Making a pizza at home can be a bit difficult if it’s your first time, but it’s far from the Da Vinci Code. With a bit of help, you can perfect your homemade pizza dough.
While we’re positive you’ll have a great time making and eating your homemade pizza, you always have the option to order from Tuscan Pizza should things become a headache. We’ll come to your rescue with a perfectly crisp, warm, and cheesy pie.
Pizza Dough Ingredients
It might be a little daunting at first, but believe it or not, there isn’t much that goes into making pizza dough. All you need is flour, water, yeast, and salt. Seriously, that’s it.
To get the perfect dough, you need high-quality ingredients. You don’t have to import your flour straight from Italy, but you do have to make sure you’re using the correct ingredients:
- Filtered water
- Self-rising yeast
- Highly refined flour
- Oil (some people use this, some people don’t)
Pizza Dough Technique
Even though you only need four ingredients for amazing homemade pizza dough, you have to perfect the technique. Proper kneading ability is perhaps just as important, if not more important, as the ingredients you use.
Before you begin, there’s one thing you really need to know: dough has to rest. The first time it rests for 5-8 hours. The second time, you leave it covered overnight in the fridge. The third and final rest, you take it out and let it warm up to room temperature for 20 minutes.
Then comes the actual kneading and shaping of the pizza dough. Here, the key is to do it with your hands.
Coat the table and your hands with flour. This will help with the stickiness. With that being said, don’t add too much because the dough will absorb the flour and change the recipe.
Start by shaping the dough ball into a pie, working from the center out to the borders. Then, bring the pizza dough up and start stretching it from the center out, until you get a perfectly round pizza base. You’ll likely have to repeat this process a couple of times.
Pizza Dough Baking
Finally, once your pizza dough is shaped and ready to go, it is time for the baking. Do this step wrong, and all your hard work will go to waste. No pressure.
Chances are that you don’t have a pizza oven at home. So there’s also a strong chance that your home oven doesn’t reach 850 F, but there’s still hope.
Set up your oven to the max, usually 550 or 600 degrees. Make sure your oven reaches this temperature before you place your pizza inside. If you have one, use a pizza stone because it will help retain the heat and start cooking your pizza immediately.
It’s a challenge, there’s no denying it, but if you want to perfect homemade pizza dough these steps are required. If you think it’s too much work, and we’d agree with you, just give us a call and order your favorite pie from Tuscan Pizza. We’ll get it to you well before you even get out the ingredients to make your own dough.
