No Knead Pizza Dough

Pizza is great.  Now I don’t mean the greasy cardboard that most chains sells as pizza, I mean real pizza.  Homemade dough, fresh toppings, maybe even some homemade pizza sauce.  It is a great way to use up stray vegetables and it can be a quick and extremely satisfying dinner.  But I have been having a hard time finding the perfect dough.  So this week, I tried something new – no knead pizza dough.

There has been a lot of buzz about no knead bread.  This was my first time trying it.  I always just kind of thought of it as a hassle.  Yeah, you don’t need to knead the dough, but you need to wait up to 24 hours to actually bake the bread.  And kneading bread really isn’t such a big deal.  It might get a bit messy, but its also a bit therapeutic.  But I started to read about it and I learned that by not kneading you are really allowing the yeast to work and add flavor.  So I thought I’d give it a try.

It started last night.  I mixed together the ingredients and it made a gloppy mess.

But I just followed the instructions and let it sit until I got home from work today.  And then it looked like this….

Still pretty much a gloppy mess.  I was beginning to lose hope.  But I continued to follow directions.  When I rolled it out, I did need to add quite a bit of flour to make it less sticky.  But man oh man, this is definitely the best crust I have made.  It has more flavor and it is just the right thickness.  This is definitely a keeper.  And another great thing about this is that the recipe makes enough dough for about 6 small pizzas!  So we made 2 tonight (1 veggie, 1 meat for Dan) and we wrapped up the other dough and stuck it in the freezer.  So now we have 4 individually wrapped pizza dough balls!  Now I won’t have to think so far in advance if we want to make pizza!

And for my brother…

No Knead Pizza Dough

Adapted from The Washington Post

• 3 cups bread flour, plus more as needed and for the work surface (I used all purpose flour)
• 1/4 teaspoon instant (dry) yeast, such as SAF brand
• 1 1/2 teaspoons salt
• 1 1/2 cups water

Combine the flour, yeast and salt in a large bowl. Add the water and stir until blended. The dough will be very sticky. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let it rest for 12 to 24 hours in a warm spot (about 70 degrees). Once I mixed everything together, the dough seemed a bit dry, so I added another 1/4 cup of water.

Lightly flour a work surface. Place the dough on it; sprinkle the top of the dough with flour. Fold the dough over on itself once or twice, using a dough scraper if necessary and sprinkling with more flour if needed, then cover the dough loosely with plastic wrap and let it rest for 15 minutes.

Divide the dough into 6 equal pieces (about 4 ounces each). Shape each one into a ball, again sprinkling with flour as needed. At this point if you plan on freezing some of the dough, wrap the dough in plastic wrap and put in the freezer. With the pieces you are going to use immediately, generously sprinkle a clean cotton towel with flour and cover the dough balls with it. Let them rise for 2 hours before stretching or tossing into shape, topping and baking.

I baked at 500 degrees for about 10 minutes.

In order to use the frozen dough, unwrap the dough in the morning and let defrost all day.  This will allow the dough to rise as well as defrost.