Cookaholics Bulletin Board

I pre-bake (blind bake) my pizza crusts and store wrapped in the freezer. I get less sogginess by pre-baking and a lot of convenience. Heat the oven (30 minute minimum for getting the stone's temperature up), grab some previously made sauce, shred the mozz and scavenge some toppings from the fridge. By the time the oven and stone are at temp, the crust is cool but thawing. Cover with sauce and toppings, cook for 8 or so minutes (aiming for 450F or higher oven temperature) until the crust browns, and the mozz melts. You got pizza brudda!

We generally cook (in the oven) on parchment paper. It turns out a thin crust, very crispy pizza with a minimum of work, provided you have invested some effort in the previous making and storing of crusts and sauce.

This is changing in our house with imminent arrival of my charcoal and wood pizza insert for my Weber. I will probably go to Amy's method since we won't pre-bake the crust, simply make it and freeze for future use. Love those bread machines where I can dump the ingredients in and come back in an hour or two and have dough. Yeah, a sort of slothful pursuit of perfection.

Could easily work into winos funny meal plan

Unless you make your pizza into a smiley face, there is nothing about pizza that is humorous!

Except for ...

An American businessman goes to Japan on a business trip, but he hates
Japanese food, so he asks the concierge at his hotel if there’s any place around
where he can get American food.
The concierge tells him he’s in luck; there’s a pizza place that just opened,
and they deliver. The concierge gives the businessman the phone number, and he
goes back to his room and orders a pizza.
Thirty minutes later, the delivery guy shows up to the door with the pizza.
The businessman takes the pizza, and starts sneezing uncontrollably.
He asks the delivery man, ”What the heck did you put on this pizza?”
The delivery man bows deeply and says, ”We put on the pizza what you ordered,
pepper only.”

Good thing I don't make a living as a comic!

Tatoosh,

That joke is completely off-base! There's no such thing as food delivery in Tokyo.

Anyway ...

In addition to Amy's frozen balls, here's a couple other options for pizza on weeknights:

1. Some upscale grocery stores sell pre-made balls of dough. We get them from our grocer, and they're pretty good. Not as good as homemade, but much better than baked pizza "crust".

2. Pizza Rustica is an Italian tradition of making deep-dish pizza using a short crust. Normally it's done as a thick covered pie which takes 45m to an hour to bake, but can be done thinner and faster. The main difficulty here is the chilling time before rolling out the short dough, but seems like you could cheat your way around that somehow.

This thread prompted me to make pizza dough this morning and pop it in the fridge. Since my husband is at home all day, he can warm up the balls this afternoon...

Technically these would be your balls?

You AND Amy...man...you meet people spend time with them and really think you know them...

The request to do a yeast-based dough in an hour and a half is pretty challenging considering it takes a while to gather ingredients (10 min), bloom the yeast (10 min), mix and knead (20 min), proof (60 min), final knead and portioning (10) will burn through that time in a hurry just making the dough (Your requirement was 90 min MAX, we've violated that with 110 min so far). And we're not even talking about shaping, resting, prepping ingredients, assembly and cooking.

I suggest with your time constraints to buy a pre-made pizza dough at the grocery store. They come in regular or thin crust, flour, whole wheat, gluten free, mini-size, whatever. Figure a store run takes 30 minutes right there, then you have an hour to grate your cheeses, slice the meats, chop your pineapple, saute your anchovies and get it cooked.

Making yeast based dough, even if they're pancakes will take a while. Toss in the towel and just buy a ready made crust, build your own from there. Give that a shot, see if you can get what you want.

Thin pizza crusts are inherently dry and cracker-like, so sensitivity to freshness is less noticeable. IMHO, even regular crusts are can get by with store-bought. It's the thick crusts that you'd want to make sure turns out like fresh bread.

here is a recipe for a very quick pizza dough that I have used in a pinch...it is actually quite good...

Ingredients:

1 tablespoon sugar
1 package active dry yeast (21/4 teaspoons)
1 1/3 cups lukewarm water (105-115 degrees)
1 tablespoon olive oil
3 1/2 cups AP flour
1 tablespoon salt

Method:

In a measuring cup with a spout, add sugar and yeast to the warm water and stir. Allow to rest for 3 or 4 minutes and when foamy, add the olive oil and stir again.

Place flour and salt in the bowl of a food processor and pulse a few times to blend.

With the processor on, quickly pour the yeast mixture through the feed tube and process dough until it forms a ball , about 30 seconds. Let the dough rest in the processor, covered with plastic wrap for about 10 minutes.

Remove from processor , cut in half and roll out to the thickness you desire. Either pre bake for five minutes and top, or top directly and slide onto stone and bake.


Note: I have never pre-baked it....I just use it as I would any other pizza dough.
It really is pretty good and makes for an easy mid-week, I forgot to thaw the dough, pizza.

As long as she's not carrying them in her purse this will work.

Paul,

I can’t remember if Cook’s Illustrated recipes still work in the interpenetrating dimensions of your Xenoverse, but if they do, two of my favorite weeknight pizza recipes can be found there.

Pizza Margherita’s generously yeasted [1%] mix of AP and cake flour will double in about an hour after food processor mixing. Like any dough with copious amounts of yeast there is little or no fermentation during the rise so flavor can suffer a bit, but it is very fast and convenient with a no-cook sauce.

Thin-Crust Pizza is an excellent choice if you can mix today and eat tomorrow. Minimally yeasted [.30%], mixed with ice water and immediately refrigerated for at least 24 hours, there is enough fermentation to improve flavor and little gassing. Dough is divided after fermentation so handling the dough will warm it some and it will be ready to shape and bake in about an hour. It is very easy to shape in spite of the fact that uses bread flour.