Homemade Pizza

A friend of mine shared her pizza dough recipe with me and I will be forever grateful. I love, love, love pizza and now I can make it myself. It's really not that hard, it's cheaper than ordering out and it makes me feel accomplished to do it. Here's her recipe for the pizza dough. Oh and I have to add that when my husband and I got married I registered for this expensive mixer because I knew I should have one but honestly didn't know what I'd ever use it for. My grandma was so wonderful to buy it for me and for the first 5 years I maybe took it out twice to use it. I've used it many times over the last few months and I've come to truly appreciate how wonderful it is to own a good, sturdy mixer. Here's the recipe:

Pizza Dough

2 3/4 - 3 1/4 cups flour (I usually end up using 3)
1 pack active dry yeast
1 cup warm water
2 tablespoon veggie or olive oil

In a large bowl combine 1 1/4 cups of the flour, the yeast and 1/4 teaspoon salt. Add warm water and oil. Beat with an electric mixer on low speed for 30 seconds, scrape bowl. Beat on high speed 3 minutes. Using a wooden spoon stir in as much remaining flour as you can. (If you're using a stand mixer you can just use that to mix in all the flour). Turn dough onto lightly floured surface. Knead in enough remaing flour to make a moderately stiff dough that is smooth and elastic, about 6-8 minutes total. (This is where I use the dough hook attachment. I just run the mixer with that for 5 minutes or so). Cover and let rest for 10 minutes.

Spread dough onto two greased pizza pans. For thicker, pan pizza crust, cover and let th crusts rise 30-45 minutes before baking. For a thin crispy crust, just bake straight from there.

I've made this using half all-purpose flour/half whole wheat graham flour and it still turns out wonderful.

I made it this time with almost all whole wheat flour and it was awesome. I spiced up the sauce with some onion onion and some dried tomato and garlic pesto from Tastefully Simple because I'm cheap and buy generic sauce. The best part is this recipe give me two crusts so I refrigerated one and we had pizza for lunch on Saturday when we would normally have had fast food.

Thanks again to my friend Ashley for the recipe.