On {most} Fridays we eat pizza

Most Fridays, we eat pizza for dinner. Sometimes, it's pizza purchased at our favorite pizza place but usually, I make homemade pizza at home. Occasionally, we have plans out of the house on Friday evening but we try to avoid that. Fridays in are our favorite. Since we sometimes have plans and we sometimes eat pizza out on Friday, I don't make pizza every Friday for dinner. That would likely become tedious- I usually end up making it two or maybe three Fridays in one month. That's plenty enough to enjoy it but to not make us sick of it...

I've been using the same pizza crust recipe for years. Before I started making my own crust, I used to buy crusts already made or I'd buy the packages of pizza crust mixes where you just add water. But after a few years of buying what was essentially, way overpriced flour, I knew I wanted to try to make my own pizza crust from scratch. It turns out that it's pretty easy to make homemade crust. There are a couple of tricky parts to it but with practice and some trial and error, I've gotten my particular pizza making process down pat! 

I use yeast in the dough and have the dough rise but because the dough is not going to be made as a bread but rather a crust, it would probably be ok if the dough didn't rise. I let the dough rise for an hour so the only consideration I have when making this is time. It can't be done last minute. 

Here is the recipe that I use for the crust:

1 cup water, warm, to activate the yeast

1 Tbsp sugar

1 Tbsp active dry yeast

1 Tbsp olive oil

2 to 2 1/2 cups flour

1 tsp salt.

Instructions:

For yeast to activate, the water must be somewhere in temperature feeling between hot and cold (so lukewarm or between 105 and 110 degrees Fahrenheit). At 30 seconds on high, my microwave heats a cup of water at the correct temperature to activate the yeast.  

Add the water to a bowl along with the sugar and yeast. Check in five minutes or so to see if the yeast activated. The liquid will be foamy on top if it's activated. If the appearance hasn't changed in five minutes, then the yeast didn't activate and the dough won't rise. It's probably OK to have use unrisen dough, since again, the dough will be used as a crust and not as a baked item that is supposed to have height like bread ;). If you have qualms about using unactivated yeast, you could start over or just order a pizza from your favorite place and try again next week...

Add the the olive oil and salt and flour to the bowl and stir. The amount of flour needed to form a dough that's not sticky may vary so start by adding two cups of flour and then add incrementally. When the dough is no longer sticky, it can be kneaded. Most recipes call for bread dough to be kneaded on a clean surface. My hack is that I use the bowl in which I've already made dirty rather than make a new bowl or surface dirty. I lift the dough up and add flour to the bottom of it, knead and add more flour until the a smooth ball forms. 

Now she's ready to rise:

If the sun is shining, I place my dough bowl (covered in plastic wrap or a towel) in a spot where the sun hits it so that the warmth of the sun helps it rise. If the sun isn't shining, I use my stove top to provide some warmth to the bowl. After about an hour...

...the dough has risen and looks like this. I punch it down in the center to deflate it a little, add a little more flour and knead it again a few times and reshape it into a ball.

The hardest part for me is to stretch the dough to fit the pans. I'm sure there are videos online that show how to do this. I kind of shape the dough out in the air (sort of like what you see people in pizza places doing but not that precise) and then place the dough on my pan and start stretching it out with my hands to cover the pan. It has taken trial and error/ practice for me to get this part right! The dough from this recipe covers a cookie sheet and a small round pan for me. How thick the crust is placed on a pan will help determine how much surface area it will cover. I make my crust pretty thin. Alyssa likes to have her own pizza so I use a small round pan for her. If she's home for this process, she likes to add her own toppings when the time comes in order to make it precisely how she likes it. 

Here is where you can do one of two things: Add your sauce and toppings and bake for about eight minutes on 450 degrees or bake just the crust for five or six minutes, then place the toppings on and then bake on 450  for about eight minutes.

If you bake the crust prior to adding toppings, the crust will be crunchier so it depends on how you like your crust. It also depends on your oven. Since we got a new oven in January, I noticed that if I didn't pre bake the crust, the middle part of the pizza crust was way too soft for my liking. If I kept the pizza in the oven longer to bake the middle more, the top of the pizza would start to burn. This happened even on the "convection" mode of baking (which should not happen- maybe something is wrong with the convection?).

Prebaking the crust is necessary to get (for my preferences) the best result. But again, that's with my current oven. My old oven didn't have that same issue. So oven variances definitely make a difference. Also I feel like when baking at a high temperature like 450 degrees, it's really important to check more often to make sure that nothing is burning in the oven. I check for pizza doneness after five minutes and then keep checking every two minutes or so. I don't want to risk my pizza being burnt!

One other thing that I wanted to add pertains to yeast. Yeast is considered "alive" (it's a single celled living organism) so I thought that its expiration date may literally mean that it expires and would then not be able to be activated. That is not the case. I am currently using a jar of expired yeast and things are a risin' just fine. So don't throw out old yeast! I keep my jar in the refrigerator which is supposed to help prolong its life.