Hi Bold Bakers, I'm Gemma Stafford and
this week on Bigger
Bolder Baking I'm gonna show
you how to make the easiest
pizza dough for beginners.
It is absolutely delicious.
Here's how to make it.
So I've made it my life's mission to
perfect pizza of all kinds.
On Bigger Bolder Baking we've done
sourdough, fermented
doughs, wood burning oven pizza,
in my oven pizza, no
yeast, so many delicious doughs.
But I've never done a beginner dough
before so I'm gonna show
you how to do that right
now.
This will yield an amazing pizza but just
a simpler few ingredients and technique.
In my bowl here I have some all purpose
flour, we're gonna add
that into our stand mixer.
Now let me tell you a little bit about
all purpose flour and
why I'm not using bread
flour.
I guarantee you the majority of you have
all purpose flour in
your cupboard but you don't
have bread flour.
All purpose flour is a protein
percentage of around 8 to 11%.
Bread flour is around 12 to 14% so
there's not a huge difference there.
So you can totally get
away with all purpose flour.
I've been making pizza for
years and I've done it both ways.
The results are still good with either
flour, if you want to do
bread flour because you're
kind of a purist then
you can totally do that.
Next up are salt.
Salt is super important in bread doughs
because otherwise it can
seem a little bit flat so
don't be scabby with the salt.
Now next is our yeast.
Now this is a beginner's dough remember
so we are using instant yeast.
I love to use instant
yeast, I'll tell you why.
There is no sponging.
With instant yeast you add it straight
into your flour just like
you would any other ingredient.
Active yeast has to be sponged and it
takes an extra step.
This is so much easier and the best
choice for a beginner dough.
I'm gonna put that on the other side of
my bowl over here away from the salt.
We try and keep that yeast and salt
separate so the salt
doesn't deactivate the yeast.
Now I'm just gonna go in here and give it
a little mixy mix the
yeast on one side, mixy
mix the salt on the other side and now we
just give it a mix all around.
Okay so I have my
dough hook attachment here.
Turn it on to a medium speed and here I
have some lukewarm water.
Now lukewarm water is really important
when making bread
doughs, pizza doughs, anything
like that with yeast because yeast needs
warmth to survive and
thrive so what you want to
do is either put it on the stovetop or
put it in the microwave.
Get it nice and warm but not too warm.
Put your finger in the water and if you
can't feel the water
around your finger that means
it's the same temperature as your blood
which is perfect for yeast.
Yeast loves that.
So we're going to pour
that in to our flour mixture.
Cold water will just make it a lot longer
for your dough to
proof and it will make it
quite sluggish.
Our water is in here.
We're gonna add in some olive oil.
Now I always, regardless of the dough, I
always have olive oil.
I love it in there because it adds a
little bit of a softness to your dough.
Sometimes if you've ever had a pizza it
can bake up really hard
and we like a nice, you
know, crispy crust but we
don't want a hard crust.
I think the olive oil
really helps with that.
So we're gonna let this knead here for
around, you know, seven
to eight minutes or so on
the machine and let that gluten form.
Now this is a beginner dough so if you
don't have a machine
that is totally fine you can
also do this by hand.
Kneading by hand is really simple.
It will just take a little bit longer and
a lot of welly to
really work that dough but
it's totally possible.
Okay lovely.
Now this is a sign I like to see.
We have a nice, tight, lovely, smooth
ball of dough and a clean bowl.
So this is fantastic.
This is exactly what I'm going for.
Simply add in enough liquid to get
yourself a nice, tight ball.
Don't add in too much where you have like
a really wet dough
because we don't want that
either.
So here I have my nice, big bowl.
I'm gonna put a little bit of olive oil
in there and what
we're gonna do is just put
in our dough, give it a
toss around in the olive oil.
So what this does is just it coats the
olive oil so while it's
proofing it is really easy
and it doesn't struggle to
proof up the side of the bowl.
Doughs have yeast.
Yeast is a living thing.
You try it and make its life as easy and
as comfortable as possible.
We give it food, we give it warmth with
the warm water, we
make it nice and snug, put
it in a bowl and put a little share cap
over it and we put oil
in there so it can like
as it's proofing just
glide up the side of the bowl.
So when you take care of your dough and
do all these little
things to make it happy you're
gonna see that in your finished pizza.
It's gonna be absolutely delicious.
Okay so here's what we're gonna do.
We are going to let this proof now for
roughly an hour and a
half to two hours I like to
give it two.
It's going to double in size, get nice
and big, it's gonna
develop flavor while it's
doing this and what we're going to do
then is come back and
prepare it to make our pizzas.
I'm gonna set this over to the side now.
So it's been two hours,
look at this lovely dough.
Is that not a happy dough or what?
That is definitely
more than double in size.
I'd say probably three times the size.
And then if you see this,
see those gluten strands?
That's because we proved it for those few
hours and our gluten got to develop.
These strands are gonna trap the gases in
our pizza dough and give you those lovely
bubbles.
Let's make sure all
the air is out of there.
It's called knocking back the dough.
When I first started making doughs when I
was like a teenager, I
used to spend my Saturday
mornings and Sunday mornings making
breads, pizzas,
everything in my family kitchen and
I always thought that knocking back the
dough was actually
weakening the dough and getting
rid of all those lovely gases and all the
lovely bubbles in there.
But I learned later on that the more and
more I made pizza, and
I've made thousands of pizzas
at this stage, is that knocking out that
air just builds back your dough stronger.
So it strengthens the gluten so it
creates even more gas and
it makes your dough even
stronger to capture
them while it's baking.
Now here's what we're gonna do.
Divvy this up into four pieces.
We're going to be roughly eight, eight
and a half ounce pieces each.
Do them in nice smooth
balls just like this.
You will notice right now there is no
flour on my surface.
A lot of you already know why I say this.
We do not put flour on our surface when
we're trying to shape a
dough into a smooth ball
because your dough will
just slip and slide on it.
What you want is traction
against your work surface.
So no flour is needed
at this point in time.
Okay, lovely.
Here I have a dish.
I lightly floured it with a little bit of
flour obviously because it's floured.
So here's what we're going to do.
We're going to cover these up again and
let them sit here and
proof a little bit and relax
for around 20 minutes.
During this time the gluten will relax
and they'll be much
easier to roll out and get
the shape that we want to later.
So we're just going to leave these right
here and we're going
to stick on our oven and
get our other ingredients ready.
So here's a pro chef tip for making pizza
at home in a domestic oven.
Preheated tray.
What I'm going to do is pop this in here.
This is a cast iron tray.
We're going to put that in there.
Then we're going to preheat our oven and
let that tray preheat
while the oven is heating
up. So what we do is we roll out our pizza,
slide it onto that
preheated tray and it just pops
in the oven and gives your crust this
lovely big bubbly texture
which is exactly what we're
going for.
So we're about to get
ready to roll our pizza.
I just have a few things ready.
I've got a pizza pan here.
I buy a few of these on Amazon.
They're just really handy to have when
you make a lot of pizza like I do.
And here we have a piece of parchment, a
nice big piece of
parchment around 12 inches.
We're going to use this to slide our
pizza into the oven.
So I'm going to set that over there.
I have my pizza dough.
It puffed up again.
A little bit of flour.
This is how we want
some flour on our surface.
Now there's two types
of people in the world.
People who roll their dough with a
rolling pin and people who do it by hand.
I've done it both ways and I do different
things for different doughs.
I have seen, I think it was called one of
the best pizza restaurants in the country
and he rolls his
pizza with a rolling pin.
So I thought, well if this guy is doing
it and it turns out
amazing, then I'm going to
do it too.
So I just find that you get better
evenness, like just better
size, just better consistency
with your shape and everything.
So I like to use a rolling pin.
So we're trying to get our pizza to
roughly 10 to 12 inches.
I like a nice big pizza.
But I want to show you something.
This is very normal with yeasted doughs.
Do you see the way my dough is pulling
back there as I roll it?
That means that the gluten in the dough
needs a little bit more time to relax.
That's super common.
So here's what we're going to do, rather
than kill ourselves
trying to get the shape
that we want, all you have to do is just
cover it up, give it
five minutes or so, let it
relax, come back and it will
be so much easier to roll out.
Get it nice and thin because
it does puff up when it bakes.
Let's see what size do they get it to.
12 inches, lovely.
So bring back in your tray here.
I like to sprinkle it with a little bit
of semolina, which you
find traditionally on
pizza.
It just avoids the need for more flour on
your dough and sometimes it can get baked
on there.
So semolina, just a really nice addition.
Okay, tomato sauce, pizza sauce, this is
my five minute pizza sauce.
Takes five minutes to make
in a blender, super easy.
Recipe and video is on
BiggerBolderBaking.com.
When it comes to topping your
pizza, less is definitely more.
Here I have fresh mozzarella, you can use
shredded, whatever you like.
There's one thing you don't want to be
stingy with and that
is the cheese, I can't
stand when you order a pizza and it
becomes more like a
flatbread with hardly anything
on it.
And then pepperonis, my
favorite pizza is pepperoni pizza.
George's favorite is ham and pineapple.
So I'm gonna have to make
him one of those after this.
Because if he sees this he's gonna be
like, "Hey, where's my pizza?"
So there you go, so really
easy to get it to this stage.
It doesn't take a whole lot of time.
Few basic ingredients and our pizza is
ready to go into the oven.
So follow me over here.
So our oven is preheated to 500 degrees,
which is a lovely hot oven.
Slide your pizza right in there onto the
preheated tray and we're
gonna bake it for roughly
10 to 12 minutes or so
until it's lovely golden brown.
What is more satisfying than a gorgeous
golden brown bubbly
pizza coming out of the oven?
This looks fantastic.
I love how you can see the crust just
popped all the way
around the edges and it got a
little bit browner in parts.
Not only is it brown on top, but it's
lovely and crispy on the
bottom because of the preheated
tray.
Without a doubt, one of life's simple
pleasures is definitely
eating homemade pizza straight
out of the oven.
This is absolutely lovely.
The crust is nice and thin, it's crispy
on the bottom, like I
said, because we used that
preheated tray.
It got lovely bubbles on
the top, it's caramelized.
It got a little bit like scorchy because
the oven was so hot.
You have to try this dough, it's not just
for beginners, it's for anybody who loves
awesome pizza.
Listen, if you love pizza as much as I
do, then stick around
because I've got tons more
pizza videos for you to check out.
Thanks so much for watching and I'll see
you back here again really soon.