Pizza Night at our place is generally a big deal. Sometimes we order in from our favorite pizza joint, Buccaneer Pizza, and sometimes it’s frozen pizza from Trader Joe’s (even Costco if our friend Eric is bringing the feast). As of late I’ve been making pizza from scratch at home, with pizza dough and sauce TJs, but I have friends who always make their own pizza dough and claim it’s as easy as pie (sorry ’bout the pun). So after tooling around with some recipes online, I came up with this one. It uses a bread machine, so if you have one gathering dust in the highest cabinet in your kitchen, it’s time to crawl up there and bring it down for a test run. In my bread machine the whole recipe takes less than 90 minutes, which is less time than it would take for me to go to TJs, get completely sidetracked be all the other cool stuff I want to buy, and drive home.
Incidentally when I’m using fresh dough I generally do not make one big pizza. Instead I make tiny pizzas in muffin tins (big thanks to Catherine at weelicious for the inspiration on that one). This recipe made 2 dozen pizza muffins.
INGREDIENTS
8 oz light-colored beer, room temperature (I used Peroni, which is an Italian lager)
2 T. butter
2 T. sugar
1 t. salt
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour (try using one with a high-protein content so that your crust is chewier, like King Arthur)
2 1/4 tsp. yeast (1 packet)
olive oil
DIRECTIONS
Put all ingredients except olive oil in a bread machine in the order recommended by the manufacturer (note: in my case, it went flour, salt, sugar, butter, yeast, beer). Select Dough setting, and press “Start”. Remove dough from bread machine when cycle is complete.
The Dilettante's Table 