135. Pizza Dough

Date Cooked: June 12, 2010
Page: 662
Rating: A-

So I had bought the new Cuisinart 14-Cup Food Processor and I wanted to really try it out. I figured I had been putting off Pizza Dough for awhile because I didn’t want to make it by hand and my old food processor would have seized and died painfully at the thought of trying to mix pizza dough. So this was a perfect opportunity.

I’m not going to lie. I am still intimidated by a lot of tasks in the kitchen, mostly those that I have never attempted before and pizza dough is one of them. I started by soaking some yeast in warm water while I got the rest of the ingredients in order. Flour and salt were sifted together and then oil and water were added to the yeast mixture.

I pulsed the wet and dry ingredients together in the food processor until it came together into a ball. Even though this processor is rather heavy duty it was bouncing all over the counter as it tried to spin the ball around. I could only imagine what would have happened if my old food processor tried to handle this… bouncing around the counter… motor screaming in agony… smoke pouring forth… and then a final squeal of despair before silence.

I removed the ball of dough and kneaded it quickly before forming it into a nice round ball. The dough was left to rise in a lightly oiled bowl, covered. When the dough had doubled in size I removed it from the bowl and divided it into three pieces. This is where the story of pizza dough ends… I then turned two of these pieces into pizzas and put the other in the freezer… which is still there to this day.

Rating: A- Rating pizza dough by itself is tough. The dough came together very easy and wasn’t that much work. I obviously didn’t taste the dough uncooked but I will say it was a decent tasting dough from the pizzas that were made. How many variations of plain pizza dough are there… water, salt, flour, oil and yeast.