cheese. We also sprinkled garlic powder, oregano, and black pepper on the dough.
Keep in mind if you load your pizza down with lots of toppings, the dough will take longer to bake. I’d suggest lowering the temperature of the oven down to 350 degrees if you have a heavy hand when it comes to toppings.
I baked ours at 425 degrees for about 15 minutes I think. If you want your dough thin and crispy, cook it longer until it’s very crisp. If you want it chewier, cook it a little less.
So, that’s it. Nothin’ to it…except to maybe grab a beer to enjoy with your pizza! Cheers!
Edit: I wanted to talk a little more about the difference between using bread flour and all-purpose flour. The first time I made this dough, I used bread flour like the recipe called for, and the pizza dough rose a little, but not too much.
The second time I made this recipe, I didn’t have enough bread flour on hand so I used about 3/4 bread flour and 1/4 all purpose flour. The pizza I photographed above was the flour mixture.
The third time I made this recipe, I used 100% all-purpose flour because I was totally out of bread flour. The dough rose up too much…and not in a uniformed way. The bread is fine in terms of taste, but using the bread flour makes a flatter dough crust which is what I want, and it also makes a better visual presentation as well.
