Post two in our Big Cheeseburger Pizza trilogy – and maybe the most important part – the dough. This particular pizza calls for starting with a store-bought baked crust (think Boboli) – so I thought I’d take a shot at making my own.
Friends have given us recipes which work really well for them – we’ve tasted the results – but always leave us with tasty, but kind of funky, crusts when we’ve tried them; so I was kind of interested to come across this recipe in the Cuisinart recipe book just a bit after the Challah recipe that I like so much.
Success!
It would’ve been more better if I wasn’t out of corn meal, but this is one nice little hunk o’ dough! The food processor does all the heavy lifting with this recipe, and before you start thinking it’ll be a pain to drag out an appliance just to make some pizza dough; I made this disk o’ bready goodness AND a dozen Challah rolls in one afternoon before breaking down and cleaning everything up; so you could just as easily just make two (or more) batches of this dough and stash it in your freezer.
INGREDIENTS
•1 pkg (2-1/4 tsp) active dry yeast
•1 tsp granulated sugar
•2/3 cup warm water (105º to 115°)
•1-2/3 cup flour
•3/4 tsp salt – don’t get fancy, the recipe calls for table salt
•3/4 tsp extra virgin olive oil
With the metal blade in your processor work bowl, add flour and salt and pulse to combine.
Dissolve the yeast and sugar in warm water in a two cup measure and let stand until foamy, about five minutes.
With the processor running, pour the yeast mixture through the feed tube as fast as the flour can absorb it. Process until dough cleans sides of work bowl and forms a ball, then process for 30 seconds to knead dough. The dough may be slightly sticky.
Coat dough evenly with olive oil, scoop out of the processor bowl (be careful of that blade!), and transfer to a plastic food storage bag and seal the top. Let rise in a warm place for about 45 minutes.
Place dough on a lightly floured surface and punch down.
Roll into desired crust sizes and place on baking pans lightly sprayed with vegetable oil cooking spray – I used our pizza stone – and bake according to whichever pizza recipe you’re using. For a prebaked crust, 425º for about ten minutes on the stone in the upper part of the oven worked a treat.
Tomorrow: we’re lovin’ the ‘za!
Ermmm, I hope…