Wisdom Wednesday- Homemade Pizza Recipe

So this Pizza dough recipe is my favorite for pizza and breadsticks, sometimes I even use it for rolls and cinnamon rolls.  Here you go, enjoy!

Homemade Pizza

Ingredients and instructions for dough:

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

In a medium sized mixing bowl combine: 1 tablespoon of active dry yeast, 1 tablespoon of sugar ( you could use white sugar, organic, or honey here), and 1 1/4 cups of warm ( not too hot and not too cold).  Stir this together to dissolve.  Let this sit a couple minutes to get a little bubbly.  This is actually how you can tell if your yeast is good, let it sit 5 minutes if it is bubbly it is good.  It will smell yeasty too.  Now add 2 tablespoon oil, I use olive oil.  Then add 2 3/4 cups of flour and 1 teaspoon of salt.  Stir together, I use a fork to do this.  When you can't stir any more, then start kneading by hand.  I do this in my bowl, just rotating the bowl with one hand and kneading (folding the dough in and over) with my other hand. I keep adding a little flour at a time if it gets sticky.  Knead the dough for 5 minutes.  This helps the dough to be able to stretch. After kneading your Dough should be nice and smooth.  Now it's time to use it.

Today, I made a stuffed crust pizza.  Here is how:

 For my pizza round I only need a little more than half the dough.  So I split it.  Spray your pizza
stone or pan with cooking spray.  Hand knead dough into a circle and place in pan or stone and start
from the center and push the dough outwards, forming a circle if you are using a pizza stone.  I have also used a large shallow cake pan and it worked great too.

For the stuffed crust pizza, I used cheese sticks, aka. string cheese. I used three of them.  Pull them apart half length wise then, break them in thirds and place along the edge of the pizza like so:

Now fold dough over the cheese and press against inner dough, like so:

 

Continue the whole way around.

Now add your sauce.  I just used bottled marinara sauce.  You can make your own sauce or use store bought pizza sauce too.  Spread it onto your pizza evenly like this:

Add  your shredded cheese. I use the pizza blend cheese, spread a good even amount like so:

 You could stop here if you just want a cheese pizza or add your choice of toppings.  I did low sodium pepperoni.  Sprinkle outer crust with coarse salt and place in oven.

It took my pizza 20 minutes to be nice and golden and the cheese bubbly.

Now with the rest of the dough you could make another smaller pizza, or bread sticks  or a desert pizza.  I opted for the desert pizza today, and actually I tried something new.  Usually I make a cinnamon desert pizza, but today I opted for raspberry.  Which I must say, smells wonderful! Spray a cake pan and press out dough.  I then used homemade raspberry jam and spread it evenly onto the pizza dough.

 I did this while my pepperoni pizza was in the oven.  So it sat and rose a little while the pizza was cooking.  Then I put it in the same 375 degree oven for 10-15 minutes.  Let cool a little bit and mix up  1 tbsp of milk and 1/2 cup of powdered sugar a little bit of vanilla extract would be nice too.  Just drizzle it one top..

 Hope you enjoy this.  Let me know if how you like it.