Ladies and Gentlemen, this recipe is a LIFE CHANGER for me. I don’t know why, but the idea of making my own pizza dough has both interested and scared me for years. How cool would it be to MAKE my own dough?! Pizza night every week – any toppings we could imagine – budget friendly and knowing exactly what ingredients I was feeding my family.
The flip side: how in the WORLD could I possibly ever MAKE my own dough?! It sounds so difficult, daunting even. Do I need yeast? What kind of yeast? Do I need to take pizzeria style dough tossing lessons?
I am happy to report, that any fear of the unknown that I may have been feeling was completely eradicated after finding a recipe that was so easy, I could nearly follow it blindfolded (I said NEARLY).
This recipe uses a bread machine to do all that nitty gritty kneading and such. As long as your bread machine has a “dough” option (and many of them do), you’re in business. One of my very favorite parts about this dough recipe? It freezes like a champ. You can have a dough day every few months… just keep loading ingredients into that bread machine and let it do the work. Bag your dough and pop it into the freezer for days when a quick-yet-tasty dinner is a necessity (hmmm.. that’s pretty much EVERY night over here).
This recipe makes enough dough for one large pizza or two smaller pizzas.
Here’s how to make your very own pizza dough:
Ingredients:
4 C whole wheat flour
1 packet bread machine yeast (approx 2.5 tsp)
1.5 C warm water
3 TBSP olive oil
1 TBSP sugar
2 tsp salt
1/4 C grated Parmesan cheese
1/2 tsp dried minced garlic (up to 1 tsp depending on how garlic-y you like your crust)
To make:
1. While I suggest following the directions that came with your bread machine as far as what order to add your ingredients, a general rule of thumb is to add wet ingredients first. Then add the dry, with the yeast at the very top, not touching the wet ingredients.
2. I add the water, then olive oil, following by: flour, sugar, salt, Parmesan cheese, garlic. Then I poke a little indent in the top of the dry ingredients and pour the yeast into the hole.
3. Turn your bread machine on and choose the “dough” setting. Sit back and let your bread machine take over! (This process takes my machine about 1.5 hours.)
4. When your dough is finished, remove from the machine.
5. Decide if you want to keep your dough in one piece (for a larger pizza) or, if desired, break evenly into two balls for two pizzas. We have actually been able to get 2 smaller thinner crust pizzas out of 1/2 of the dough, so in other words, 1 batch of this recipe tends to yield 4 thin crust pizzas, approx 12 inches in diameter.
6. Set dough aside to let rise for 20 minutes.
7. Label a Ziploc bag for each ball of dough and spray the inside of each bag with non-stick cooking spray. Place each ball of dough in a bag and stick in the freezer.
8. You can, of course, skip the freezing part if you intend to make your pizza that night. Otherwise, pull the dough out of the freezer several hours before you intend to start cooking it to give it time to defrost.
The sky is the limit when it comes to toppings!
We bake this dough for about 20 minutes at 350 F.