Pizza crust advice

I’ve made a whole lot of homemade pizza crusts. I’m going to share with you the best recipe I’ve ever found. Getting the amount of dough-soon-to-be-crust ratio to what you want is merely a matter of determining how much to use for a personal-sized pizza like YOU want it.

1 cup warm water
2 tsp. active dry yeast
½ tsp. sugar
3 cups all purpose or bread flour
2 TB. olive oil
1 TB. honey
1 tsp. salt

  1. Stir water, yeast and sugar into the bowl of a KitchenAid mixer till dissolved. Let stand in warm place 10 minutes until foamy.

  2. Add flour, oil, honey and salt on top of the yeast mixture. Using the dough hook, mix till ingredients come together on Setting 1, then process for 4 minutes on Setting 2. (Or you can knead by hand for 8 minutes, until dough is smooth and elastic.)

  3. Lift dough and lightly grease the bottom of the bowl, turning to coat dough. Cover with cling film and a damp towel. Let rest 30 minutes in warm place. (Mixture will almost double.)

  4. Punch down dough. Divide and shape into 4 equal balls. – or in my case, 8. I like thin crust pizza. At this point, you can freeze the dough for use on another day. (I do this by placing each dough ball into a plastic bag and giving the bag a twist before adding another ball so the balls don’t touch. You can rearrange them after they’re frozen.)

For dough you are using more immediately, place on a lightly greased plate, turning to coat. Cover tightly with plastic wrap. Refrigerate 2 hours or overnight. Remove from refrigerator 1 hour before baking.

Preheat oven to very hot (500 degrees), but first place oven rack in lowest position along with pizza stone. Prepare pizzas. Sprinkle pizza stone with polenta or corn meal. Slide pizzas onto hot stone. Bake for 15-20 minutes for thicker pizza, 10-12 minutes for thin ones.

The honey is the secret. :slight_smile:

If dividing into 4 is too much dough per pizza and dividing into 8 is too little, I’d try dividing it into 6 and see if it’s to your liking.

Hope this is of help!