Poco Mountain Girl

In my pizza-making journey, I’ve come a little closer to getting the results I’m after here in our mountain home. 8250 ft. can throw your baking off course a bit!

David likes a thin, crispy pizza crust–not the thick, soft homemade crust I grew up with. It took a bit of experimentation, but I finally hit on a decent method.

I like this recipe I found online: the Good n’ Easy High Altitude Pizza Dough Recipe. It makes 2 thin crust pizzas (or one thick crust) but you can also double the recipe and freeze it in balls to use later.

1 package yeast
1 tsp sugar
1 cup warm water
1 tsp salt
2 tbsp olive oil
2.5 cups flour (I substitute half of the flour with whole-wheat)

In a large bowl, dissolve yeast and sugar in warm water. Then slowly pour in the remaining dough ingredients and beat vigorously (about 20 strokes). Optional: Sprinkle a little parmesan cheese and oregano or crushed red pepper into bowl before beating. Knead dough for 5 to 10 minutes. Cover bowl and let dough rise for about 5 minutes while you prepare the sauce.

Since it takes me quite a bit longer than 5 minutes to “prepare the sauce”, I do that step ahead of time, usually in bulk. I buy a giant can of crushed tomatoes at Costco for $2 + change and make a quadruple batch of Zesty Sauce. We like all of our sauce “zesty”, so I freeze the extra to use later as a base for spaghetti and meatballs,  lasagna, eggplant parmesan or whatever other Italian dish we might make.

Next step for the pizza: I divide the dough into 2 balls, roll it out super thin, and prebake it at 450 degrees for 10 minutes. Then I add sauce and toppings, and bake for another 10 minutes.

In my oven, on our mountain, it comes out perfect.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 11th, 2012 at 8:10 pm and is filed under Cooking, Recipes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.