Susannah Styles: The Best Thing I've Ever Made

Three Cheese White Pizza

Up until yesterday, I had never attempted making homemade pizza dough. It was too intimidating. I came across this recipe from the blog the The Curvy Carrot on Pinterest. After reading through the recipe, I decided that it seemed simple enough. I did change it up a bit and made it even easier. Here's what you need.

For the dough:

1 packet or 2 and 1/4 tsp of fast rise yeast

4 cups bread flour

1 and 1/2 tsp salt

water

2 tbsp olive oil

Instructions for dough:

1. In your standing mixer using the paddle attachment, add the fast rise yeast, bread flour, and salt in the bowl and combine.

2. Then, slowly add water until the dough looks like this.

3. Now, take off the paddle attachment and put on the hook.

Mix on low for 5 minutes until the dough has formed a cohesive, soft mass.

4. Take the dough out of the mixing bowl and place it into a greased bow. I used olive oil cooking spray. Then cover the bowl with saran wrap. Place the bowl aside for 2 hours.

5. After two hours, the dough should have risen and look like the picture below. Punch the dough down to release the air and transfer it to a floured work space. I used a baking sheet.

6. Spread the dough out slowly to avoid holes or tearing. Do the best you can to make it into a circle for the pizza pan. If you don't have a pizza pan, you can use a regular baking sheet and have a square pizza. I bought my pizza pan from Kroger for like $13-15.

The dough recipe above makes enough for two pizzas. I halved the dough and wrapped one half tightly in saran wrap, put in a Ziploc and froze it. Now I'm good to go when I want to make a pizza again!

For the pizza:

olive oil

4 cloves crushed garlic

8 oz fresh mozzarella, thinly sliced

3 oz goat cheese

1/4 cup Parmesan cheese

fresh basil, thinly sliced

Instructions for pizza:

1. I like to pretend that I am hosting my own cooking show, so I set up almost everything ahead of time. Go ahead and preheat the oven to 450 degrees. Here, I have brushed olive oil onto my pizza pan and have crushed 4 cloves of garlic into 2 tbsp of olive oil. The pan I have has little holes all over it so I placed a dishcloth underneath it.

2. I transferred my pizza dough from my floured baking sheet on my oiled pizza pan. I already have my goat cheese and sliced mozzarella ready to go too.

3. First, I brushed the garlic infused olive oil all over the dough. Next I added the mozzarella first and tried to space it out pretty well. Then, I sprinkled the goat cheese on top of that. Don't worry if the goat cheese is clumpy because it will melt. Finally, I grated the Parmesan cheese onto the pizza. All set!

4. Pop the pizza into the oven for about 18-20 mins. There were several times while baking that I thought the pizza was done because of how browned the cheese was. But the crust took a little while longer to get crispy so I lifted up the edges of pizza and looked underneath. I could see how the crust looked under the toppings and not just how the crust looked. That was the best way for me to determine when it was ready to come out of the oven.