Homemade Pizza with Homemade Pizza Dough Recipe

If you haven’t noticed by reading my blog billyparisi.com, I love pizza.  No, like I really love pizza and especially pizza dough.  Whenever I travel to other cities I do my best to research and identify that city’s best pizza and then go try it out.  Out of all the places I’ve traveled to or have lived in, Chicago, New York, St. Louis, Detroit, San Francisco, Los Angeles, I still have a favorite pizza place and it’s where I went to college.  The university of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri has the best pizza joint of all time, Shakespeare’s.  It’s so good that even ABC named it the best college food restaurant in the entire country.  Their crust is amazing, the cheese options and toppings are of the upmost quality, and it’s just plain old good.  While I may never find a place that can live up the Shakespeare’s, I make a pretty dang mean homemade pizza with a homemade pizza dough recipe right in my very own home.

I’ve made several pizza recipes in the past from my Three Different Homemade Pizza Recipes with No Knead Pizza Crust using dark rye flour, to my Homemade Hawaiian pizza with Semolina Crust, and a few more sprinkled in. However, I have to admit that this Homemade Pizza with Homemade Pizza Dough Recipe, may be my absolute favorite.  While the toppings and sauce to a pizza are really important, ask yourself what’s the best part to any pizza.  It’s the pizza crust of course!  For me a light, crusty, filled with air pocket crust that is tender and chewy is where it’s at.  To be honest, it’s kind of hard to hit all of those crust staples because of time mostly.

Hands down the most important things when making a pizza crust are time and ingredients.  If you aren’t starting with really good ingredients than most likely your pizza isn’t going to turn out very good.  For me when it comes to making any bread or general dough recipe I always turn to Bob’s Red Mill Artisan Bread Flour.  It is packed with protein making it ideal for those gluten packed recipes.  In addition to the bread flour I wanted to add a little depth to my homemade pizza crust recipe so I added in some Bob’s Red Mill Whole Wheat Flour.  The wheat will help in the flavor department as well as ensuring it to be a golden brown outer pizza crust and a lightly browned inside.  Honestly the combo is insanely delicious but don’t be fooled because you can absolutely use 1 or the other for an all white or all whole wheat pizza crust recipe.  One thing that I believe is an absolutely necessity is the use of a gram scale.  You can be off a gram or 2 in a bread recipe, but you can be off an ounce of 2 or else your recipe will be trashed.  Baking is a science and it needs absolute ingredient amounts, so if your serious about baking or are even remotely interested in it, then get yourself a gram scale; I promise it will be worth it.

Outside of the need to use really good ingredients, time is the second biggest factor.  Making bread is not hard at all, it’s mostly just time that is needed.  No self-respecting pizza joint makes dough an hour before service starts.  No!  You usually have a baker or cook come in at wee hours of the morning to prepare the dough for resting and rising.  THIS is the most important part of the entire baking procedure.  I have a resting time of about 4 ½ hours but if you can make that even longer then your dough will be even fluffier and more tender.  My biggest challenge is trying to record a video with enough light in my kitchen during the day so you can actually see what I am doing.  Dang the time change!

Once you mix your pizza dough recipe together really well you let it sit for 90 minutes covered in plastic wrap before stretching it and folding it for 2 minutes.  Then, let is rest for 90 more minutes before removing it from the bowl.  You then want to form it to a large ball and then split it into fourths.  This recipe will give you 4 pizza doughs, which is awesome!  The topping portion is completely up to you so get as creative or as simple as you’d like, but one thing is for certain and that is this homemade pizza dough recipe is legit!