Easy DIY Pizza Dough

Hello & happy Friday eve! I hope you’re gearing up for the weekend — I know I am!

We have a tradition in our house that we usually order pizza at some point during the week, it just makes an easy end of the week meal, or a mid-week treat. But why order pizza when you can make it yourself? This recipe is easy & pretty fast — for a risen dough recipe. You could have this on the table tonight with minimal effort!

Here’s what you’ll need:

566 grams (~4.5 Cups) of flour
8 grams sea salt
374 ml of luke warm water
4 grams active dry yeast (approximately half a pack of yeast)

Here’s how to bring the dough together:

Heat the water in a microwave safe container unless warm to the touch. Add yeast and set aside.

In a separate bowl, combine flour and salt in the bowl of your stand mixer. Once yeast bubbles in the water, add to flour and salt mixture and knead with the dough hook application until combined — i.e. no dry spots. Allow to rest for 15 minutes at room temperature.

Next, knead dough for 3 minutes on high-speed. Turn out onto floured surface & divide into 4 pieces.

Roll pieces to form balls & place on a floured tea towel, sprinkle flour on top of balls & cover with another tea towel. Let rise in a warm space for 3-4 hours, until doubled in size.

{If you would like to make this dough a day ahead, cover dough balls with plastic wrap and let rest in the refrigerator for 8-24 hours. When ready to make your pizzas — let dough come to room temp (about an hour) before use}

When you’re ready to cook your pizzas, turn your oven on as high as it will go and let it heat for about an hour.

If you have a pizza stone, place it in the bottom of your oven and let it heat with the oven. If you don’t have a pizza stone (a. why not? and b. go get a pizza stone) then you can use a sheet pan in the middle of the oven to cook your pizzas (add it once the oven comes to temp). They wont come out *as* good as on a pizza stone but they will still be tasty.

When your oven is hot, the sky’s the limit with what you can put on your pizzas just stretch the dough into a circle, or square, or whatever shape you want — top with your favorite pizza toppings and slide into the hot oven. {We used a pizza peel to move our pizzas with a bit of cornmeal on the surface so that the dough wouldn’t stick, but you can use another sheet pan if you’d like}