The best pizza dough

Η τέλεια ζύμη για πίτσα

Published originally on my blog on 23 September 2012

The times when I'm most proud of my achievements in the kitchen, are when I make successful bread and dough of every kind. That's when I feel that I have really accomplished something spectacular.

Sourdough bread, puff pastry, phyllo dough, Greek kourou dough, pie and pizza dough. I get the most satisfaction when I achieve to make a delicious, crusty bread and a buttery, flaky puff. Nothing compares to how they smell, feel, taste. No, they don't and cannot compare to a salad, however detailed and extravagant it may be, or even a chocolate creation, and we all know how I feel about chocolate.

Upside down dough after proofing. Doesn't it remind you of the moon?

There's nothing more satisfying than feeding your family and friends homemade pizza and having them crave for more. And even though I love to cook for my friends and family, I think the time has come for them to learn how to make it for themselves. It is like that old Chinese proverb, "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime". The same thing applies here. Learn how to make your own pizza and you'll never be hungry again. You'll never have to eat ready-made, super market freezer isle pizza or those awful ones your neighborhood pizzeria makes,—unless you live in Naples, then you can go ahead and skip this post,—and surely, you don't have to nag your friends to make pizza for you.

As it is obvious by the title, this is part one of the pizza posts, the dough, which will be followed by the tomato sauce and then by a post about a couple of different topping selections which comprise two of my favorite pizzas.

Reshaped dough after proofing

I have been meaning to share with you my recipe for pizza dough for a long time. I've tried a lot of different recipes over the years before I ended up with this one and it is everything I want my pizza dough to be. Puffy, bubbly and crunchy yet soft in the middle and crusty around the edges.

What I absolutely hate, is when pizza dough turns out like bread. It's not supposed to be bread, but pizza. If I wanted bread, I would have made bread. You need those big and smaller holes, the crusty outside and the soft inside, you need the bottom to be crisp and the top to be charred. And here's how to do it.