This is really one of the best pizza recipes. Very detailed, with tips, tricks, and pieces of advice. The dough looks so pretty and soft that, it seems, you can eat it raw. And also, this video will help you to choose the right sauce, which is so important for a pizza. Anyway, enjoy this recipe and make gorgeous pizza for your family or friends.
If you’re still not convinced, this video got over 1.4 million views during just 1 day.
Every city in the country, every city in the world, probably, has a pizza place. It’s usually pretty good, it's usually pretty cheap, but there's something about making your own at home that just really drives the point home. Do you know anyone that doesn't like pizza? I don't want to know that person!
Honestly, making pizza only takes a few simple ingredients. What you're gonna need is a little bit of warm water – it's gonna activate a good amount of dried yeast. But if sugar that's gonna act as food for the yeast, salt for flavor, flour for the base of the dough. Extra virgin olive oil is gonna make your dough a little bit easier to work with, it's also gonna add it just a little hint of flavor.
All right. So, first things first. We have to bloom our yeast. 2 ½ cups warm water + 1tsp sugar +2tsp dried yeast. In warm water – and by warm I just mean if you put your finger in, it shouldn't feel like anything, it's not cold or hot. We're gonna give it a stir to make sure everything is well hydrated. And then, you're gonna see that your yeast is gonna start to produce a little bit of bubbles – it means it's kind of alive. If you don't see any change that means that your yeast might be a little on the old side, throw that out and start again with some fresh yeast.
We're gonna add salt to the flour and not to the yeast water mixture. 7 cups flour + 1 ½ tsp salt. Salt will slow down the production of yeast, so we want to make sure that we're adding that later, once the yeast is already activated.
We're gonna add extra virgin olive oil (6tbsp olive oil). Again, it's gonna add a little bit of flavor.
We're gonna throw in the water and sugar mixture. It's easiest in the bowl because it won't make a huge mess while you bring the dough together. What we're trying to do is just hydrate as much flour as we can.
Once we're happy that we're not gonna have water or flour all over the place, we can toss it onto our board and start kneading it. So, kneading is one of those things that people tend to not do enough. Set the timer and do it for 10 minutes. You want to be able to look at it and it's like so pokey and smooth and fun. And what you're trying to do is just roll the dough on top of itself and then push forward. You're not trying to tear the dough, you're really just trying to rotate and make sure that you're getting all parts of the dough incorporated. At the end of it, we want a really nice pretty top. You'll know when you're done kneading the dough – when you press the dough and it springs back right away.
Now, what we want to do is to get a really gorgeous top part of the dough. You can just pull the sides of the dough from the outside in, so that it makes a nice ball on the other side. Once you turn it over, push your pinkies in and kind of rotate the dough like a really beautiful round ball.
All right, cool. Ready to rise. And we're gonna go into a big bowl, pour a little bit of oil in there so that the dough doesn't stick, and then you're gonna cover the dough itself in oil as well. It's gonna rise significantly and we don't want to stick to the cling film. I like to cover it with cling so that it's much easier to get off. I've done a lot of doughs where you cover it with a towel and then it gets stuck to the towel. I prefer cling.
So, you can let this rise for an hour, if you don't have a ton of time. Even better would be to let this rise overnight. Still, it’s gonna be a great flavor, it's still gonna be a great texture. The longer you let this process go, the more flavor and the more complexity is gonna be in your dough.
And what we're gonna do now is just bring this dough back to life. A lot of work has happened with all the yeast, and it's been a little bit uneven in the way that it's grown. And that's just like a totally normal process. So, we're gonna turn it out and we're gonna knead it again for another minute or two. Nothing different about this process again, we're just evening out the bubbles that are inside the dough. We're gonna do that shaping thing again so use your pinkies if you will. You have to kind of push to make into a cute ball.
If you're using store-bought pizza dough, you want to do this as well. So, knead it for a minute or two and leave it out at room temperature while you're doing all of your other Pizza prep.
And then, we're gonna cut it. As you can see now that we've cut into this, just how much gluten development, just how much growth has all the yeast done, how alive our dough is. I got some awesome process to see.
So, this is a huge amount of dough. It should make about 4 good-sized pizzas. You can give one to each person at your party, each person in your family, you can shape them, you can freeze half of them or freeze three of them, so you have some for later – it's really up to you.
Add a little bit more flour, cover it with a towel, and let it rise for one more hour.
One thing that you want to recreate from a pizzeria in your own home kitchen is getting your oven as hot as it possibly can. One thing that's gonna help that is having something in the oven already preheating, that's gonna give you a really good bottom heat.
So, you could do a baking sheet turned upside down, you can do a cast iron which is really great at holding heat, and then the third option – if you are going to be making a lot of bread or pizzas at home is to get a pizza stone. And that really holds a lot of heat as well and it's a nice open surface.
So, let's talk sauce. There's a lot of different options out there and people never really know which ones to get. There's puree and that's gonna be the finest of all of the tomatoes. Then, there's gonna be crushed – that might have a little bit of chunk left in it. Diced is gonna be diced, it's just cut up already, it's in its sauce and its water. And then, there's whole tomatoes – those are the most intact and those are the ones that I recommend.
You can crush them with your hands or, as we're gonna do here, we're just gonna use an immersion blender. Little safety PSA: if you’re having any leftover sauce, do not store it in the tin can, store it in a separate container, and make sure to throw the can away.
Now, let's talk cheese. The thing about pre-shredded cheese is it has some product on it that prevents it from clumping in the bag. It just kind of doesn't allow things to melt as easily. If you shred the cheese yourself, it's gonna be much softer, it's gonna be a better flavor in the end. So, if you have the option, we do recommend that you shred the cheese yourself.
One thing about using fresh mozzarella is that you can leave the chunks as big as you want. If you're super cheesy, you can have huge chunks on your pizza.
So, now that our dough is rested, it's ready to be shaped. There's a lot of different ways that you can get your dough out to a good shape. What I like to do is kind of do a finger poke, if you will, all over the dough. One – because it's so fun, but also, as you can see, these kind of bubbles that are developing, I'm allowing those to stay in the dough, and then those are gonna help give you those awesome pizza bubbles. So, you can stretch the dough with your hands, just kind of being really careful. You can use your fingers and kind of spread it if you will. Do a combo of things.
I used to work at a pizza place and the guy would actually flip the dough on the side of the table, kind of stretch it that way and would let gravity work its magic. He kind of let the dough stretch out itself. It was kind of fun. I thought it was a cool technique, he was able to do it much quicker and smoother than I'm able to do.
And then, the classic way that everyone wants to know how to learn is that tossing of the dough technique. You kind of want to create a spinning motion with your knuckles, as you're throwing it in the air. So, on your knuckles, rotate and toss, catch.
Now, it's time to assemble our pizza. We're gonna use a turned-over baking sheet, so this is gonna act as the peel, that cool plank that they have at a pizzeria that helps get the pizzas in and out of the oven. And we're gonna use a little bit of semolina. If you don't have that, you can use flour. But we just need something that the pizza won't stick to the bottom, but also so that it helps move the pizza really quickly off our peel and onto the preheated baking sheet.
We're going to just reshape our pizza ever so slightly, re-stretch it out just a little bit, so when you're adding sauce and stuff to your dough, just try to work quickly here. Don't panic or anything, but if you are too slow, it's gonna be much harder to get the pizza off the peel and into the oven.
We're gonna use a ball of mozzarella, and I like to tear it up pretty small so that we can get a really good, even amount of cheese throughout the whole thing.
You want to take it off when the cheese is a nice dark deep brown and the crust is golden brown as well.
And then, we like to do a little bit of fresh basil on top. Again, I'm kind of a perfect biter so I like everything to be a good bite size, I don't want to bite into a huge piece of basil and then have it hang out of your mouth.
That's how a good classic Margarita is made. Really easy.
If you want to make a pizza Bianca, or a white pizza, or pizza without a sauce, here is the recipe.
That's gonna be a little bit of olive oil, again more cheese of your choice, we're using mozzarella. We put a bit of dried oregano on top of this as well. And this is gonna go into the oven as is.
This is a super easy one.
At the end of the cooking process, we actually added some fresh ricotta, which is a really nice fresh cool bite. This is a great summertime option.
On top of that, we put a little bit of fresh pesto that we had.
This is a really gorgeous light fresh pizza.
And, obviously, the other fan favorite is a good classic Pepperoni. So, that is just cheese, sauce, spicy pepperoni, you can grate some fresh parmesan on top at the end of it. None of that weird stuff in a canister – you’ve got to freshly grate it, so much better.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sv3TXMSv6Lw
