Making Pizza From Scratch

Making pizza from scratch

1. Simple Dough
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Ingredients : Flour (All purpose), Water, Dry active Yeast, Salt, Olive

oil.

Introducing the baker's percentage:
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The bakers percentage describes the mass quantity of your ingredients

in relation to the mass of flour you are using to make your dough.

Example : Make pizza from a 500g package of flour.
500g flour -> 100 %
Amount of water -> 55-60% (good for starting out when making pizza)
So:
500g * 0,6 = 300g water is required.

Flour and Water make up for the bulk of mass when you are mixing your

dough, so for simplicity's reason we will disregard the other

ingredients quantities and go by feel.

Procedure:
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In a large plastic bowl, mix Flour with 1 Pck. of Dry Active Yeast, 1

Tablespoon of Salt. Lightly dry-mix the ingredients and then start

adding your calculated amount of Water (300 g). If you see your dough

will be coming out too dry or wet, you can compensate for that.

Knead the mixture for ~ 5 minutes. Then, add a small quantity of Olive

oil (1 Tablespoon). This simplifies the kneading process and gives a

nice texture. Knead another ~ 5 minutes.

Cover bowl and put it into the refrigerator for at least 8 hrs,

preferrably 48 hours. This is the most important part for great dough

(apart from correct ingredient rations, IMHO). Plan ahead and let it

sit for 24 hrs+ , it will be worth it ! Longer times improve

Elasticity, Texture and most important Taste of your Crust.

2. Simple Sauce:
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Ingredients:
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1 Can Whole Tomatoes, Salt, Olive Oil, Seasonings (Pepper, Crushed

Chilies, Thyme ...)

Procedure:
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Simply take out the Tomatoes and crush them by hand or use a "Magic

Wand" type of Mixer. I like preparing the Sauce along with the dough

and chill it in the refrigerator for the same amount of times, so it

develops a more troughout and rounded flavour.

3. Baking the Pizza
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Preheat your Oven (As hot as possible). If you have a Stone, of course

use that :)

Take your bowl of dough and your sauce out of the refrigerator and let

it come to room temperature.

Doughballing:
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Portion your dough as desired. A batch made out of 500g flour will make

me 3 small-medium Sized pizzas (personal taste). Lightly knead the

portioned dough and form it into a ball with a smooth surface (look

this up on Youtube "pizza dough balling", it is quiet hard to describe

in words).
Liberally cover Doughballs with flour and let them rest for another 15

-30 minutes at room temp.

When your Oven is preheated, Spread out the pizza dough, sauce it, etc.

and put it in the Oven !


Last words
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Making everything from scratch is a learning process. It took me a few

tries to get it right, but if you use a consistant approach you will

get your base procedure down really fast and learn the finer points as

you go. Experimenting is fun !