Daring Bakers – Pizza

This month the Daring Bakers are tackling pizza.  I love to make homemade pizza and have several dough recipes that I use, but none of them employ the overnight technique that I’ve heard so much about.  The thing I loved about this recipe was that there was no rising time.  Getting dough to rise can be tricky in my house.  It’s drafty, it’s chilly and I usually resort to warming the oven a bit and doing it there.  But for this I didn’t have to employ any workarounds.  And the dough was fabulous!  So easy!  

We had two guidelines for the month.  First, we had to toss the dough.  Second, the pizza needed a sauce and toppings.  That was it!  Beyond that we were free to do what we wanted as far as type of dough and toppings.  I made the dough with regular bread flour and did both a savory version and a sweet.  

The recipe was the Basic Pizza Dough recipe from Peter Reinhart’s ‘The Bread Baker’s Apprentice’.  Thank you to Rosa for hosting!

Tossing the dough.  I did okay, although the dough was thin in the middle and thicker at the edges.  This happened both times and I’m not super sure how to correct this.  I like the tossing method to stretch out the dough, but definitely need some help perfecting my technique.

Pizza #1.  Pureed squash with italian sausage and red onions.  I topped it with mozzarella cheese, which was too bland of a cheese.  Because the squash was sweet, it needed a cheese with some bite.  Next time, feta.

Pizza #2.  I really wanted to make a dessert pizza.  I thought about doing a PB&J pizza, but I had cream cheese in my fridge that I wanted to use up.  In the end I did cream cheese as the sauce and topped it with kind of a streusel topping – brown sugar, flour, butter, oatmeal, chocolate chips and almonds.  I wanted some chocolate and some caramel, but I went a little heavy on the streusel.  Next time no flour, and less of everything else.