Pizza!

Well... on Friday, it was getting late and we didn't know what to do for dinner. Since we had just recently received our beautiful new food processor, we decided to give pizza dough a try. After all, the guy in the video made it look pretty simple! Now, I know this is not technically baking, but... its close! While Dan ran to Publix to get mozzarella, I started to put together the dough. The yeast poofed up perfectly and the dough came together pretty quickly. It was all going well until we had to roll it out. As we didn't have a pizza pan, a typical circular pizza pie was out of the question. We planned on rolling it out into a rectangle on our cookie sheet, but that didn't go so smoothly either. Initially, the dough was a little stickier that it should be. It stuck to the food processor bowl, the counter, our fingers, everything (besides our supercool silicone rolling pin! :) When we had added enough additional flour to get it to the correct consistency, we decided to just roll it directly onto the cookie sheet to avoid the complicated dough transfer (and subsequent tears). The shape that resulted from rolling it on the cookie sheet was more amoeba than pizza pie. But when it finally came out of the oven and cooled for us to eat it, it proved that it doesn't really matter what it looks like. It was pretty good! Thin, crispy crust. I just don't know how soon we'll be making another one from scratch... perhaps pizza is best left up to the pro's.





Pizza Dough from Cuisinart's Food Processor Instruction & Recipe book
1 package active dry yeast
1 tsp sugar
2/3 c warm water
1 2/3 c all purpose flour
3/4 tsp salt
2 tsp oil
Vegetable oil for the pan (I used olive oil)
1.5 tablespoons cornmeal for pan (but we used flour since we didn't have this)

Stir yeast and sugar into the warm water, and let sit until foamy - about 10 minutes.
Using the metal blade, put flour and salt in the work bowl and turn on machine.
Pour in the yeast mixture through the feed tube and process ~45 seconds, or until dough pulls away from sides of the bowl.
Add oil through the feed tube and process 60 seconds better.
If the dough sticks to the side of the bowl, add more flour 1 tablespoon at a time, processing 10 seconds after each addition until dough leaves the sides of the bowl, but remains soft (we had to do this several times!).
Roll dough on floured surface into a circle, rotating and turning often so it doesn't stick. Roll it to a 15 " circle, or 10" circle (but we just oiled and floured a cookie sheet, and after rolling it out a few times on the counter, rolled it directly onto the cookie sheet.)

Preheat oven to 425. Bake the crust for 6 minutes (though we forgot to do this step, and it was still fine!)
Spread sauce on the crust to your liking, leaving outer edge exposed.
Top with shredded mozzarella, pepperoni & any additional toppings you may like.
Bake about 18 minutes, or until edge of crust is golden and bottom is deep brown.