Introduction I started making this pizza after I had left over dough from my quick ciabatta recipe, (which you can make by following the same instructions but doubling the ingredients). Anyway, I like this better than the traditional olive oil enriched overnight proofed pizza doughs. It takes only about 2 hours start to finish to make, so you can make it after work. A kitchen aid style stand mixer is required, unless you're comfortable working with high hydration doughs and hand mixing. People have assured me it's possible, but it's much easier with a mixer. You could also use a food processor to mix the dough, but the time will be much shorter. Probably less than a minute. The resulting pizza is light, delicious, and full of huge holes in the crust. If you grow tomatoes and basil in your garden, this pizza is just the ticket.

Ingredients Crust 250 g Bread Flour (All Purpose will also work in a pinch)

1 cup water

1 tsp yeast

7 g salt Toppings 2 Tomatoes

Handful of fresh basil

Olive Oil

Mozzarella Cheese Step 1, make the dough Mix the flour,yeast,salt & water in your stand mixer with the paddle on high speed, it won't look like it is doing anything for a while. Then after about 10 minutes or so it will start to come together Initial Ingredients



Initial mixing, notice the dough is sticking to the sides Dough is done as soon as it stop sticking to the sides and is just coming off the bottom. It has the consistency of rubber but is very sticky.

Step 2, proof until triples. I like to proof this dough in a narrow plastic container that has markings on it, it's important that the dough triples so it's easier to observe that then just throwing it in a bowl. Spray the container you use with spray oil, you'll thank me later. Be quick moving the dough from the mixer to the proofing container. You'll probobly still end up with a little dough stuck to your hands, because it's very wet. Here's my dough, now it will be very easy to see when it triples. Step 3, heat oven and shape pizza. Place your pizza stone into the oven and preheat to 500 degrees. Now on a heavily floured counter, pour out your dough into a nice blob. Now turn a baking sheet upside down and cover it with parchment paper. Not wax paper! Parchment paper is silicone treated and won't melt or light on fire in your hot oven. It will make getting this thing in the oven much easier. I like to get the dough into a rough pizza shape while on the counter by grabbing it from underneath and stretching. Since the dough is floured on the bottom, you won't stick too much. You don't want it paper thin, but fairly thin in the center

The next step is tricky, we need to get our pizza to the parchment paper on the baking sheet. Spray the parchment with oil so you can slide it around.

So pick up this thing and quickly move it to the parchment, if you need to do some reshaping once it's on the parchment move fast. It will eventually stick to the parchment, but spraying the parchment with oil will help. Phew! That was a close one, but I got in on the parchment. And it resembles a pizza dough! Now it's time to top the pizza, I really just want some light olive oil, garlic powder, fresh tomatoes, basil and cheese. If you want sauce, you're on your own. You can really do whatever you want from this point. One thing I've noticed with my oven though is that if I put the cheese on from the start, it'll burn and I'll have a raw pizza with burnt cheese. So I usually add cheese 2/3 of the way through baking.

Step 4, Baking Time to bake! I always trim the parchment so it fits the pizza since loose parchment will brown a bit and might even catch on fire in the oven. So you can see in the photo above I've trimmed it up. Once your oven has hit 500 degrees, slide your cheese-less pizza on to the pizza stone using the baking sheet. If you don't have a stone, just leave it on the sheet. After 5 minutes my pizza looked like this, nice oven spring! Once the crust has just started to brown (after about 8 minutes for me). I add the cheese. Now I just let the cheese get to the point that I like and the crust to be nice and brown and I'm done. The all together baking time for this pie was 14 minutes. Finished! Looks good to me, though maybe i put on too much olive oil since it kind of pooled in the center. Also I probably could have put the cheese on a minute or two earlier since it's not brown all over. I like to brush a little melted butter & Parmesan cheese on the crust, as well. But that's up to you.

Yum, yum yum. Crust is looking perfectly golden. Once again, nice airy crust, not dense and sticky, but light and delightful. That's the pay off from our 100% hydration ultra lean sticky dough.











