Soft & Chewy Pizza Crust

One thing is for sure.  If it’s on a pizza crust, my kids will eat it.  I find myself making homemade pizza dough quite often.  It is much more cost efficient to make it myself, especially since my kids could eat pizza every single day of their lives.  The neat thing about pizza dough is I can put almost anything on it or in it, and my picky kid will eat it.  There’s something about pizza that makes food fun to eat.  I use this recipe for pizza, calzones, sausage or pepperoni bread, and probably a thousand other things.  This is a really easy recipe with minimal ingredients.  I make it in my KitchenAid mixer with the dough hook, but I’ve also tried making it both by hand and in the bread machine with equally good results.  This pizza dough is 100% no fail. 

Ingredients:

2 1/4 teaspoons active dry yeast
1/2 teaspoon brown sugar
1 1/2 cups warm water
1 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons olive oil
3 1/3 cups all-purpose flour

1. In the mixer bowl, dissolve the yeast and brown sugar in the water and let sit for 10 minutes.
2. Add the salt and oil and stir.
3. Mix in 2 cups of the flour.
4. Mix the dough with the dough hook, and add more flour until the dough is no longer sticky and forms a large ball.
5. Place the dough into an oiled bowl.  Cover with a towel or plastic wrap and keep in a warm place until it has doubled in size.  (I usually keep mine in the microwave with the door open)
6. After about one hour, punch the dough down and form it into a ball.  Let it rest for a few minutes.  

You can now do one of two things.  Either roll it out and top it with your favorite toppings, or you can put the dough into an oiled plastic ziploc bag and freeze it for later use.  I do this quite often so I always have pizza dough ready to go whenever I need it.

This recipe makes either one really large pizza or two medium sized pizzas.  I almost always divide this dough in half before I use it.  We like to make two pizzas at a time, each with different toppings.