Hello there hi everyone I'm Bettie if you're not familiar with me I'm a baking
instructor and I teach here on this channel I also teach over on BakerBettie.com
and I live in Chicago and I teach workshops in the Chicago area and
usually here on this channel I do pretty formal baking tutorials
they're pretty edited and nicely presented but I'm making pizza for
dinner tonight and I told my Instagram audience that I would show them how to
make it so I thought maybe I would just try to go ahead and record more of a
casual kind of vlog style video of me making the pizza and post it here on
YouTube and just kind of see what happens because I make pizza all the
time and it's actually super super easy to make if you're watching this in the
future I filmed this during the coronavirus outbreak so everybody's kind of
staying home right now and cooking so I thought this would be a good thing to
share most of the ingredients for the dough are things that you probably have
in your pantry if not they would be easy to find and then you can use any kind of
toppings you want on it we make this at least once a week it's
so so easy and I also have a sourdough version of the dough that I make all the
time as well so this one is gonna use dried yeast I will share the sourdough
version in the future as well so to start the dough all you need is you can
use unbleached all-purpose flour or you can use bread flour I'm using bread
flour and this is about 2 and 3/4 cup of flour
I always measure my ingredients by weight when I'm baking
bread, well really most of my baking I measure by weight, but especially for
bread dough recipes so this is 330 grams of flour if you're gonna measure by
weight I find that actually so much easier to do when you're making bread
but however you want but 2 3/4 cup of flour you're also gonna add one full
package of dried preferably instant or rapid rise yeast
if you only have active dry that will work as well but it's just gonna take a
little bit longer for your bread to rise now I'm also going to add about seven
grams of fine sea salt in here that should be about two teaspoons of salt
and you're gonna go ahead and add that in there so all their dry ingredients
are in your bowl now flour yeast and salt and I know I'm probably gonna get
some questions about mixing the yeast with water and adding a pinch of sugar -
it's called proofing your yeast when you do that you don't need to do that with
any of the yeast that you use for this just go ahead and add it right into your
dry ingredients now if you want to you can add a little bit of olive oil this
is optional it will make just a little bit of a more tender pizza crust I'm
adding about a tablespoon in here but that's optional you can leave it out if
you want and then our last ingredient is our warm water and we do need the water
to be warm so it wakes up our yeast gets things moving but you do want to be
careful that the waters not hot it should only be about 110 -120 degrees
Fahrenheit just kind of feel it if it feels warm to the touch that's good if
it feels hot to the touch then it's too hot for the yeast and you can kill your
yeast so if your water is a little bit cooler than like 110 degrees Fahrenheit
your yeast is still going to wake up but it just won't move as fast so err on the
side of it being a little too cool if you're kind of unsure or don't have a
thermometer to check the temperature so I'm gonna add my water right in my
mixing bowl and you need a cup which is 237 grams and I'm just going to weigh it
because that's how I like to measure okay so now that I have all of my
ingredients in the bowl I'm just going to use a spatula to mix it up a little
bit and get it started and then I'm gonna knead it a little bit no you have
a few options for how soon you use this dough
after you mix your dough you can knead it by hand and then use it within the
next hour you need to let it rest for at least 20 minutes but you can let it rest
for a longer like up to an hour an hour and a half but if you don't want to use
it the day the day you make it you want to pre make it you can mix it and you
can knead it if you want to but you can actually skip the kneading step and just
put it right in the refrigerator and let it sit in the refrigerator for up to
like four or five days and that extended time in the refrigerator it's gonna slow
your yeast down but the time is actually going to develop the gluten structure
for you instead of kneading by hand so if you want to make a no any bread or um
no need pizza dough you can but you want to let it rest on the fridge for at
least 24 hours but you can go up to like 4 or 5 days so I'm gonna use mine
tonight though so I'm gonna knead it and you can throw this in a stand mixer if
you want with your dough hook I'm gonna just do a little bit of kneading by hand
so I have flour on my work surface here let me get all my dough out I'm gonna do
a little bit of flour on top and I'm just gonna knead this for probably a
good 8 to 10 minutes do what you can if you don't knead it
completely all the way it's still gonna make fine pizza but you're gonna get
like a chewier nicer crust than if you do knead it that whole 8 to 10 minutes
but it definitely takes some arm strength to do it for that long I just
add a little bit of flour as I go if it starts feeling like it's too sticky
sticking to my hands now something that I always tell my students in my bread
classes is that if you are kneading dough my hand and it's constantly
sticking to the counter or sticking to your hand you really need to make sure
that you are going across the dough instead of down into the dough and like
pushing it into the counter you're you're trying to pull it and stretch it
this way instead of down into it and as you knead it it
it will get less I'm sticky and more elastic so I'm not trying to add tons
and tons of flour to this I'm gonna hold back as much as I can so that I get a
really nice soft dough I don't want it to get really hard and dry so I'll come
back and show you after I've done kneading this. okay so I just wanted to
give you a closer up of view of the kneading of the dough as you can see I am
stressing it out and folding it back over and kind of turning it 90 degrees
each time I'm not going down into the counter I'm going across the dough my
dough is really really smooth its sticky but it's not like gluing itself to my
hands or to the counter and yeah it just feels really really nice so my favorite
way to kind of check to see if your dough is done being needed is you round
it up into a tight ball you do have to kind of around it and get some tension
over the top to do this and then I'm just dipping my fingers and a little bit
of flour and I'm gonna press down in on it and if it immediately fills in that
hole that you pressed in on it and it bounces up then you have a good gluten
structure if that hole very very slowly fills in then you need to do a little
more work on it but I think this dough is good to go so this is gonna make two
pizzas so I'm gonna divide it in half and I'm gonna take each half and kind of
round it into a nice ball give it a little bit of tension not too much just
get it in a nice ball and now I am going to dust a decent amount of flour over
the top excuse my terrible camerawork I'm not used
to doing this on my phone but I have both pieces of dough here they're both
kind of nicely dusted with some flour and now I'm just going to cover them
with a clean kitchen towel and I'm gonna let me sit while I prep my ingredients
and prep my oven these need to sit for a minimum of 20 minutes but longer is better
they'll have a little more flavor they'll have more air in them so I
usually go around an hour but just kind of like however your schedule works I'm
going to show you how to prep the oven now and then the ingredients that I use
for my pizza so to prep your oven you ideally want at least one pizza stone if
you have two that's even better if you do not have a pizza stone you can use a
sheet pan or a cookie sheet turned upside down so that there's no like
edges or lips on it and you can kind of use that as your pizza stone it does not
work quite as well as a real pizza stone but it will be better than nothing
because you want your pizza to go in on a really hot surface so that the bottom
of the crust immediately starts cooking and gets crisp now the top pizza stone
is going to give some like heat down from the top so I'm gonna preheat both
of these in my oven the one I'm cooking on is in the bottom third of my oven the
one that's just adding some extra heating is basically on the very top
rack in my oven so I'm gonna preheat both of them but then I'm only going to
put my pizza on the bottom one and yes I know my oven is dirty I don't care so
you want to pre-heat your oven to the highest temperature you can for our oven
it's 550 degrees and you want to give it at least 20 minutes preferably more it
needs to be get very very very hot so as hot as you can get it at least 20
minutes I do mine sometimes up to an hour open your windows it's gonna get
very hot in your kitchen but yeah so that's how you prep your oven okay for
toppings we keep it super simple we love a good margarita pizza so that's
typically what we do a lot of times we'll just buy a good store-bought sauce
but this time I just took we had a can of crushed tomatoes I went ahead and
just added some salt a little bit of sugar to kind of cut the acidity and
then I added some fresh garlic in there I will taste this and adjust if I need a
little more salt in there I will but I just keep it super simple no need for
anything fancy and then we have fresh mozzarella I just tore it into some
hunks and then torn fresh basil and that's it
super super simple we'll do the sauce will do the mozzarella on top and then
once the pizza comes out of the oven while it's still hot we'll add the fresh
basil on top and it's just a really delicious simple margherita pizza this
is also probably four times the amount of sauce we need for tonight's pizza so
I'll save this and we'll make pizza again soon we make pizza all the time so
it will not go to waste but you definitely do not need this much sauce
okay so I let these rest they've actually been resting for about 45
minutes so that gave my oven plenty of time to preheat you can see the dough
got really relaxed and it's really nice and soft now so now I can go ahead and
stretch it and I have just a cutting board here that I'm gonna use sort of as
my pizza peel and I'm gonna liberally dust it with some just cornmeal and
that's going to help my pizza slide right off onto the baking stone when we
go into the oven okay so just shape the dough you don't
really want to use a rolling pin whenever you shape pizza dough or you're
just going to get all of that air out of the dough so what I do is I just start
by taking my fingers and kind of pressing the dough out to sort of make a
edge like a little crust and then I press it all down to where it's somewhat
flat keeping that edge intact and then I just go ahead and pick it up and I
actually let gravity kind of do the work for me and I'm keeping my hands kind of
out near the edge and I'm kind of holding them out wide and letting the
dough just sort of stretch with gravity as I turn it and if there's parts of the
dough that are getting a little too thin kind of trying to avoid putting your
hands there to let it stretch there and try to get it in the
rights that are a little bit thicker so that you don't rip the dough or get one
spot that's really really thin now if your dough's really fighting you it
probably means that you need to just let it relax for a little longer alright so
once you get your dose stretched you're just gonna put it right on your pizza
peel if you have a pizza peel or cutting board that has the cornmeal underneath
it and then I like to pick it up and just like make sure that it's gonna
slide around before I start adding toppings because if it's too sticky
underneath it before you add toppings it's gonna be really hard to get it off
okay and then we're just gonna keep it super simple we're just gonna put a
little bit of this sauce down and the fresh mozzarella and then we will top it
with the fresh bagel when it comes out of the oven you don't want to do really
really thick sauce or heavy toppings or it will take longer to cook it'll be
hard to to slide it off your pizza peel okay we are ready to go in the oven okay
so now we're just going to go in the oven and the way you do this to get in
the oven it's a push and then a pull you're not trying to like tip it off
your pizza peel you just want to push it forward and pull it back so try and show
you here then remember your pieces Stone is super hot so be careful but push
towards pull back that's it
all right we are ready to pull our pizza out
and it looks amazing you can see that the middle is kind of like molten
doesn't mean the crust is not set it definitely is but you want to wait to
cut it until that middle kind of like cools down a little bit it will set a
little better and then after you pull it out of the oven while it's still really
hot you can add your torn basil right on top so that it gets warmed up and smells
really amazing but you don't really want to put the fresh basil in the oven
because it will burn so you want to put it on right when it comes out
okay if we're gonna go eat dinner I hope you enjoyed this video let me know in
the comments if you make this and how it goes I'm always happy to answer any of
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