Thin Pizza – possible best ever!
As is tradition, I prepared a batch of thin pizza dough today for a visit from my father who loves thin pies. I have been playing with the Cracker Crust Thin Pizza Dough recipe from pizzamaking.com for a while. In particular, I’ve been trying to find the right amount of water to use in order to form a dough ball that comes together and is somewhat manageable yet provides that crackery texture when baked. This has turned out to be a bit challenging for me. When I use the exact amounts of water and flour called for in the recipe, the result is a crumbly mess during mixing. This time, I went slightly short on the flour and a scant over on the water in an attempt to compensate.
I mixed the ingredients in my breadmaker until they combined. This is a misleading word because there really was still a lot of flour that hadn’t found moisture after 4 minutes of mixing. I decided to dump the whole thing on the counter and continue combining the mix by hand. This was difficult and even a bit hard on the forearms as this is very stiff dough. Once it was balled I placed it in a bowl and allowed it to rise at room temperature for about 9 hours – this is one thing I really like about this dough – you don’t have to wait a day to eat it!
When it came time to stretch the dough, I placed it on the counter and rolled it with a rolling pin. This was another exercise for my arms. The dough had relaxed a bit, but it was still very tough. Since I do not have a cutter pan, I have been stretching the dough to the size of my 16 inch screen then trimming the edges with a pizza cutter to create a nice round edge.
After being stretched, I topped the pie with Neapolitan sauce to the edge of the crust, pepperoni and mozzarella cheese. I then baked the pizza in a 500 degree oven on the pizza screen but with the pizza stone in place. In fact, after about 3 minutes, I used my metal pizza peel to take the pizza off of the screen and place it directly onto the stone. This technique seems to work very well until I get my hands on a decent cutter screen.
The pizza baked for 9 minutes and came out looking great! The flavor and texture of the crust went wonderfully with pepperoni. My dad was pleased and the pie was gone in minutes! This was definitely a “best yet” treat for this dough recipe. I am close, but I think I will continue to play with water content in an attempt to give my arms a break!
