King Arthur Flour: Pizza Dough

I am definitely no stranger to making homemade pizza in my own kitchen.  Some of my favorite pizza creations include my beet green and bacon pizza or my roasted garlic, onion and goat cheese flatbread.  In each of these instances, I have used pre-made pizza dough because I have always felt like making pizza dough is way too difficult and time-consuming.  But after my weekend at King Arthur Flour Company, I learned just how easy it is to make pizza dough and I know that I will definitely be making my own dough the next time I make pizza or calzones at home.

As I mentioned previously, I had the opportunity to take a baking class at King Arthur Flour recently.  The baking facility there is really awesome.  There is plenty of room to view cooking demonstrations and also really get your hands dirty.

Our instructor, Susan Miller, was absolutely wonderful.  She was patient, kind and incredibly knowledgeable.  Her teaching style was simple.  She demonstrated for us first and then allowed us go back to our station to try it out on our own.

Jen looks on as Susan measures out flour for our pizza dough.

The ingredients for pizza dough are very simple - unbleached all-purpose flour, yeast, salt, olive oil and warm water.  You stir these ingredients in until the dough is a "shaggy mass".

Then comes the fun part - kneading!  Despite what you see in movies, kneading is actually very gentle and not aggressive at all.  Kneading can be done in three simple steps.

First pull the dough back towards you.

Then push the dough away from you using the heels of your palm.

Then turn the dough 90 degrees to the right.

Simple, right?  You do these three steps over and over again until the dough feels light and fluffy.  If the dough starts to stick to your hands, just flour up your hands and keep going.  When I asked Susan if my dough was done, she told me to close my eyes and just feel.  I know it sounds corny but I could feel how light and airy it was and knew that it was just right.

When the dough was ready, I put the dough back in the mixing bowl with a little bit of olive oil on the dough to keep it moist and wrapped the bowl in plastic wrap.

After working on some of the other recipes (which I'll be blogging about later), I later checked on my dough.  It rose quite a bit.  I gave the dough a quick envelope fold and left it back in the covered bowl to rise some more.

And after waiting some more and maybe even cooing at it...the dough was finally done!

Instead of rolling out dough as I've always done, I learned to hand stretch the dough out to ease it into shape. My pizza came out more like a triangle than a circle but I personally thought it was unique.

I topped the pizza with just a bit of sauce and mozzarella.

And the pizza went into King Arthur Flour's super modern outdoor fire oven.

This was some serious heat and the pizza only took a few minutes to cook.

The end result?

The pizza was delicious when it was topped with fresh chopped basil and it had lots of pizza bubbles, which I love!  Even though I think my pizza is gorgeous, I wanted to end this blog post with one more photo because it makes me smile everytime I see it...

Here's Meghan and Alicia during our cooking demonstration!

Who said baking had to be serious?

Tell me, do you like to make your own pizza? If so, what do you like best about it?