All Around Awesome Pizza Crust Recipe!

We have discussed my family’s love of pizza before, but I have yet to share with you all my go-to pizza crust recipe. I got this one from my Mother in Law who I lovingly refer to as Mama.

I have never asked Mama where she got this recipe or if she made it up but its a great one. I use it for more than just pizza. I use it when making fry bread for Navajo Tacos and for breadsticks.

I have tried in the past to use less yeast than the recipe calls for because lets face it I am cheap and want my ingredients to last as long as possible, but being stingy on the yeast makes it so the dough is more difficult to work with because it doesn’t have the light and elastic quality needed to be able to stretch it out nicely.

It’s pretty simple requiring only a few ingredients: dry active yeast, sugar, oil, salt, water and flour. Its pretty difficult to run out of the ingredients needed to make it, but I do tend to run out of yeast if I don’t pay attention to it. The other ingredients I purchase in much larger quantities so I usually have them on hand.

So here’s the secret family recipe…

Ingredients:

1 Tbsp dry active yeast

1 cup warm water

1 Tbsp sugar

1 tsp salt

2 Tbsp vegetable oil

2 1/2 cups of flour

Dissolve the yeast in the warm water. Next add sugar, salt and oil. Mix together before adding the flour. Add the flour and mix until you have a lightly sticky ball of dough. I like to use my Bosch mixer for making pizza dough, but this can be done in a Kitchen Aid mixer, with a electric mixer with a dough hook, or simply by hand with no mixer.

At this point the dough is ready to be pressed out onto a pizza pan or formed into bread sticks or fry bread. Before pressing the dough out be sure to spray the pizza pan with spray oil to keep it from sticking. I have ruined many a pizza by forgetting this step.

Top your pizza however you like and bake at 425 degrees for 14 minutes. Add a minute or two more for very heavily topped pizza. Then cut and enjoy! Don’t forget Pizza Thursday!!