This recipe makes one thin, 11-13" pizza crust.
- Put into a bowl and whisk:
- ⅓ cup warm water (~95℉);
- 1 tsp sugar, honey, vel sim.; and
- 1 tsp active dry yeast.
- Cover and let stand to proof the yeast. If it’s not nice and foamy within 10 minutes, you need fresher yeast (although when I did this two days ago, our nearly-empty jar of Fleischmann’s that had a 2015 expiration date on it produced yeast that was still quite active).
- In the meanwhile, put into another, larger bowl
- 1 cup all purpose flour and
- 1 tsp kosher salt
- and whisk to combine.
- Add the clearly active yeast mixture and 1 Tbsp olive oil to the dry ingredients.
- Mix to combine thoroughly and then
- knead for five minutes. (I did this in the bowl and needed (ha!) no more flour for the kneading).
- Form into a ball and
- transfer to a smaller, oiled bowl.
- Turn to completely coat the ball with oil.
- Cover and let rise in a room that is ~76-80℉ for about 2 hrs (until double in size).
- Place a pizza stone, cast iron bistro pan, or some other such item into an oven and preheat to 450℉.
- Punch down the dough.
- Get out some parchment, sprinkle with semolina (I switched from corn meal and like the texture slightly better), and start rolling out the dough from the center, shifting 90° with each stroke. (With other crust recipes, I get slightly better results when I can use my fingers to knead the dough out into a round shape, then pick it up and stretch the outside circumference to enlarge the circle. I still find myself finishing with a rolling pin, though. This crust is fairly loose, so rolling pin it is.)
- When the dough is ~13", sprinkle with a bit more
corn mealsemolina, - prick all over with a fork,
- flip,
- brush with olive oil, and
- top with desired toppings.
- Transfer to heated stone or iron in the oven. (I slide a thin metal pizza pan underneath the parchment, just set the parchment with the pizza down on the hot stone or iron, and slide the fake peel out; the parchment makes a convenient tool for removing the cooked pizza from the oven and for containing the mess when cutting and serving.)
- Bake for ~12 minutes,
- check for desired browning of the crust, and either leave in for a bit longer or
- take out, cut, and serve.
