Friday, May 14, 2010

The Pizza Story (3) - Making Dough

If you are just joining this story, check this page for more background...

Once I had all of my ingredients, it was time to figure out what to do with them!  The recipe I was working from was based on a stand mixer, but my stand mixer is in storage until I move out of the city in a few months.  However, I recently bought a new fancy food processor which came with a dough blade.  I am nerdy enough that I actually watched the instructional video that came with the food processor, and I remembered that one of the examples they showed was making pizza dough - perfect!  I had to do a little digging on the Cuisinart website to find the clip (I'm pretty sure that dvd became a toy for the munchkin at some point), but it seemed like the recipe could be adjusted easily enough.

So the night before pizza night, I pulled out my food processor and all of the dough ingredients and got to work.  I carefully read the instructions on the back of my yeast packet on activation, and was really excited when it actually started to foam like it was supposed to (this took a few minutes, long enough for me to get nervous and google how long it was supposed to take!).  I measured out my flour and salt, blended in the food processor, and added my yeast, water, and olive oil.  I had to stop and scrape down the sides to get it to come together...I also had to hold onto my food processor which looked like it was about to jump off the counter!  Not sure if that's supposed to happen, but after several minutes of kneading, like magic, a sticky ball did form. 

The next stop was getting it onto the counter to cut into pieces.  Did I mention the dough was sticky?  When I say sticky, I mean ridiculously sticky!  I had to stop yet again to wash my hands and then thoroughly coat them with flour, in addition to coating the pile of dough with flour.  Ahh, I was finally able to cut it into pieces, roll them into balls, coat with oil, and get them into plastic bags.  I have to say that once I got the stickiness under control, playing with the dough was pretty fun :) 

Two bags went into the fridge for the next night, and the other four into the freezer for future weeks.  I couldn't wait until dinner the next night to see how it would go!

Read here to find out how it turned out!

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