Making Pizza Dough in a Bread Maker

I really can't recommend bread makers enough. They are great tools. Waking up every morning to the smell of fresh bread is amazing. Even better? Spreading butter over warm bread. Over a year or so of making your own bread, a bread machine will also save you money; it costs about for several weeks worth of bread flour. You'll also give yourself access to tons of bread variety - there are vast tomes of bread machine recipes out there.

All that said? That's not why we're here. I like to talk about pizza sauce recipes. And pizza sauce needs to go on a pizza crust. Today, I'd like to detail my recipe for pizza dough, using a bread maker.

Bread Maker

This will make a pizza crust between 14 and 16 inches.

Water-----------1 cup
Olive Oil---------1.5 tbs
Salt-------------.5 tsp
all purpose flour- 1.5 cups
wheat flour------1.5 cups
baking yeast---- 1.5 tsp

It's best to put in your liquid ingredients first, followed by flour and salt. Make sure to put the salt in one corner of the bread maker, you don't want to deactivate the yeast accidentally. Even out the ingredients, a good tap against the countertop will work, then put a small divot in the flour for your yeast. Your bread maker will have a "dough" setting. That's what you want to use--obviously we don't want to bake the dough in the maker!

When the dough is finished, roll it out into your preferred shape, square works pretty well if you lack a pizza stone. Place your index of your non-dominant hand along the side of the crust and use the index finger of your dominant hand to fold the edge of the dough over your index finger. This will form a small "roll" in the dough. By repeating that process along the whole edge of the dough, you'll form a crust that will bake up nicely.

There you are! You've made a crust. Slather it with pizza sauce and put on toppings, then bake. I like to bake at 325 for about 25 minutes, long enough to bake the crust, without burning the cheese. Try it out and let me know what you think!

Making Pizza Dough in a Bread Maker