Homemade Pizza Dough

Friday night is homemade pizza night at my house!  When I get home from work on Fridays, I head straight into the kitchen to make the pizza dough to allow time for it to rise.  Making your own pizza is so much fun and you can add any type of toppings you like.  We usually make a 'kitchen sink' pizza.  We take all of the vegetables that we didn't use up through the week and use those as toppings for our pizza.  The picture above has red peppers, but we love to add spinach, asparagus, herbs, tomatoes, broccoli, anything you can think of! Even if we have leftover meats like chicken, turkey, sausage, cold cuts, etc, they go on there too! It is so much fun to experiment with all of the endless options you can create.  Plus, you aren't wasting any of the produce you bought during the week. 

Making your own dough is very simple and just takes a few steps that are fast.  To this dough recipe I like to add spices to give the pizza an added layer of flavor.  You can add garlic powder, Italian seasoning, basil, oregano or any other spices you enjoy. 

Pizza Dough Recipe

Makes 2

3 1/2 - 4 cups flour

1 teaspoon sugar

1 envelope instant dry yeast

2 teaspoon kosher salt

1 1/2 cups warm water

2 tablespoons olive oil

You can make the dough in either a food processor or a stand up mixer fixed with a dough hook.  Mix the flour, sugar, salt and yeast together.  If you wish to add some additional spices to the dough, as I mentioned above, you would do that at this time.  While mixing/processing stream in warm water and olive oil until dough forms a ball.  If the dough is sticky add a tablespoon of flour at a time until a solid ball is formed.

Knead the dough until smooth on a floured surface.  Grease a large bowl with 2 teaspoons of olive oil and place the ball of dough in the bowl.  Cover the bowl and allow to rise for 1 hour.  Once the dough has risen, place the ball of dough on a floured surface and divide into 2 pieces.  Cover with a towl and allow to rest for another 10 minutes.  Then roll out your dough for your pizza and have fun with your toppings! 

What are your favorite toppings??

Tips:

     1)  When making this dough I like to use half whole wheat flour and half white flour.  This adds a lot of flavor to the dough.

     2)  Don't forget to add some additional spices to do the dough if you would like.  I usually don't measure them out, I just sprinkle them in and look for an even distribution through the dough.  If you want a bit more then knead some more in.