• 100% All-purpose Flour
• White Whole Wheat Flour
• Spelt Flour
• Baking

Simplified instructions for making pizza

#food - #pizza - #home - #recipe - #blog_jr

These recipes make the "Margherita" style pizza. Each dough recipe makes four pizzas that are at least 10 to 12 inches in diameter. If using a rectangle baking stone instead of the more square-ish pizza stone, the pizza dough will be stretched into an oval shape.

A baking stone is typically 12 in by 14 in and a half-inch thick. A quality pizza stone is 16 in by 18 in and 3/4 inch thick.

It's best to stretch the dough by hand when making a pizza. A rolling pin "blisters" the dough, causing the dough not to bubble up as much when baking. A rolling pin can make the final crust tougher. When stretching by hand, the dough should be thicker along the edges.

Ingredients are weighed with a digital scale.

100% All-purpose Flour

This dough will be very easy to stretch by hand, and the thickness of the dough in the middle of the pizza can be made as thin as paper or a credit card.

Ingredients:

• all-purpose flour : 550 grams
• water : 360 grams
• fine-grain sea salt : 11 grams
• dry active instant yeast : 4 grams

I use King Arthur all-purpose flour. Bread flour is recommended often, but I've not tried it.

White Whole Wheat Flour

If wanting a little more flavor in the crust, incorporate some whole grain flour. Too much whole grain flour, however, will make the dough difficult to stretch when shaping the pizzas.

Since whole grain flour has less gluten and less stretching ability, this recipe uses more total flour, so that the same size pizza can be made. The crust will be a little thicker and chewier, but the flavor is much better. This dough can still be stretched by hand.

Whole wheat is more absorbent, so a greater percentage of water is used in this recipe.

Ingredients:

• all-purpose flour : 500 grams
• white whole wheat flour : 150 grams
• water : 455 grams
• fine-grain sea salt : 13 grams
• dry active instant yeast : 5 grams

Most of the time, whole wheat flour is made from red wheat. But white whole flour is made from a type of wheat that lacks the red pigment, which gives red whole wheat its grainy, "healthy" taste. Some people dislike the grainy taste of red whole wheat.

White whole wheat less known. Its taste is much milder than red whole wheat. But white whole wheat contains the same nutritional value as red whole wheat. Because of its milder flavor, white whole wheat is a good way to sneak whole grain healthiness into baking foods that use flour.

I use King Arthur white whole wheat flour.

I have not tried the regular red whole wheat flour in a pizza recipe. Usually, the word "red" is not included on a package of flour. The package may only say "Whole Wheat."

But a white whole wheat flour package will be clearly marked.

Spelt Flour

We bought spelt "berries" at the Phoenix Earth Food Co-op, and we milled our own spelt flour at home, using a Vitamix. It took about 40 seconds to ground the spelt berries into a fine-grain flour.

Spelt is a whole grain. It contains less gluten than whole wheat, so this recipe contains more ingredients, but it still makes four pizzas.

Ingredients:

• spelt flour : 180 g
• all-purpose flour : 540 g
• water : 500 g
• fine-grain salt : 14 g
• dry active instant yeast : 7 g

Spelt flour seems less absorbent than whole wheat, so the dough will be a bit stickier or wetter than the other two recipes. One option I plan to try in the future is using less water, like 480 grams instead of 500 grams. Compared to whole wheat, I have less experience baking with spelt.

Spelt has a mild, sweet, nutty flavor. I like the spelt flavor better a little better than the white whole wheat in pizza dough, but both whole grains provide fine flavor to the crust.

Spelt will also make a crust that is a little thicker and chewier than a dough recipe that contains 100 percent all-purpose flour. The dough with spelt is still easy to stretch by hand.

If unable to mill flour at home, the co-op sells spelt flour, which I have used in the past for bread recipes.

Making the Dough

1. Mix dry ingredients together in a bowl.
2. Add water to dry ingredients.
3. Mix with hand whisk for 1 to 2 minutes.
4. Knead dough in bowl for 1 minute to make sure water and flour are incorporated into a sticky, shaggy blob.
5. Dump dough on counter and cover with bowl for 15 minutes. This rest period is known as autolyse. Flour absorbs water and gluten strands develop. Experiment with 20 to 30 minute autolyse times.
6. Knead dough for 5 minutes on counter.
7. Place dough in a large Pyrex bowl or something similar and cover with plastic.
8. Let dough ferment at room temp for 2 hours. (maybe longer in the winter with a cold house). The fermented dough should at least double in size. The time also depends upon whether you use refrigerator-temped water or room-temped water. I normally use the water from the filtered pitcher in our frig.
9. After fermenting, punch down dough in bowl and dump dough onto counter.
10. Shape into one mass and divide it equally by size or weight into 4 pieces.
11. Gently shape each piece of dough into a ball. Then stretch the top of the ball down and around the rest of the ball, until the outer layer wraps around the other side. Pinch the two ends together to make a smooth ball with a tight outer "skin."
12. Set dough balls seam-side down, lightly flour, and cover with plastic.
13. Let dough balls proof at room temp for 1 to 1.5 hours. The dough balls will dramatically increase in size while proofing.
14. If not baking soon after proofing, then wrap dough balls in plastic and place in a plastic bag or container and set in the refrigerator. It's better to allow the dough to rest in the frig for at least 24 hours. The dough seems to work better after it has "aged" for a day or two in the frig. When time to use, remove from frig and allow dough to warm at room temp for at least hour. From the above website: "Try making your pizza balls the day before you need them. Overnight refrigeration helps the dough develop more flavor, and a fully developed dough browns better in your oven."

Baking

1. Place stone on rack in oven. I use the lowest or second lowest rack level.
2. Preheat oven to at least 500 degrees with stone in oven for at least 30 minutes.
3. Flatten one proofed dough ball into a saucer plate-sized disk.
4. Drape dough onto the backs of the knuckles of both hands.
5. Stretch and work the dough with the backs of the knuckles.
6. You can also grab the dough along the edge and let gravity stretch it. Keep working around the dough to form the desired shape and to keep it relatively the same thickness (or thinness for this pizza.) The dough will get so thin in some areas that you can see light through it. If a hole forms, pinch dough together and let it rest a bit on the counter and then resume shaping.
7. I scatter semolina flour onto a wooden peel. This allows the dough to slide easily from the peel to the stone.
8. You can stretch the dough some more on the wooden peel. The dough will spring back some. I try to leave dough a little thicker around the edge.
9. Add thin layer of sauce.
10. Add chunks of fresh mozzarella cheese.
11. Drizzle or pour on some excellent olive oil.
12. Sprinkle on some coarse grey sea salt.
13. Check to make sure the pizza still slides easily on the wooden peel. If not, gently lift dough and add more semolina. It's frustrating when the dough sticks to the peel.
14. Slide dough onto stone. This is tricky to do with the smaller baking stone, since sometimes my dough will be as long or even longer than the stone. I need to upgrade to the larger pizza stone.
15. Bake at 500-plus degrees for 8 minutes or when you think it's done.
16. The edge will bubble up some and some charring will occur, which is nice.
17. When done baking, place on a cooling rack, and immediately add the fresh basil leaves. Don't places basil leaves onto pizza prior to baking, since the high heat will shrivel the leaves to almost nothing. The pizza surface is still plenty hot enough after baking that the fresh basil leaves will "cook" a little.
18. After five or so minutes of cooling, cut and enjoy. The crust will be credit card thin in some areas. The baked crust will be a bit firmer near the outside edge and a little floppy toward the center.