Food Processor Pizza Crust: It’s all about the flour
Prior to going on my first trip to Italy I researched places to eat and what to eat and what not to eat. In my research many people frowned on ordering pizza in Italy, because it was a “touristy” thing to do. However, I have had some of the best pizza in Italy. On our first trip we ate at a wood-fired pizza place just down the street from the Spanish Steps. It was some of the best pizza I had ever eaten by far. Italy pizza is simple and a lot of times just a red tomato sauce over the dough with balls of mozzarella and fresh basil. Unless you don’t like pizza there is no such thing as a bad pizza in Italy. Italy pizza is not precut like we do in America, but you just pull apart the pizza like a piece of bread.
About 5-6 years ago the frozen organic pizza my husband and I enjoyed wasn’t on the store shelves any longer. At that point and time, I decided to start making my own pizza from scratch. My husband wanted a wheat dough pizza, but an all-wheat dough is not possible as you need the gluten that whole wheat flour doesn’t offer. I was able to make a recipe that was about half wheat and half white flour. Which has done the job and was pretty good, but the crust never seemed to match the flavor of the pizza I had eaten in Italy.
I decided to see what other types of flour I could use for the crust to bring back the flavor of Italy we had experienced. On one of my trips to the grocery store I found a flour that was labeled pizza flour. Turns out this is a 00 flour that is used in making pizza in Italy and why my experience in Italy had been different than my home experience. This is a refined flour with the whitest part of the wheat and milled very fine to a super soft flour, that makes for a tender and silky pizza crust. I have developed a combination of 00 flour and wheat flour that brings me back to that pizza crust I experienced in Italy.
The recipe is below.
Ingredients
- 1 1/4 cup pizza flour (must be 00 flour)
- 1 1/3 cup wheat flour
- 1 cup very warm water
- 2 tablespoons olive oil
- 2 teaspoons yeast (I use Fleischmann's Active Dry Yeast)
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
Instructions
- Add pizza flour, yeast, and salt to food processor bowl. Pulse a couple of times to mix the dry ingredients.
- Add olive oil and warm water to the food processor and pulse several times until a soft sticky dough forms.
- Add wheat flour to dough mixture and pulse a few times to combine. The mixture will turn into a ball and start spinning on the outer edge of the food processor bowl.
- Place dough ball into bowl sprayed with cooking spray. Set in a warm dry place and cover bowl with a dish towel.
- Allow dough to rise for 30 minutes prior to using.
- This dough will make either two 12-inch pizza circles or three 9-inch thin crust pizza circles. I usually divided into thirds, use one and freeze the other 2 dough balls in freezer safe plastic bags.
- To cook I heat my oven with pizza stone on the bottom of the oven to 500 degrees. Once heated I turn down to 450 degrees before baking the pizza.
- Roll out dough and prick with fork to prevent air pockets in the pizza. Brush with 1 tbsp olive oil and par bake for 7 minutes. I prefer par baking as it helps to
- Add toppings and bake for another 7 minutes.
- Per recipe
- Energy: 1380 kcal / 5768 kJ
- Fat: 34 g
- Protein: 40 g
- Carbs: 236 g
