Cashing in on the Dough - Bellissimo!

There's nothing quite like home made pizza dough - light, fluffy, and delicious - forget about the store bought cardboard - make your own!!

We have experimented with heaps of different doughs - we started making dough when we had a bread machine - one hour later, and not enough dough quickly changed that idea - it just didn't cope and I was spending hours just making dough.

So we switched to doing it by hand - it takes about 20-30 minutes to make the dough - while its rising, we heat up the oven and get ready to start building pizza. To make the dough rise quicker, we have found that if we separate the dough into portions before leaving it to rise, that it actually rises quicker. For this recipe, we divide it up into 8 equal portions - we use 25cm pizza trays as these fit in the oven much better (4 at a time) - but use whatever trays you have (they don't have to be round - your house, your rules!!)

• 600 g strong bakers flour
• 400g semolina
• 10ml olive oil
• 10g salt
• 10g sugar
• 20g dry yeast
• 650ml water (warm)

Mix dry ingredients, add water and oil. Knead on floured surface until dough is soft and pliable. Divide equally into 8 portions of 200g each. Place on tray - use baking paper or sprinkle the bottom of the tray with flour or semolina to stop sticking - and cover with a clean tea towel in warm draft free space until dough rises (about 20 mins depending on room temperature).

Building Pizzas
Roll out your dough portions - sprinkle some semolina flour on your workspace before rolling. The semolina will stop the pizza sticking from the tray - be generous with the semolina on the bottom of the pizza, it does not affect flavour and is a blessing when it comes to sliding off the tray.  

Put your rolled out dough onto the tray. Spread a spoonful of sauce over the pizza base. Sprinkle with a cheese mixture (I use 50/50 cheddar and mozzarella cheeses). Then put your toppings on top with a very light sprinkle of cheese if needed (most do not need more cheese. 

We roll out all our dough first, then we spoon sauce over them all (to make sure evenly shared among pizzas), then we do cheese on them all. Once that has been done, then we do the toppings.



Bake hot oven until crisp on base and cheese has melted (about 15 mins).

Freeze: yes.  When we freeze the bases, we also put on the sauce and cheese.  We freeze on the tray, and once frozen then we wrap (and free up the tray).