I have two people to thank for making this post possible: my aunt Amy and Jim Lahey. Amy provided a few of the ingredients, including the wheat flour that she ground herself. I guess a machine actually took care of the hard part, but I’ll still give her all the credit. After all, have any of you ever ground your own flour? Didn’t think so.
As for Jim Lahey, I need to thank him for totally rocking my bread-making world, as I’ve mentioned plenty of times in the past few months. If you’re at all into making your own bread you should buy his book. Or if you think you would like to try making bread, you should get his book. It’s so easy and so good. No, Jim Lahey is not standing over my shoulder telling me to write this, but that would be pretty awesome.
I posted a different Lahey pizza dough recipe a couple of months ago saying it was my favorite pizza dough yet. That may still hold true, but this new one is really good and has a much shorter fermentation period, which allows for pizza-making to be a one day affair. If you are planning ahead and know that you’re going to make pizza tomorrow, I would suggest the other version, but if you just got home from BarBri class and decide at 4PM that you want to make pizza for dinner tonight, then this recipe is the one to use. One other great thing about this recipe is that it doesn’t require a pizza stone. You can cook your pies on an oiled, rimmed baking sheet (or any old baking sheet with parchment paper) and still end up with a nice, crispy crust. That, my friends, is a good dough recipe.
Wheat Pizza Dough
Slightly adapted from Jim Lahey
2 1/2 cups (350 grams)* bread flour
1 1/4 cups (150 grams) whole wheat flour
2 1/2 tsp (10 grams) instant yeast
3/4 tsp (5 grams) salt
3/4 tsp (3 grams) sugar
1 1/3 cups (300 grams) room-temperature water
Makes enough for two pizzas (large ones if you prefer a thin crust or medium if you like a slightly thicker crust)
*If you make a fair amount of bread or do a lot of baking, I highly recommend buying a kitchen scale. You can get a decent one for $25-40, and it makes measuring much easier.
Wheat flour, rye flour, and cornmeal, all ground by my aunt Amy. The cornmeal even comes from corn in her garden. Pretty awesome. Thanks, Amy!
Mix the flours, yeast, sugar, and salt in a large bowl. Add the water and mix to combine – you might need to use your hands to incorporate all the flour. The dough will be slightly stiff.
Cover with plastic wrap or a kitchen towel and let rise at room temperature for about two hours, until it’s doubled in size.
Scrape the dough onto a floured surface, divide into two pieces, and cover with a damp kitchen towel for 30 minutes. Preheat the oven (with a pizza stone, if using) to 500.
When the 30 minutes is up you can form your pizzas on an oiled, rimmed baking sheet, a pizza peel dusted with flour, or a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. My rimmed baking sheet (actually a jelly roll pan) is out on loan, so I used both a pizza stone/peel and a baking sheet with parchment paper. I thought about oiling the baking sheet, but I didn’t want any oil to run off and burn on the bottom of my piping hot oven because I absolutely hate the sound of my smoke alarm. The parchment method worked well, as did the pizza stone. When we made pizzas for my mom’s birthday we used the oiled baking sheet method, and that worked well, too, so take your pick.
One of the two pizzas from last night was this oregano bread. It’s more of an appetizer or side dish, like breadsticks or easy-on-the-cheese cheese bread, and maybe it doesn’t even qualify as a pizza, but it was good. I brushed the dough with a little olive oil, rubbed it with a sliced clove of garlic, sprinkled it with some fresh oregano courtesy of Amy, and then grated a bit of parmesan over the top.
Baked until brown, it was delicious. We dipped slices in Trader Joe’s tomato sauce, straight out of the can and warmed a little. A sprinkling of good, flaky salt or freshly cracked pepper, followed by a plunge into olive oil would also be really nice.
Next time I might experiment a little with different herbs or maybe throw on a few olives. And there will be a next time.
