Homemade Pizza Dough

It has been a long time since we published our recipe for homemade pizza sauce. And in that time, we've made many, many pizzas. Some with our pizza sauce and some without. Usually with olives and sausage (my toddler's absolute favorite toppings) and other times with whatever we have rattling around in our fridges. We've tried several pizza dough recipes, and we finally settled on one we quite like, and then we got around to snapping some pictures before devouring the subject at hand.

As always being fans of the easiest option, we liked the idea of a pizza dough that you can make in a food processor. Let the food processor do all the dirty work. I had been using the recipe from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything, while Sarah had been working with Emeril Lagasse's version. In the end we melded them together and came up with the recipe below.

 Making pizza dough is surprisingly easy, and once you do it a few times, you might wonder why it ever intimidated you. This recipe makes two 14-inch pizzas, and you can make one and save the other for the next day. Suddenly, a homemade pizza is a simple lunch you are throwing together at the last minute.

Homemade Pizza Dough

makes 2 14-in pizzas

• 1 package active dry yeast

• 1 cup warm water

• 2 1/2 to 3 cups all purpose flour, plus more if necessary

• 2 teaspoons kosher salt

• 2 tablespoons olive oil

1. Combine the yeast with the warm water in a small bowl, stir well, and let it sit for 5 minutes.
2. Transfer the yeast and water into the bowl of your food processor. Add the flour, salt, and olive oil and process until it forms a ball. Touch it and if it is quite sticky, add more flour until it is no longer very sticky and process a minute longer (for us it is close to 3 cups).
3. Knead the dough for a few minutes on a floured surface until it is a smooth and elastic dough. It should not be sticky, so add more flour if necessary. Place the dough in a lightly oiled bowl, and turn dough to coat with oil. Cover with a damp towel and let it rise in a warm place for an hour or so, until it has about doubled in size.
4. Place pizza stone in oven and preheat to 500 F. (We highly recommend a pizza stone! They are not expensive and they really make a big difference in the crispiness of the crust. They are awesome for baking bread, too.) If you don't have a stone, you can use a baking sheet -- don't put it into the oven until you put in the pizza itself.
5. Divide dough into two portions and shape into balls. Stretch or roll your dough into a circle (we usually just stretch with our hands rather than roll with a pin.) Take your time manipulating the dough. Sometimes the dough needs to rest a bit, so take a break, and then resume stretching until it is the right size and shape.
6. What we do, which may be a bit unconventional, is take our preheated pizza stone out of the oven, lay the shaped dough directly onto the stone and then put the toppings on. The dough will start cooking immediately, so we work fast. But we've had the best luck this way. For us, futzing around with a pizza peel leads to misshapen final pizzas. So we like this way... try it! Or use place the toppings on your pizza on a pizza peel, and then slide the pizza onto the stone that is in the oven.
7. Bake your pizza until crispy with a golden brown crust: around 10-13 minutes.