Lola’s Kitchen: Pizza Dough Recipe

Lola’s Kitchen is a feature on Lola’s Reviews where I talk about all things related to food, cooking and baking. These posts can be recipe posts, tens list posts about food or recipes or more discussion type posts about food. I love cooking and spend some time in the kitchen almost every day, so I wanted to give it a place on my blog as well. The banner for this feature is designed by Michelle from Limabean Designs.

I love pizza, but often am not fully happy with store bought ones and only rarely go out to restaurants to make them. For a while I had found some good homemade solutions, which included store bought dough with my own sauce or even french bread pizza. I dislike making bread and didn’t want to bother with making my own dough. Until one day we stumbled upon this recipe. The way Babish made his pizza dough seemed deceptively simple. I decided to give it a try the next time I was making red tomato pasta sauce. One the day I made the sauce I prepared the dough and then let it rise 24 hours till the next day. This dough turned out amazing. It’s so fluffy and tasteful and this makes some of the best pizza I’ve eaten. I definitely would recommend this pizza dough. It’s relatively simple to make and the long rise time means you can easily prepare it a day in advance, which I find easier to remember than starting X hours before dinner.

This recipe is based on Babish’s Pizza recipe.

Ingredients

• Flour – 190 gram/ 1 1/2 cup
• Water – 135 ml/ 1/2 cup
• Yeast – 1/2 teaspoon dry yeast
• Salt – 3 gram/ 1/2 teaspoon
• Sugar – a pinch

This makes enough dough to 2 pizzas. You also need your preferred sauce or toppings to cover it with.

Method

1. The day before you want to make pizza for dinner start making the dough. Put the water in a bowl and warm it in the microwave for about half a minute, till the water is just a bit too hot to touch, but don’t let it boil. Now mix a pinch of sugar in it and then add the yeast. Set aside for 5 minute to poof the yeast.
2. In the meantime grab a larger bowl and add the flour and salt in there and mix. wait till the 5 minutes have passed and then add the water and yeast mixture to the dough. Mix it till it just barely comes together. It’s totally fine if it’s lumpy and feel too wet, this will get fixed later, it will look weird at this stage. Cover the bowl with a wet tea towel and set on a spot where it won’t get too cold. I usually leave it in the kitchen. Now let it rise for about 24 hours. I think anywhere from18 hours or so will do, but I always leave it to sit there for almost a full day.
3. Make sure to prepare your sauce ahead as well. You can serve it with any sauce you like. I like using my red tomato pasta sauce for this.
4. The next day it’s time to make pizza! Preheat your oven to 250 degrees Celsius/ 482 degrees Fahrenheit. Then cover your work surface with a layer of flour. Divide the dough into 2 halves for 2 bigger pizzas or into 4 smaller pieces for 4 smaller pizza’s. Then pick up one of the pieces and roll it around a bit on the flour covered work surface, until the outside is less sticky. Then try and shape it with your fingers into a round shape, I like to push it it outward a bit and hold it in my hands and stretch the dough a bit until I’ve achieved my preferred shape and thickness. I like my pizza’s a bit on the thicker side, but you can make them as thin as you like. Then place them on a parchment paper covered baking sheet. Repeat until you’ve turned all the pieces into pizza shapes.
5. Now cover the pizza with your preferred sauce. Try and keep the edges of the pizza free of sauce. Then add some cheese on top (optional). And bake for about 15 minutes.
6. After the 15 minutes remove the pizzas form the oven. Let it cool down for a few minutes and then you can eat it.

What’s your favorite pizza topping?