Pizza & Dough

I found this recipe through momadvice.com.

I feel that I have 'cheated' a little bit since this recipe calls for the use of a bread machine and some of my readers will not have bread machines. My advice, if you are looking for a bread machine, is to first look for one at a thrift store, they should have outlets available for you to plug in a try out the machine. Otherwise you can look for a local Italian grocery store who may sell fresh dough (locally, Cantoro's Market, 7 and Middlebelt), or you could pick up frozen pizza dough at any grocery store.

Most of the ingredients you should already have in your cupboards.
Ingredients: water, corn meal, olive oil, flour, onion powder, garlic powder, yeast, salt, baking powder and sugar (in the blue lidded container).

First I placed all of the dry ingredients into my bread maker.

Followed by the water and the olive oil.

The dough setting on my machine takes an hour and forty minutes... so plan well in advance.

This dough recipe claims to be a knock off of Pizza Hut's... I haven't eaten at Pizza Hut in years (and I didn't order one for a side by side comparison) but my husband (who prefers Jett's) said that this pizza had "great taste!"

The dough batch is enough for two medium pizzas, or a large pizza and bread sticks.

Toppings Side Note: I've made a few home-baked pizzas in my day, and so I've learned that a single (15-ish oz) can of pizza sauce can cover 3 pizzas. When I first open my can of sauce, I divide it into thirds and freeze the two remaining thirds for later date pizzas.

I also decided to shred my Mozzarella on the larger shred side of the grater. I used 2 cups of shredded Mozzarella cheese on my pizza- and trust me, it was plenty!!!

We have purchased pre-made pizza dough from Cantoro's Market (really yummy) and just spread our toppings on top and baked the pizza. This Pizza Hut clone's recipe calls for parbaking the crust for 10 minutes BEFORE adding the sauce an toppings. PARBAKE: to prebake. Who knew?

Side Note: When rolling out/stretching out your dough, use floured hands and a floured surface... and if your dough is sticky, coat it will more flour.

I decided to only bake a single medium sized pizza (since it is just the three of us) and I packed the second half for the freezer! (We'll see how that turns out... my plan is to let it thaw in the fridge over night before I make my next pizza.)

This is what parbaking did to my crust. (If you peek at the upper right section of my crust you can see my 'crust band-aid,' my husband found a You Tube video on pizza dough tossing (as if...) and you are supposed to spread the dough out on the backs of your hands with your knuckles... again, who knew?)

Then I layered on our toppings, 'his and hers' style (I'm the Feta and tomato half :) ).

After baking our pizza for 10-15 minutes, this is what was pulled from the oven. Delicious!

Thick and crusty! The only thing that I'd do differently next time, is I would butter the crust edges a little bit before the final baking!

Recipe Recap: (baking temperature: 450*)
1 1/3 cups of water
2 teaspoons of sugar
1 1/4 teaspoons of salt
2 tablespoons of olive oil (+ additional for parbaking step)
2 tablespoons of cornmeal
3 1/4 cups of flour (not bread flour, just regular flour)
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon of garlic powder
1/4 teaspoon of onion powder
1 1/2 teaspoons of yeast