How to Make Pizza Dough

A few years back I started making my own pizza and quickly found the worst part was making and rolling out the pasta dough.  The solution, buy the dough!!  Today. there is not shortage of places to buy a good quality pizza dough.  And while it  is available is most grocery stores, I’ve started just going to my local pizza shop and asking to buy the raw dough.

Pizza shops generally have better dough, and I’ve never had a pizza maker unwilling to sell some raw dough.  So, given that the toughest part of making a homemade pizza is dough, let's buy ours.  Then as I show you in this cooking video, all we have to do is roll it out.

To Roll out Pizza Dough

• While I refer to this process as rolling out the dough, as you’ll see in the video, I don’t really roll it out.  Instead, I use my hands and the help of gravity to stretch the dough apart.  I don’t end up with a nice round pizza, but who cares?  I just call them “rustic” pizzas.
• Cut off a piece of dough the size you’d like and dust that piece and your hands with flour to prevent it from sticking.  My general rule of thumb is a piece the size of a large fist, makes one “personal” size pizza
• Starting at the center of the ball of dough apply a bit of pressure, and gently pull the dough apart in the shape of a disk.  Let part of that disk slide down, rotating your hand so you’re holding onto the top of the dough, and the weight of the dough is pulling it down.  That weight will further stretch the dough out.
• Rotate your hands around the outside the dough, so different sides are pulled down by gravity and gently pull and stretch the thickest parts of the dough; add more flour if needed
• You’ll want to continue that process until you get the dough to the desired thickness; think thickness rather than the size of the pie.  I like to get my pizza pretty thin, probably about an 1/8 of an inch, knowing it will puff up when cooked.  You also want to get it close to uniformly thick – so that it cooks evenly
• If you happen to tear a whole in the dough, don’t worry about it, just patch it by squeezing the dough together

Once you get the dough to the desired thickness, you’re ready to go.

Note that getting the dough to slide off a wooden paddle onto the pizza stone in the oven can be tricky.  I like to lay down a good amount of dry corn meal (or polenta) on the board before laying the dough down on it.  Then, once all the toppings are on, the corn meal acts like little ball bearings and makes sliding the pizza off much easier.

Leave a comment and let me know how it goes.

Enjoy!!