Pizza Dough

Homemade pizza has been a bit of an evolution in our house.  At first, I just used hollowed out french bread leftover from a different meal for the crust.  It works really well to hold lots of toppings and helps me not waste the french bread that comes in such giant loaves.  Then, I used the boxed Jiffy mix where you pretty much just add water.  It was more "pizza" like, but we either had to doctor up the crust a little bit or just eat it as is, which was a little on the cardboard side of things.  Finally, I just tried making the dough from scratch.

When I originally planned making homemade pizza for dinner, I had planned that if somehow the dough turned out awful we could just order pizza in and call it good.  I wasn't expecting to be serving it for guests.  But, as things turned out, we ended up having people over for dinner and instead of changing what I was going to make, they became guinea pigs along with Joe.  I looked up some different recipes, read some reviews and here's what I tried...

Ingredients

• 1 package active dry yeast
• 3/4 cup warm water;110 degrees F
• 2 cups bread flour
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 2 teaspoons white sugar

Directions

1. In a small bowl, dissolve yeast in warm water. Let stand until creamy, about 10 minutes.
2. In a large bowl, combine 2 cups bread flour, olive oil, salt, white sugar and the yeast mixture; stir well to combine. Beat well until a stiff dough has formed. 
3. Cover the dough and let rise until doubled in volume, about 30 minutes. Meanwhile, preheat oven to 350 degrees.
4. Turn dough out onto a well floured surface. Roll out into the best circle you can and place on pizza stone.  Using a fork, poke the dough a few times and bake without toppings for 3-5 minutes. 
5. Take the pizza stone out of the oven and cover with your favorite sauce and toppings. Put it back in the oven and bake until brown, about 15 more minutes.

We tried just putting the topping on without pre-baking, as well as pre-baking and Joe and I liked the pizza that had a pre-baked crust.  I made 2 batches of crust and it made 5 pizzas for the 5 adults that were eating.  (Taelin went with a more deconstructed pizza...meaning she just ate the toppings while they were sitting out for people to build their pizza.)  It really didn't take that long and it was WAY better than the Jiffy brand.  Another win!