Pizza Recipe

A few people have asked me for the pizza recipe, so here it goes. I will first describe the way I first started baking it (based on a mix of recipes from the internet) and then I will tell you about the changes I made after I spoke to an Italian friend.

Ingredients:
+ 5 cups of plain flour
+ 5 cups of wholemeal flour
+ 1/3 cup of olive oil
+ 1 teaspoon of salt
+ 1 teaspoon of sugar
+ Pint of warm water.
+ Fast Action Yeast. You can get this in sachets or water activated. If you go for the water activated one, you mix it with the pint of water (i.e. you don't use two pints of water!)
+ 300 gr of Grated Mozzarella cheese
Note that these portions will make enough for at least two large pizzas (maybe three), I usually freeze half of the dough.

Mix the flour, salt, sugar and yeast in a bowl.
Pour the water ( if you get water activated yeast, you need to put the yeast in warm water and leave it for around 5 minutes) and mix. Put around 60% of the olive oil too.
Basically you mix the ingredients and knead it until you get a good consistency. You don't want to have a mix that breaks (too dry) and at the same time you don't want a sticky mix (it shouldn't stick to your fingers). To get the right consistency you may need to play with the amount of water and flour. Sometimes I end up pouring a bit more dough.

You want it to look something like this:


Once you get the right consistency, grease a bowl with the rest of the olive oil and leave the dough to rest for around an hour. Cover the bowl.

After an hour you can knead it again (it should have grown at least twice the original size). At this point the mix should not stick to your hands. Sometimes I just leave it to rest for two hours. If you are going to freeze some of it, cut half of the mix after an hour and put it into the freezer.

After the two hours the dough is ready for your pizza. And I guess from here it doesn't need much explaining :) I usually use bolognese sauce for the base (I should try to make the tomato sauce myself); but do not put much of it, actually I put a very very thin layer.

Preheat the oven to 200C and bake until the cheese turns brown.

I baked a pizza tonight and made a couple of changes suggested by a friend:
1) I only used plain flour.
2) I didn't use olive oil at all.
3) Get the max temperature from the oven. I baked it at 250C.

I have to say that I did like it better than the 'original' recipe.

Good luck!