Pizza Dough

I love homemade pizza! It is much tastier and cheaper than your local pizza shop and it really doesn't take that long to prepare!

Equipment
There are a few key pieces of equipment you need to really make excellent pizza:

• Ceramic Pizza stone, La Cloche or brick oven
• Pizza Peel

The key to really great pizza is a brick oven. Camino, a local restaurant here in Oakland, has a wonderful brick oven and very lovely things comes out of his oven.

If you happen to be one of the millions of Americans who does not have a brick oven in their backyard, don't despair! I don't either! A ceramic pizza stone or a La Cloche for deep dish pizza works equally well. Using la Cloche is excellent for deep dish pizzas, while a ceramic pizza stone is better for thin crust pizzas.

You can purchase a Pizza stone at most grocery stores and kitchen specialty shops:

Bath Bed & Beyond
Williams-Sonoma

I actually got  mine at the local Safeway. It works fantastic. I usually just keep the stone in the oven, this way, it reduces the chance that the pizza stone will break. If I need to use the oven for some other dish, I take the pizza stone out and place it on the counter for an hour or however long I will be using the over for.

The other key piece of equipment is a a pizza peel. It is essentially a giant spatula that you can sneak under the pizza dough to transport it easily. You can get away without having one, but it really helps when you need to transfer your pizza dough with all its lovely fillings from work surface to oven, and from oven to work surface. I got mine at Bath Bed and Beyond and it works great!

Ingredients
Obviously, the fresher your ingredients, the better the pizza. Having fresh active yeast really helps out, it will give your crust the light fluffy consistency. I use commercial yeast that comes in those packages of 3. They work great. Be sure to check the expiration date: the closer it is to the expiration, the less active your yeast will be, and they less fluffy and light your pizza dough will be.

I prefer to use chicken fat or duck fat to pork lard. Either will do, but I find that the duck fat lends a delicious quality to the dough. I will usually collect duck fat from a duck I am cooking and save it in the freezer. I also will collect and strain bacon fat when I am making bacon and use bacon fat. Chicken doesn't have much fat, and I usually collect chicken fat when I am making chicken stock. You can also purchase good duck or chicken fat from specialty stores, like Marin Sun Farms. The good thing about using Marin Sun Farms fat is that it is already rendered for you...you just need to melt it. It's also good to support a local company like Marin Sun Farms-they make good honest cuts of meat!

If you want to make it all vegetarian, substitute 1/4 cup warm water for the fat.

The more you bake with yeast the more spores will come into your kitchen and your oven. I am not really sure about the science behind it, but I find the more often I make pizza, the fluffier my crusts turn out.

Ingredients
Corn meal
1 package active yeast
2 teaspoons sugar
1 cup warm water
1/4 cup of chicken fat, duck fat or pork lard
3 to 4 cups of flour
2 teaspoons salt
Olive oil

Makes 2 pizza rounds

Directions
If you have an electric mixing bowl, now is the time to use it. I got a Kitchen Aid Mixer for Christmas. It works miracles, and it even comes with a dough hook! If you don't have a Kitchen Aid or an electric mixing bowl, you can do it all by hand, and it will come out just as tasty.

Whisk the yeast, sugar and fat or lard together with a whisk until the yeast and sugar dissolve, and the lard is evenly distributed. If you would like to make this vegetarian, just substitute a 1/4 cup of warm water for the lard.













Add the flour and salt and mix, using the dough hook, until the dough crawls up the dough hook. Remove the dough from the bowl. Grease the bowl with olive oil. Replace the dough. Cover with saran wrap or a clean kitchen towel, until the dough doubles in size, about 1 hour.















Roll the dough into 1 or 2 balls. Cover and let the
dough rest for an additional 20 minutes.
The dough is ready to be shaped.                              

When you are rolling out the dough, be sure to rotate the dough as you roll it out. This will help you get a nice round pizza dough.

When you get your dough rolled out, dust some corn meal on a pizza peel and transfer the dough to the pizza peel.

The best way to transfer the dough is to hang it on your rolling pin.

Then add your toppings. Then transfer the pizza peel to the oven and let the pizza slide off onto your hot pizza stone.

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