The Home-Made Alternative Series: Pizza Dough

In the midst of all my soap boxing (can I make that a verb?), I took a second to catch my breath from my usual rants of "Don't eat that type of chicken," "You better not be buying things out of boxes," and "We'll all end up as balding drug addicts looking for smack on the streets if you so much as consider putting that in your mouth."

All convincing arguments to live your life right, I feel.

While the facts and figures are helpful and we'll keep posting them, I also am going to implement a weekly feature on the blog called "The Home-Made Alternative Series." I am a marketing guru, am I not?

This series will highlight the make-at-home solution to popular staples (be these take-out foods, packaged goods, household items, grocery staples, etc.). Some are no-brainers and some, I admit, will take a touch of work and planning. But, I promise, all will be worth your time.

First item on my list: pizza dough.

This recipe is so super simple, it's embarrassing any of us go out for pizza. Except for the whole needing to let it rise for 1.5 hours and it turns out the pizza joint on the corner makes a pretty delectable pesto pizza and oh! there's Osteria 832 which has the jalapeno pesto, chorizo pizza, oh my. And don't get me started on my hometown NYC pizzas...

See the point is, I get it. There is delicious take-out pizza. And yes, Michael and I still eat it. This recipe isn't intended to replace the 'I know I would die a miserable, lonely death if I couldn't have my [insert favorite pie here] again' pizza.

BUT. What Michael and I don't eat anymore is the crap pizza. You know the ones we're talking about. We're all guilty of eating them at one time (or many in college). And frankly. Ew. You even know it's not that good when you're eating it. Oh sure, the first bite is full of oily, cheesy goodness, but it goes downhill from there. And in the end, it wasn't really worth it.

This pizza recipe will have people uncomfortably eyeing one another to see who they have to kill first to get the last piece for themselves. I know. It happened in my kitchen one night when I made the pizza as an appetizer to share over drinks.

First up: the dough.

In a bowl, mix:
1.5 cups flour
1 tsp. salt (kosher)
3/4 tsp. active, dry yeast

Then add:
1/2 cup pretty warm water
1 Tbsp. olive oil

Shape the mixture into a ball (or as close as you can get). I find in my kitchen I need to add 2 additional tablespoons of water to the mixture to help it bind, but with the humid summer coming on, I doubt that will be the case for much longer. I recommend starting with the recipe above and adding water (or flour if it's too wet) in increments until it looks like this:

Next up, add a little extra olive oil in the bowl, roll the dough around to gloss it up a bit, cover the bowl with plastic wrap and stick it in a warm place for an hour. I have under the counter lights that I stick it under.



You can also heat up some water and stick it with your dough in the microwave. The key is, the yeast wants warm weather so it can do it's thing. Warm is key. Your dough won't rise if it's just sitting on the counter top because yeast is a living thing that needs the warmth to become undormant (new word, jot it down for future use).

After an hour, your dough will look like this lovely thing:


Throw it on your counter top and knead it lightly to get the air out of it. Make it look like a ball again and then back into the bowl, cover with plastic and back to the warm for another 20-30 minutes.

That's all the hard work. Which is totally not hard and you should be embarrassed to order pizza on a Saturday night again.

But pizza does not exist on dough alone. True, you can pick and choose any and all toppings you want. I encourage you to play. Stick your pizza in a 500-degree oven for 12-15 minutes (just pull it out when you're contemplating climbing in the oven and eating it in there; cheesy goodness is a good indicator).

However, I consider it my civic duty to tell you about a particular little beauty we stumbled upon: onions and fennel caramelized in butter with salt and thyme; some chicken-apple sausage; fontina cheese; some Parmesan cheese shavings and then some impossibly thin-sliced apples on top when it's done cooking. Divine. Michael, who wouldn't eat the majority of those ingredients on their own, devoured this pie. Just him. Pay no attention to the 4 slices I had.

Naturally, when I wrote this post, I didn't have any of these ingredients on hand. Wait, there I go lying again. I have a lone chicken sausage which has been in my refrigerator long enough to grow legs and a beak. Since we won't be cooking with that, you get a photo of another impossibly delicious pie.



This one making me ache for summer and freshly picked tomatoes:

1. In a 400-degree oven, roast cherry or grape tomatoes for 30-35 minutes.
2. Raise oven temperature to 500 for the pizza.
3. Assemble tomatoes, fresh mozzarella and basil on the pizza dough.
4. Bake in a 500-degree oven for 12-15 minutes.
5. Remove from oven and grate fresh Parmesan cheese on top.
6. Add red chile flakes.
7. Tell husband pizza is ready only after you've eaten three slices.