Meh

Not going to dignify my pizza dough failure with a photo. Actually, it isn’t a failure… yet. But still no photo.

I thought it had this figured out. Appropriate amounts of water, flour yeast, sugar, oil, elbow grease…

Still flummoxed about yeast, though. This time I used instant yeast as opposed to traditional yeast, and I used about twice as much as was called for in the recipe.

I put it into the fridge overnight… And I took a look just before lunch. The dough has risen. A bit, but it still resembles a large mass of wet flour. I put it on the counter for a few hours to see if we can get some levity. Uh, rise…

Same thing, really.

I have made this dough at least a dozen times. Probably 20, really. And I think I have been really happy with the results once. Maybe twice. The other times haven’t been terrible (with the notable exception of that one time when it tasted like rock-hard pita bread. Yeah, that wasn’t good) The other times haven’t been terrible but damn, it’s hard to get right.

Shouldn’t say that. Throwing together some ingredients and having them rise isn’t too hard. It’s the rise-in-the-fridge-overnight trick that I seem to be struggling with.

But the problem is that the dough tastes WAY better if it has had a few hours to think.

Speaking of which, I better get cracking on my tomato sauce.

**edit** Couple of hours later and the dough is still not resembling what I was hoping but a couple of things have come up:

• My daughter, who has a birthday today, told me that my worst pizza is miles better than everyone else’s (Her words. Her birthday. Who am I to argue)
• I’m not entirely sure what pizza dough is supposed to look like. I know, like dough. But all light and fluffy? Sort of wet? Lots of bubbles in there? Not very many? Thankfully, there are as many people to make pizza and pontificate on it as there are pizzas, so I’m pretty sure I can find someone who will agree that this is the proper way to make dough.
• So the dough stays. I expect it’ll be a challenge to roll out, but who knows? I did give it a good knead, so hopefully that helped. How it might help, I’m not exactly sure, but I expect it’ll help.

Talk about the blind leading the blind.

But I have buffalo mozzarella, regular mozza, and some killer tomato sauce that I make myself, I do. So all is not lost.