Cult of Carbs: Homemade Pizza

I don’t know what it is about a pandemic that has us all craving carbs or just making them for that matter. Maybe it’s the dopamine? In any case I’ve had Jake’s Pizza in my Door Dash cart for maybe a week now, but I have too much fresh groceries to be able to justify eating out at all. So after seeing Joel’s Instagram story on crunchy homemade pizza crust, I endeavored to bug him on Friday about what recipe he used and make a delicious pizza this weekend. Joel used @smittenkitchen’s lazy pizza dough recipe and my weekend plans were made. I did make some tweaks just to make it a bit healthier and use up the ingredients I had in my fridge.

Ingredients

6-hr Dough

  • 1.5 cups of all-purpose flour
  • 1.5 cups of wheat flour
  • 1/2 teaspoon of active dry yeast
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons of salt
  • 1 1/4 cup of water – warm so that the yeast activated a bit better

Toppings

  • 1 can tomato sauce
  • 2 oz ground pork
  • Italian seasoning to taste
  • 1/4 green squash
  • 1 1/2 cups of mozzarella
  • 1/2 cup ricotta
  • 2 cups lacinato kale
  • Dried basil to taste
  • 2 tbsp lemon juice
  • 1/4 cup olive oil
  • Red pepper flakes (optional)
  • Parmesan (optional)

A lot of my toppings were really left overs from other meals.

Instructions

Dough prep

  • In kitchenaid stand mixer add all ingredients to the bowl, and use the dough hook to blend until it’s well mixed. Dough can be rough, but mine turned out to be a perfectly shaped ball. Or use a wooden spoon if you don’t have a mixer.
  • Cover bowl with plastic for 6 hours at room temp.
  • At the 6 hour point the dough should have doubled in size.

Toppings

2 hours before the dough is ready the kale needs to be prepared so that it doesn’t burn to a crisp while you’re cooking the pizza.

  • Mix kale, olive oil and lemon juice together in a bowl. Massage the mixture of liquids into the leaves and then set aside.
  • Chop squash into cubes.
  • Mix 2 tablespoons of italian seasoning into the ground pork.

Bake Prep – 30 mins before dough is ready

  • Preheat the oven to 500-550 degrees.
  • Prepare your sheet pan by drizzling it with olive oil.
  • Then covering oil with a light sprinkling of flour so that the dough won’t stick to the pan. I also used a silpat directly on the pan, if you have one and then put the oil and flour on top of that.
  • Ok now back to the dough. Flour your workspace and scrape dough out of the bowl onto your workspace, being generous with the flour so that it doesn’t cling to your hands, work the dough into a ball.
  • Bring the ball to the baking sheet and start to stretch it into a rectangular shape by letting gravity pull it longer.
  • spreading the dough out on the pan

  • Once it’s almost the shape of the pan place it down and nudge the dough closer to the edges of the pan.
  • Now start to add pizza toppings, keeping in mind you don’t want things to be too heavy so that the middle does cook.
  • Put pizza in oven and cook for 10-15 mins depending on how hot you were able to get your oven. Sadly mine clocked out at 485F so I cooked it for the whole 15 mins.
  • Once the pizza is done, add red pepper flakes and parmesan to taste (optional).

Leave a Reply