Perfect Pizza Dough Recipe

Pizza is so cheap that if you're going to put forth the effort to make it at home, it'd better be good. Over the years, I've tried half a dozen different recipes, always resorting back to trusty Papa Murphy's. If you bake it in your own oven, that counts as cooking, right?

Finally, I found the perfect pizza dough recipe. It would be inconsiderate of me not to share it. Thank you, Joe at Culinary in the Country! I actually changed a few things about his recipe, but the basic essence is the same. Check out his original recipe for instructions using a food processor rather than a breadmaker.

An individual-sized (half recipe) BBQ chicken pizza I made for Baby and me one night that Nick wasn't eating with us. I know, I need to work on shaping it so the crust isn't lopsided. Please don't judge it based on my poor photography skills :)

Recently, my pizza was put to the ultimate test: Halo Night. Nick gets together with a group of guys every Wednesday to play Halo (a video game, for those lucky enough not to know what that is). They all take turns hosting it, except Nick. He was the only one with a pathetic little TV that just wasn't good enough for Halo, apparently. Finally, Nick got his dream TV, so we had the group over at our house last week for the first time. I made one pepperoni, one BBQ chicken, and one veggie supreme pizza. These guys are used to Little Caesars, so I was a bit nervous about sneaking in whole wheat flour, but they didn't even notice. They loved the pizzas! Of course, I also made a delicious salad with lettuce from my garden, which not one of them even touched. Must be a gamer thing.

Whole Wheat Pizza Dough

(adapted from Culinary in the Country, which was adapted from Eating Well)

1 1/2 cups white whole wheat flour*

1/2 cup all-purpose flour

2 1/4 teaspoons yeast

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon honey

3/4 cup warm water

1 tablespoon olive oil

2 teaspoons vital wheat gluten

Combine water and yeast in bread machine; let sit for a couple minutes. Add remaining ingredients. Set bread machine to Dough Only setting and let knead, rise, and punch down (approximately 1 1/2 hours, or until timer beeps). Stretch and/or roll dough out onto a baking sheet or pizza stone, cover with a kitchen towel, and let rise until it reaches desired thickness (none for thin crust, 30 minutes for thick crust). Top with sauce, cheese, and toppings and bake at 450 degrees for 12-15 minutes.

*I used freshly ground white whole wheat flour, so if you plan to use the regular red whole wheat flour more commonly found at the grocery store, you may want to use 50/50 whole wheat and all-purpose.

Bon Appetit!