Pizza Dough

I finally managed to make a decent dough for my pizza. Took a few tries to get it right. A friend of mine told me to write this down. Few thoughts:

The recipe often leaves things out. I remember chatting with a friend not that long ago and she commented that the biggest problem that chefs have with cookbooks is trying to make their recipes work for the home cook. It’s easy to do a pizza dough if you’re making 100 pies. Lot harder if you’re making 2 and trying to describe a process that you do every single day by memory into a few lines that the home cook can pick up and understand.

But here’s the trick: You have to proof the yeast. The dough I was making is an overnight in the fridge slow-rise dough and I had trouble getting a good rise ever since I started using this recipe. Sometimes it worked better than others, but generally it was pretty unimpressive. The recipe called for traditional yeast but neglected to remind you to let the yeast proof before you mix the whole works together.

What is proofing? Well, you need to make it active in water before you continue the recipe. Often it takes quite some time. Like 10 minutes or so. As in, mix water, sugar, yeast, oil together and then let it sit until you see activity. In my case it looked like someone was stirring the water, but the water was still.

At that point I mixed everything together and hey-presto, it worked like a charm. It rose overnight in the fridge and it rolled out and make a superior pie.

It was lucky, but it was also the product of making the dough at least a dozen times – including a particularly disastrous situation with the in-laws where the dough didn’t rise at all. Still tasted pretty good, and I wasn’t asking for the youngest daughter’s hand in marriage (thankfully that happened more than two decades previously) but still it was a bit embarrassing. Won’t let that happen again.

Soon.

Unless I’m rushing things.

Which I almost always do in the kitchen.