Holy Smokes! Great Pizza Dough!!

I have a copy of the book "Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day" and have seriously considered making a couple of the recipes from it for quite some time. As a matter of fact, I bought a couple 6 quart lidded containers to keep dough on hand in my fridge, but had not made it until a couple days ago. I had made the dough and put it in the fridge but hadn't used any of it until tonight.

What took me so long? This stuff is fabulous!! Tonight the boys wanted homemade pizza and I was getting ready to make dough from my regular recipe, then I remembered the dough in the fridge. Pizza dough is basically thin bread dough, so I thought, "What the heck, let's give it a try."

This dough is different from most dough in that you really need to use it from the fridge when it is cold, or it gets sticky. I worked it from the center, stretching it thin, then put it on parchment paper to thin the edges out. I stretched the second pizza dough until you could almost see through it and it turned out to be the one we liked the best. This dough does rise more during the baking process, which is great for bread rounds, but thinner is better for pizza. After I got it thinned out to the point I liked, I topped it with pizza sauce ( 1 can tomato sauce, 1 small can tomato paste, 1 or 2 cloves of garlic, 1 tablespoon Italian seasoning--brought to a simmer then allowed to cool..I also add a teaspoon of red pepper flakes, but you can dress it up the way you like...) and added toppings like drained canned mushrooms and chopped black olives, pepperoni and whatever else we feel like at the time.

Holy Smokes, this is good stuff. I think this is going to be my standard pizza dough recipe from here on out. I love that it is ready in the fridge whenever we get the hankering for pizza (and we can use the dough for boule bread loaves when we need it for dinner) and it save a ton of money, not to mention time.

Try it and let me know what you think. As I said, I bought the book, but the New York Times has one recipe from the book here. This is the one I used, although I did have a pizza stone in the oven, I spread my dough out on baking parchment paper and didn't do the broiler pan with water since I was doing pizza, not bread loaves. I'm going to try to find a pizza peel though so I can try the recipe the way it was written. I'll report back on that later this month.