Pizza Night!

Every Saturday night is pizza night at our house. We plan our weekends around it, our adult children visit for it, and we feel sad if the family has pizza night when one of us is missing! There are 3 components that can not be changed: 
1. Pizza-any kind will do. We have ordered out, made our own, and bought frozen pizza. It all depends on our finances at the time, and how much time we want to take to prepare it.
2. Soda-one of the few times we buy soda, along with birthdays and other celebratory occasions.
3. A movie-usually the sillier the better, always family friendly.
Tonight we had homemade pizza, and watched, "Tangled" for the movie. It's one of our very favorites, and we love to sing along! It would be an amazing Broadway show, don't you think? We made pepperoni, bacon and onion, and pepperoni, bacon, and red pepper pizzas. Yum!

Are you drooling yet? Would you like the recipe for this incredibly easy pizza crust?
O.K., you've got it!


Easy and Amazing Pizza Crust

5 cups all purpose flour
1 Tablespoon sugar or honey
2 teaspoons salt (or 3 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt)
1 teaspoon instant yeast
2 Tablespoons olive oil
1 3/4 to 2 cups room-temperature water

Combine all of the ingredients in a large mixing bowl and stir vigorously with a wooden spoon. After you've combined all of the ingredients, set the dough aside to rest for 5 minutes. Stir again for 3 to 5 minutes, adding more water or flour if necessary. Generally speaking, you want the dough to be wetter and stickier than your typical bread dough. It should be dry enough that it holds together and pulls away from the side of the bowl when you mix it, but it doesn't need to be dry enough to knead by hand

I doubled the recipe and let it rise in a stainless steel bowl with plastic wrap covering the dough. I generously splashed olive oil to cover the ball of dough completely.

I let the dough rise until we were ready to bake, about an hour later. You can oil your pizza pans, or dust with cornmeal, whichever you choose. I oiled mine, and they didn't stick. The double recipe was enough to make 3 fairly large pizzas. I used 2 rectangular cookie sheets and one large round one. I probably could have gotten another pizza out of the dough if I spread it thinner. 

Set the oven as high as you dare. I set my convection oven to 500 degrees.  They baked in about 12 minutes, it will probably be shorter if you make a thinner crust.

We watched carefully at the end of cooking-at 500 degrees it won't take long to go from "perfect" to "scorched"!

 Now, get your favorite drink, a funny movie, your kids, your neighbor, your dogs and start a family tradition!