This recipe makes ONE 12" pizza OR cheese sticks crust.
To all who it may concern; this dought is 66% hydration.
INGREDIENTS
- 150 grams All Purpose Flour
- 100 grams Water (45°C)
- 1 tsp Brown Sugar
- 1 tsp Corriander
- 1/2 tsp Salt
- 1/4 tsp Garlic Powder
- 1/4 tsp Yeast
MURICAN INGREDIENTS
- 1 cup All Purpose Flour
- 2/3 cup Water (115°F)
- 1 tsp Sugar
- 1 tsp Corriander
- 1/2 tsp Salt
- 1/4 tsp Garlic Powder
- 1/4 tsp Yeast
Note: People usually use too much yeast, which does speed up the process, but the taste and texture is not as good.
Less yeast + more time = better bread.
Start Yeast
In a small bowl or measuring cup, add the yeast, sugar, and 4 tbsp of your water. Stir the mixture together.
Set it aside to activate for about 15 minutes.
The yeast mixture should get a nice yeast head during this time. However, contrary to what many recipes do, it is important to let the yeast mixture sit until the yeast head has fully grown, AND begun to fall/deflate.
Smol Rant About Yeast.
What this does is it ensures your little yeast microbes are not only alive and well, but HUNGRY (they have finished eating the activating sugar).
If you add the yeast mixture to the dough before the yeast has eaten all the sugar, it won't "take" in the flour as quickly or as well and your bread won't rise as nicely.
People usually just resort to using more yeast to get their bread to rise correctly, but then the bread starts tasting like the yeast instead of the nice, nutty flour and the whole thing is just bad.
Tip For Activating Yeast.
If your room temperature is anything below 26°C (80°F), the yeast might take a LONG time to activate.
What I do is set the yeast misture bowl in a larger pan filled with a few centimeters warm water and covering the whole thing with a lid. (see example in recipe video)
Dry ingredients and Kneading dough
In another bowl, measure out the dry ingredients and mix them together so that there won't be any clumps of seasoning in the final crust.
Pour your yeast mixture as well as the remaining water into the dry ingredients and knead dough for about 5 minutes (more is better than less).
Shaping and Proofing
After kneading, set the dough to rest for 10 minutes and then, depenging on how much dough you made, separate it into what will be the individual pizza crusts.
Shape the dough balls nicely, oil the outside, and put them in a warm place to proof.
Let it proof for around 1.5 hours.
The proofing time will change alot depending on your altitude and temperature, so just keep an eye on the dough the first couple times you make it until you get a sense of what to expect.
As a general rule of thumb, let it proof until it is has doubled in size.
YeASt KnOwLEdGe
(not part of the recipe, just commentary)
Temperature. Yeast dough rises best at around 32°C (90°F). If it gets much colder than that, in most cases the yeast doesn't ferment fast enough to produce enough carbondioxide to suport a nice crumb (make the dough nice and fluffy), rather, the dough kind of... puddles? and becomes flat. At least that's what I think is happening LOL. In general, warmer is better.
If the temperature is too warm: 40+°C (115°F), the dough tends to become floppy and lose gluten integrity. IDK why it just isn't as good.
Altitued REALLY affects breads. The higher up you go, the faster and faster your bread will rise. From my experience, every 300 metres of altitude shortens the proofing period by about 5%, sometimes more.
Another thing that altitude affects alot is dough hydration. Working with 80% hydration dough when you live close to sea level is HARD. It's so frusturating. However, 80% hydration is actually a pretty good hydration for most doughs and is easy to work with once you get above 1,500 metres.
In summary: The higher you go, the more water your dough needs and the faster it will rise.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
Stretching the Dough
This is the final step before baking, so go ahead and put your skillets in the oven and preheat it to 230°C (450°F).
Note: This process is the same for the cheese sticks. Simply stretch the dough as thick or thin as you want your cheese sticks to be.
This part is pretty simple, you just take one pizza crust dough ball at a time and stretch it out to the size you want.
It helps to stretch them on the bottom of an upside-down bowl if your not skilled. :'C
Most commonly, you then lay the stretched pizza crust on some corn flour to keep it from sticking to the surface below (I did not do this in the video).
Then, when you're ready to bake, slide the crust into the skillet using an oven peel or any other creative methods you conjure up. You do not have to worry about the pizza crust sticking to your cast iron skillet or oven stone - it just doesn't.
Why stretch instead of roll?
Because, when you stretch the dough instead of roll it, you keep all the little bubbles in the dough which makes the crust airy, tender and helps it form a nice crispy crust. It also makes sure that the sauce you spread on the pizza doesn't penetrate the dough and make the crust soggy.
Rolling it out would just smash the dough and pop all the nice bubbles resulting in a chewy crust.
Although it is relatively 2 dimensional, pizza crust is a LEVENED BREAD.
It needs to be risen when you bake it.
Just imagine if you were making nice dinner rolls and right before you put them in the oven, you smashed each one flat. Yummy, right?