Monday, August 31, 2009

Easy pizza dough

I like making my own pizza.

I think it is quite simple to make. It makes a nice snack when I have guests over at my place.. and also makes a nice one-person lunch or dinner.

Often, I am tempted to buy a ready-made pizza base to make it even simpler. But everytime I'm at the supermarket, I balk at the price of the ready-made bases.. Plus, I usually prefer a crispy pizza base and most ready-made ones are too "bready" for me.

Last Friday, I made pizza again. This time, I tried out a new recipe I found at Epicurious.

But I saw that there were some feedback that the dough was a little too wet and a little too bread-like, so I made some adjustments to it.

What I used
1/3 cup warm water (Instead of 3/4 cups suggested in the recipe)
1/4 envelope active dry yeast (Instead of 1 envelope suggested)

2 cups all purpose flour
1 teaspoon sugar
3/4 teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons olive oil
1/4 teaspoon dried herbs (My own addition, this makes the dough even more fragrant)

What I did
1. Mixed warm water and yeast
2. Mix all the dry ingredients together, with the exception of the herbs
3. Slowly add in the oil and then the water-yeast mixture
4. Knead the dough til it is stretchy and springy
5. Add in herbs (Herbs or flavours should always go in last in a dough. Otherwise, the herbs may affect the development of the gluten.)
6. Set dough aside, covered under a damp towel for 1 hour
7. Beat the dough down using my knuckles
8. Roll the dough out into a pizza base. I rolled it out into 4 small thin pizza bases.
9. Bake at 180 deg C for 10 minutes
10. Put pizza ingredients on top, plus extra cheese and bake til cheese melts and blends with other ingredients

No pictures this time - All the pizzas were eaten by the time I remembered about pictures.

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