I’ve been promising the boys a Friday night of homemade pizzas all summer, but something always seemed to come up. Finally, this past Friday was clear (and it ended up being a bonus that Bill was also out of town for work — more on that later).
I stuck with the recipe from 100daysofrealfood.com (the original is here) that I used back on Day 3 of Real Food for 5. Here’s my slightly modified version:
- 1 c warm water
- 2 t active dry yeast
- 2 t kosher salt
- 2 T olive oil
- 3 c whole wheat flour (I used King Arthur organic white whole-wheat flour)
- your choice of pizza topping
INSTRUCTIONS
- Drop the yeast into the warm water and let it go to work for a few minutes. It should foam up a little bit. Stir the salt and olive oil into the yeast mixture.
- Pour the flour and yeast mixture into a food processor (or you could knead it by hand or use a mixer with a dough attachment)
- Process until you have a ball chasing itself around the food processor — if the dough is too dry add a little warm water, if it is too wet add a little flour
- Remove the ball from the food processor and knead into a smooth ball. Pour a very little olive oil into a large bowl. Roll the ball around in the oil, then cover the bowl with plastic wrap.
- Preheat the oven to 500 degrees.
- Let dough rise — 20 mins at least. (100days says you can let it rise in the fridge, but I didn’t have any luck with that — I set the bowl in a warmish place — on top of my stove with the stove light shining on it)
- Shape the dough (100days says to use a rolling pin to do this, but I found it too sticky and prefer to just use flour coated hands and shape it into a flat sort of roundish shape with an pinched up crust. One dough ball makes 4 or 5 “personal” pizzas.)
- Top the crust and bake for 8-10 minutes (100days bakes it on an oil coated cookie sheet, but I have a pizza stone that just lives in my oven, so I used that instead — as long as I coat it with a pinch of corn meal or whole wheat flour, it works great)
We had a blast topping our pizzas. The boys stuck with traditional “gravy”, mushrooms, and cheese. I used pesto (hey! visit realfoodfor5 on Facebook and “like” it, if you haven’t already), veggies, and cheese.
And why was it a good thing that Bill was out of town? Because running the oven at 500 degrees on a mid-August evening …. Not cool. I’ll be saving future pizza practicing for Fall.
Unless …. I attempt that pizza grilling technique I keep reading about…? Hmmmm. I’ll keep you posted.
