Joy Of Cooking Pizza Dough

I'm not sure what motivated me to make Pizza dough (p. 607) other than I wanted to make a bread recipe and pizza sounded good. I usually just buy my pizza dough at Whole Foods because I hated baking at high altitude. And Whole Foods has good pizza dough!

(I know these posts are super late so I'm not going to backdate them. Look forward to a lot of posts all at once)

I mixed water and yeast:

Yeasty!

I added flour, olive oil, and salt. I omitted the sugar because I don't like my pizza dough sweet (does anyone?):

I mixed it by hand for a minute:

And started kneading. TJOC always recommends kneading for what I think is way too long. I kneaded until it looked good:

At this point I separated the dough into three sections because I was only going to make pizza with part of it, I was going to make Focaccia (p. 607). I covered all the dough so that it could rise.

It went from this:

To this:

I punched it down, rolled it into a ball, and let it rise for another 10 minutes. I flattened the ball, stretched it, brushed it with olive oil, and made a pizza! I never use pizza stones but some people swear by them. I would love to know your experiences in the comments....

It was really good although no better than the pizza dough from Whole Foods! So I don't know if I would bother with it in the future. You all know my theory--if it's not better or cheaper homemade than I might as well just buy it. Your time is worth something, right?

I like focaccia but almost never buy it. I took the pizza dough, rolled it out, and put it in a baking dish.

Well, actually two dishes. They were let raise in the pans.

I topped mine with garlic, olives, and spices!

I topped moms with mushrooms, garlic, and tomatoes:

I wish you could have smelled how terrific these were when they were cooked:

Focaccia is totally worth making. Honestly, it was delicious and easy. And I'm sure you could make it with store-bought pizza dough if you didn't want to make it from true scratch. I even think mom froze some of it and ate it later and that totally worked. Has anyone else made focaccia? How did it turn out?

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Joy of Cooking-75th Anniversary Edition - 2006 (Google Affiliate Ad)

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