I tried the Alton Brown Pizza Dough recipe this weekend. I did my usual 1/2 and 1/2 with whole wheat flour. (FWIW, I use King Arthur White Whole Wheat flour so my brain doesn’t think I’m eating ‘whole wheat’.)
Before buying the mixer, I would spend 30 minutes hand-kneading the dough and wearing myself out. Now I can set it in the mixer for 15-20 minutes and spend another 10 just cleaning up the parts. Pretty easy.
A long time ago, my blogpal, Johno, told me that over-kneading is only a problem with machine kneading. I think that machine kneading with the mixer’s dough hook is great for developing gluten in a pizza dough, but I might stick to hand-kneading for actual bread. I kind of like the tender crumb that comes with hand-kneading. (Bread actually requires only about 10 minutes of kneading so it makes me a lot less tired.)
I think as a novice with the mixer, I took some of the directions a little too conservatively and ended having to put in a lot more flour to tighten up the dough into a ball. It ended up taking 30 minutes anyway. Plus I didn’t quite activate the yeast with hot water. (Recipe says ‘warm’, perhaps some temperatures would have helped, thank you.) The dough was flat and not springy.
Que sera sera. There will be other attempts I am sure.
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I’ll have to give that recipe a try. I’ve made many poor attempts at pizza dough lately…having a mixer didn’t help me. I guess I just don’t know what I’m doing.
Good luck!
@Eden-Keep plugging away. It’s definitely an art form. It doesn’t help that the Kitchen Detectives say it’s really the water in NY that makes NY pizza the best.
Try out a few other recipes and different techniques. Try rising in the fridge (not my favorite), a warm oven, on the counter, etc. All of those things make a difference.
I usually use a poor man’s sourdough starter for pizza. 1 pkg yeast, 1 tsp dark brown sugar, 2/3 cup warm filtered water and 1 cup flour. Mix together, cover and place in a warm location overnight.
Add 2 to 2-1/2 cups flour and 1 Tbsp good Olive Oil to the starter, kneed in your stand mixer for 10-15 minutes, cover and let rise for a hour (or place in fridge for another night, it’ll develop even more flavor).
Form dough into a pizza shape and dust peel with cornmeal before placing pizza on peel. Allow to rest 10 minutes, make sure it isn’t sticking before adding favorite sauce, cheese and toppings.
Bake in as hot an oven as you can get until golden brown and delicious (GBD).
Salt. I forgot to add 1 tsp salt.
Sorry. Don’t you be sorry and forget to add it to your recipe.