The best pizza dough
Monday, March 1, 2010 at 07:09PM When I was a child, there was one thing that my mother made with regularity that we always looked forward to, and that was pizza.
Piled high with toppings, often sectioned into segments of what each of us liked (no olives on my part please!) and a thick pillowy dough that had us eating every last piece of the crust.
Yep, mom made great pizza, and we were spoiled. There was something about my mom's pizza that brought us all to the table, and not once did we ever complain that we didn't get "take-out" like all the other kids.
One time, one of my cousins left his slice of pizza unattended while he washed his hands, and when he returned found the dog had helped himself to the slice. My cousin tried to take the piece of pizza back, before he was reassured that we would gladly give him a new slice, if he surrendered his piece to the dog. It really was that good.
Now that I have my own family, pizza isn't as regular as it was at Mom's house, but it's still something the whole family loves.
I've tinkered with a dough recipe for a while, wanting to make it more "multi-grain" and came up with what I think is a pretty good balance. The trick to good dough is repetition. Eventually, you find the right texture and consistency that you like.
Here's my multi-grain pizza dough recipe:
1 1/3 cups warm water
2 1/4 tsp active dry yeast
1 tsp honey
Dissolve yeast and honey in warm water. Let sit until yeast starts to foam.
Meanwhile mix
1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1 cup whole wheat flour
1/2 cup cornmeal
1/2 cup ground flax seeds
1 tsp salt
Add yeast and water mixture to dry ingredients and knead well (12 to 15 minutes).
Take 1 to 2 tbsp of olive oil and grease a large stainless steel bowl. Place dough, covered with plastic wrap in a warm place to rise for 1 1/2 to two hours.
Then proceed to roll out dough on some additional cornmeal.
Once it's rolled out, you can top it with whatever you like.
You could add some of these:
One of my favourite combos is a combination of chipotle salsa and olive oil spread thinly over the crust topped with mozzarella, chicken, red peppers, fried onions and sauteed mushrooms.
That's the beauty of pizza though. No matter what your family likes, you can find a combination that will please everyone. If not, just do like my mom did and divide it up into sections! Enjoy.
Reader Comments (9)
I made this dough in the bread maker and it turned out great!
Great to hear Angie :) Hope the little ones liked it too!
Hey, just browsing your recipes after looking at the beet cake post and watching the video. Yeah, homemade pizza is infinitely better than takeout/delivery. You can make the crust the way you want it (I like it very thin with whole wheat flour) and you can pile it high with all the toppings you want (we like lots of different veggies topped with thin slices of pepperoni). I only have one kid, who eats almost everything, so I just do the whole thing with one combination of toppings. One of the things I hate about delivery pizza is that if ask for, say, pepperoni, green pepper and mushrooms, you'll get a decent amount of pepperoni sometimes but so few mushrooms that you can hardly see them and it's like two tiny scraps of green pepper per slice, but then you're paying for 3 toppings!
My pizza dough recipe is just a basic flour dough (whole wheat plus some white) without the other grains, and I just use brown sugar, though I think honey could be nice. Your photo looks good. I think I'm going to make some pizza tonight.
Thanks Lucy,
I like the addition of cornmeal as it gives the crust a crispy texture that you really can't get any other way. And the flax, well, it's a flavour thing. I quite enjoy it.
Yeah, I know some pizza restaurants put cornmeal on their dough. I haven't tried that before. Will have to try it some time - next time I remember to buy cornmeal.
ooooo, thank you for posting this recipe. I just googled "multi grain pizza dough" and your website came up. i was looking for a homemade whole grain pizza dough recipe just like this! i'm so glad you have flaxseed in the recipe. Tomorrow (is Friday) and our pizza night, so i plan on making this then! i'll let you know how it turns out! blessings, sara
Im making this in my bread maker and I am doing a double recipe. Should I double the yeast as well?????
Jade,
Absolutely!
Hey, stumbled on this recipe and it tastes great. Second time around I had to add a bit more water and instead of using the cornmeal in the dough I dusted my pizza stone with it instead (if you have a pizza stone, this gives is a great crunch.)
Anywho, keep up the great work and your recipes have all worked out great thus far.
Thanks.