pizza dough

Pizza dough:

• 1 tsp Fleischmann’s RapidRise Highly Active Yeast (not active dry yeast)
• 1 cup warm water (not too warm or the yeast will die)
• 3 cups of all purpose flour
• 1.5 tsp salt

(this will yield four dough balls= 4 12-inch pizzas)

Mix all the ingredients until they come together into a messy ball.  Lightly cover the ball in the bowl you mixed it in for about 20 minutes. Then, mix the dough an additional 5 minutes.  No worries if your dough doesn't look nice, neat, or consistent.  The dough should be just tight enough to form a sticky ball. Put it in a sealed container in the refrigerator.  The container should be big enough so that the dough has room to double.

The dough needs to be in the refrigerator for 24 hours.  After a day, pull it out and give it a quick knead. I usually put mine back into the fridge for another day. The long, slow fermentation is needed to give the crust flavor. You can use it after 24 hours, but it’s not as good. 

When you're ready to bake, divide up the one ball into tennis size balls. Whatever you don’t use can go back into the fridge or to make a sheet pan of focaccia. Leave the balls you are going to use on the counter, covered with a large bowl and let them come up to room temperature, usually about an hour. I find that letting the dough "un-cool" is one of the most important things.  Otherwise, you get dough that's uncooperative and tough to work with!  After an hour, your dough should be pretty soft and pillowy.  While you wait for your dough, preheat your oven.

Turn on your oven as high as it will go, which for me is 550. Sprinkle the dough with flour and pick it up. Do not use a rolling pin. A rolling pin pushes out any bubbles that have started to form.  I stretch out my dough on the counter top (you can find youtube videos on how to stretch pizza dough without a rolling pin.) I also improvised and shaped my dough by turning a metal mixing bowl upside down.  I plopped the dough on top (or the bottom of the bowl, rather!), and let gravity do it's thing with a few gentle tugs here and there.  The best part about having it sit on top of an upside-down bowl was that all I had to do was turn the bowl right-side up to get the dough neatly on the baking sheet.  You can vary the thickness of the dough as you like when you're stretching it out.  I like to make mine pretty thin.  Lightly brush the dough, face-side up, with olive oil.  Now you're ready to load up your toppings.

3 minutes on the baking sheet in the oven, then I transfer the pizza from the baking sheet directly to the oven rack.  This gets the bottom crusty.  3 more minutes, then you're ready to eat.