I'm not sure what motivated me to make Pizza dough (p. 607) other than I wanted to make a bread recipe and pizza sounded good. I usually just buy my pizza dough at Whole Foods because I hated baking at high altitude. And Whole Foods has good pizza dough!
(I know these posts are super late so I'm not going to backdate them. Look forward to a lot of posts all at once)
I mixed water and yeast:
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| Yeasty! |
I added flour, olive oil, and salt. I omitted the sugar because I don't like my pizza dough sweet (does anyone?):
I mixed it by hand for a minute:
And started kneading. TJOC always recommends kneading for what I think is way too long. I kneaded until it looked good:
At this point I separated the dough into three sections because I was only going to make pizza with part of it, I was going to make Focaccia (p. 607). I covered all the dough so that it could rise.
It went from this:
To this:
I punched it down, rolled it into a ball, and let it rise for another 10 minutes. I flattened the ball, stretched it, brushed it with olive oil, and made a pizza! I never use pizza stones but some people swear by them. I would love to know your experiences in the comments....
It was really good although no better than the pizza dough from Whole Foods! So I don't know if I would bother with it in the future. You all know my theory--if it's not better or cheaper homemade than I might as well just buy it. Your time is worth something, right?
I like focaccia but almost never buy it. I took the pizza dough, rolled it out, and put it in a baking dish.
Well, actually two dishes. They were let raise in the pans.
I topped mine with garlic, olives, and spices!
I topped moms with mushrooms, garlic, and tomatoes:
I wish you could have smelled how terrific these were when they were cooked:
Focaccia is totally worth making. Honestly, it was delicious and easy. And I'm sure you could make it with store-bought pizza dough if you didn't want to make it from true scratch. I even think mom froze some of it and ate it later and that totally worked. Has anyone else made focaccia? How did it turn out?
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I swear by my pizza stone and usually make dough from scratch. That is mostly because we can't be bothered to go to the grocery store to buy crust. When I lived in Ottawa, there was a good, cheap, frozen one my housemates would get, then leave on the heat vent to thaw.
ReplyDeleteI've made focaccia before, but not with all of your awesome toppings. I bet yours was better than the ones I've made.
I made this focaccia once and it turned out horrible but it was due to me not knowing how to work with yeast. Now that I understand it and after reading your review I think I will give it a try. I have tried the foccacia recipe from Artisan Bread in 5 minutes a day (I've posted about it on my blog) and we really liked that. I don't use a pizza stone mostly b/c I have no where to keep it in my small kitchen. I usually just use a pizza pan to make my pizzas.
ReplyDeleteIt may rise better with the sugar left in - the yeast uses this and sugars in the flour as food to produce CO2 gas. I make this recipe and after a first rise it will usually fill the entire bowl. Your focaccia came out beautifully.
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