Top 3 Secrets To Delicious & EASY Homemade Pizza Dough!

ALMOST AS FAST as just picking up a ball of dough at the market or the local pizza parlor!

But sometimes… you just WANT to make the dough YOURSELF! I fall under the spell of this impulse quite often. Of course… maybe you want the benefit of making your own pizza dough WITHOUT quite ALL of the work! Some of the work, yes. But not all of it. If so, this post is for you!

Top Secret #1

Get a scale and measure your ingredients by weight! Sounds TOO easy, huh? That’s what I thought when this secret was revealed to me the first time. It also sounds almost un-American. But wait, it gets worse! Measure in GRAMS, not ounces! I have nothing against ounces.  I LOVE ounces!  It’s just really, really EASIER to use grams when measuring weight instead of ounces. Grams are smaller than ounces so you totally avoid pesky fractions!

Why measure your ingredients?

MY main reason is because it gives me a fighting chance to be ACCURATE! All you have to do it watch the little numbers change on a screen while you add your ingredients. No staring at a measuring spoon or cup wondering if the stuff in it is LEVEL or not! It’s also LOADS easier to adjust proportions when you make the recipe bigger or smaller. And…here comes the Snobby Bobby reason: When you get really, really SERIOUS about making gourmet-level dough (something I would never do, mind you, but you’re free to try) you need to know the percentages of dry ingredients vs water. Calm down, I don’t get even CLOSE to that in this post!

Having said that… let me hasten to add that while most of grill pizza making is NOT a matter of exact measurements, dough making IS. It’s chemistry, after all. And a gram of yeast give or take can mean the difference between delicious, fragrant, chewy pizza dough and something you throw away.

Get your hands on one of these scales. There are several brands and they range in price from 10 bucks to over a hundred. I got this one because it came in red.

Make sure your scale has the “TARE” feature. This allows you to set the readout to ZERO so you can measure each ingredient separately without doing the math.

In addition to the scale, you’ll need a bread machine or a mixer. You can use your hands or a mixing spoon if you haven’t quite grown out of your hippie stage yet. I prefer the dough machine because I can just throw the ingredients in the pan, set it in the machine, throw the switch, and walk away.

Here’s the recipe we’re going to use:

420 g water

25 g sugar

15 g salt

6 g yeast

700 g all-purpose flour

This recipe adds up to 1166 grams, which is about 2 1/2 pounds, enough for two 14 – 16″  pizzas.  If your bread machine will not accomodate that much dough, just cut all the amounts in HALF.  (Note: In this demonstration, I used durum flour, which has a creamy yellow tint.)

STEP 1 is to place your bread pan or mixing bowl on your scale…

…and press the “Tare” button.

STEP 2: Add water. Pour the water into the breadpan until the readout says 420 grams. Press “Tare.”

The temperature of the water depends on WHEN you’re going to use the dough. If it’s going to be refrigerated or frozen, then use cool water. If you want that dough to get a jumpstart on rising because you want to use it TODAY, then use slightly warm water, NOT HOT! No warmer than around 100 degrees or you’ll kill the yeast! (Put a few drops on your wrist. If it feels too hot on your skin, then it’s too hot for the yeast.

Step 3: Add sugar until the screen says 25 g. Press “Tare.”

Step 4: Add salt until the screen says 15 g. Press “Tare.”

Step 5: Add flour until the screen says 700 g.

Step 6: Add yeast until the screen says 6 g. Press “Tare.”

Step 7: Place the bread pan in the bread machine and set it to the “dough” function. Ignition!

At the end of the cycle, remove the dough from the machine!

Top Secret #2

Okay, now that you have your dough, what are you going to do with it?

That’s where Top Secre

t #2 comes in.  You CAN make pizza with it right away, but if you want a more flavorful pizza crust, let the dough develop flavor in your refrigerator overnight, or even longer.

How long is too long?  Overnight is VERY safe.  One day is PRETTY safe.  Two days is PROBABLY safe.  Beyond that, you’re in uncharted territory, which I promise to explore in a future post.

What do I mean by “safe?”  If the dough over-ferments, it’ll get a winey smell and an off taste.  It’s not the winey smell, itself, that’s necessarily bad.  I’ve used winey-smelling dough and made delicious pizzas.  But if the dough has a strong winey smell, it’s probably too far gone to use.

So if you’re not using the dough right away, you can slip the whole thing into a large plastic bag and pop it in the fridge.  Or you can divide it into two or three balls and give each one it’s own plastic

bag.

In my next post, you’ll discover Top Secret #3 to delicious and EASY pizza dough!