I finally found a great pizza dough recipe! After years of being unsatisfied either buying Boboli or Pastorelli packaged crusts (okay, not great. and fairly expensive), or the pop-out-of-a-can stuff (a bit less than okay), I decided to keep my eyes open for a real recipe. Well, I just happened upon one without really looking for it, and it turned out great on the first try,
Here’s Deb Perelman’s recipe, and below is my condensed, adjusted rebroadcast of it.
Ingredients:
380 grams all-purpose flour
rounded 1/4 teaspoon active dry yeast
1-1/2 teaspoons salt
1-1/4 cups (preferably Aquasana-filtered) water at room temperature
sprinkles of cornmeal
The Process:
Mix the flour, yeast, salt, and water together. Let it sit at room temperature for 12 hours.
Start heating oven to 500°, with the pizza stone in the oven so it gets hot. Yes, 500°. Cut up and otherwise get your toppings ready.
Scrape dough out of bowl onto floured counter. Flour the top of the dough, and divide dough in half. For each piece, grab with floured hands and let the loose, soft dough stretch and fall away from your hands a few times before landing the dough on your surface. Roll flat and pat into a circle, flouring your fingers again each time it sticks a little. You should (barely) be able to pick it up and flip it over.
Take the pizza stone out of the oven. Sprinkle cornmeal on the stone. Flip the crust onto the stone; it will be out of shape, so you’ll need to reshape it. If you work fast, you can do it before anything bad happens, like the dough getting too hot and starting to tear. Once your crust is shaped nicely, top it with your sauce and other toppings.
Bake at 500° for about 10 minutes – but check it after 8 minutes just to make sure so it won’t get too done.
Variations
Deb’s recipe says her flour is 125 grams per cup. The flour that I used the first time weighed in at almost 160 grams per cup. So instead of her 3 cups I used a little less than 2-1/2 cups. I figure 380 grams, regardless of volume, is a good standard.
If you want the dough to rise for 12 hours (do it in the morning for dinner that night), use a rounded 1/4 teaspoon yeast. If you want it in 6 hours (say, start at 1:00 pm for a 7:30 pm dinner), use twice that amount of yeast (rounded 1/2 teaspoon). If you want it to rise for 24 hours (do it the night before), use half as much yeast (considerably less than 1/4 teaspoon).
This recipe makes two crusts. If you want to make enough dough for only one, then, duh, half all the ingredients.