Thursday, September 4, 2014

Pizza dough - for 2 personal-sized pizzas

I hadn't planned posting this as a recipe, but I needed to make a little pizza for a photo for a post I was writing about unique ways to use a cast iron frying pan.

One of my interesting options was to use the frying pan upside-down in the oven to bake the pizza. Like using a cast iron pizza stone.

So I threw together this dough, and it turned out pretty darned good, so I wanted to save the recipe - for myself. Of course, the best place to save it is on this blog.

This makes just enough for two small pizzas, each about 8 inches in diameter.

Pizza Dough

1/2 cup water, plus 2 tablespoons
1 teaspoon yeast
1 teaspoon sugar
1 cup (4 1/2 ounces) bread flour
1/2 cup (3 ounces) semolina flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon olive oil

Combine all the ingredients in the bowl of your stand mixer fitted with the dough hook. Knead until the dough is smooth and elastic.

Cover the bowl and set aside until the dough has doubled in size, about an hour.

Put a large cast iron frying pan in the oven, upside-down (you'll be cooking on the bottom of the pan). Note: You might want to measure the bottom of that pan to see how large it is, so you know how large you can roll your pizza dough. My pan was 9 inches in diameter, so I figured that an 8-inch pizza would be the maximum.

Flour your work surface and turn out the dough. Knead briefly, the divide into two pieces. Roll the first piece to the size you need it. Sprinkle a pizza peel with cornmeal and place the pizza on the peel Top it as desired - I used some basil pesto and some cheese - nothing fancy.

Use the peel to transfer the pizza to the frying pan bottom. Cook until the crust is brown and the cheese is bubbly and browned in a few spots.

Remove the pizza from the pan - the easiest thing to do was grab it with tongs and slide it onto the peel.

Slice and serve.

Make the second pizza the same way.
Yum