Preheat your oven to 550 degrees. The oven rack should be at the bottom of the oven.
Ingredients:
- ½ tsp. dry active yeast
- 1 tsp. sugar
- 3 tsp. salt
- 2 cups water, cool but not cold
- 6 ¼ cups all-purpose flour
Make it:
- Put yeast, sugar, salt and water in a large bowl and mix for 5 minutes with a wooden spoon. Make sure the yeast is completely dissolved. Add flour using the “scoop and swish” method. Mix for 8-10 minutes, using your hands to knead it when it gets too hard to stir, and adding more flour, 1 Tbsp. at a time, if the dough feels too sticky.
- Cover the bowl with a clean towel and let dough rest for 10 minutes.
- While it rests, prepare a shallow plastic tub by rubbing or spraying it with a little oil on all sides. (Or do this on a cookie sheet.)
- Put the dough on a work surface and stretch it into a log about as thick as your fist.
- Cut the dough into 6 equal pieces. Cover the pieces with plastic wrap as you work with each one separately.
- Roll each one (as learned in GPS), and place them in the plastic tub or on the prepared cookie sheet.
- If you want to freeze some of them, see notes below:
Stretch it, Top it:
- Stretch the dough (as learned in class) with your fingers, gently pulling it to fit the pan. The sides of the dough should be a little thicker than the rest. Bring the edges of the dough up the side of the pizza pan (or cookie sheet).
- Add tomato sauce (just a light covering), cheese (also lightly) and your pizza toppings.
- Cook right away in the oven for 10-20 minutes (depending on the pan you use and the thickness of your dough).
- Turn the pan in the oven after the first 7 minutes, to make sure the pizza cooks evenly.
- Slide the pizza onto a cutting board, cut and enjoy!
Notes: To Freeze: the dough must first rest in the refrigerator for 24 hours.
- Rub each dough ball with a little more oil.
- Gently put each dough ball into their own zip lock sandwich bag
- Put them in the freezer in a way that they will freeze without getting squashed
- When they are frozen (the next day), put them all together in a larger, 1 gallon, zip lock bag and mark the bag with the date