No Knead Pizza Crust

"Ideas are like pizza dough, made to be tossed around"

~Anna Quindlen

I've been making this a LOT lately.  The starter dough is easier to whip up than a batch of cookies, is always available, gets better by the day, and is super-economical.  In 4 words: It fits my life.  In recent weeks I've been working more and have quite a bit going on personally too, making everything more of a juggling act.  There are people close to me, that I love, who are going through serious struggles that break my heart, and I want to be available for them as much as I can.  Makes it hard to get here as often as I'd like.  Not that I've stopped cooking.  I'm cooking up a storm!  Additionally, my camera has been giving me fits....my laptop went through a couple weeks of constant crashing, until I de-fragged it (that worked wonders.)  AND the dish I was prepared to blog about last week (Nicaraguan Arroz con Pollo) was an epic failure (bleh-patooey!) The perfect recipe for blog-neglect.  But that brings me back to the pizza dough.

Over a year ago, I posted a recipe for no-knead bread that you cook inside a heavy dutch oven.  That's a great recipe and it tastes delicious, but you make one loaf at a time.  About a month ago, I came across a no-knead recipe for Artisan Bread on The Italian Dish.  I tried it and found it even easier to work with than the first recipe I tried, and the fact that you keep the dough stored in the fridge for up to two weeks is just a God-send on busy days.  You can turn this dough into a beautiful boule that is remarkably easy to do, but my preference is to use it for pizza crust.  I've been making my own pizza for 25 years, and we've always loved it, but this crust is quicker, easier, better and always at the ready!  The bin I use to store my dough is a little too big, but it has worked anyway.

Cook's notes:  The recipe calls for 6 1/2 cups of unbleached white flour, but I used 5 cups white flour and 1 1/2 cups of wheat pastry flour.  You may be tempted to use more wheat flour, but be careful, it effects the way it rises and you may end up with very heavy, flat dough.  Consider yourself warned.  About 1/3 of the recipe of dough will spread nicely in a standard cookie sheet, for a pizza that will serve 3 or 4.  If you have a pizza stone you can use that instead.  Crisco is my preference to grease the pan, then I sprinkle it with cornmeal.  I found when I oiled the pan with olive oil, the dough slid around too much, and I prefer it to behave.  My daughter suggested dusting the edge of the crust with garlic powder, GREAT IDEA..now we're hooked on it that way.  Use a quality pizza sauce, spread evenly, then sprinkle about 1/4 cup of grated Parmesan or Percorino Romano cheese over the sauce.  Sprinkle a light even layer of grated mozzarella over this (about 1 1/2 cups), then grated sharp cheddar (about 1 cup).  Mozzarella cheese is pretty bland on it's own, using 3 cheeses really makes it.  After that, additional toppings are up to you.  Our favorite combo is pepperoni, onions and peppers on 2/3 of the pizza, and the last 1/3 left plain.

Here is the beauty of this dough recipe; at the end of the two weeks, remove whatever dough you have left from your bin.  Without washing bin, stir together new dough ingredients, replace old dough right on top of the new.  Cover bin and leave out overnight or 24 hours.  This new batch is now good for 2 more weeks.  This works, I've done it several times and plan on keeping this dough going, it just gets better!  I'm sending you over to the The Italian Dish blog for the recipe, because the post was just so darn great that you should check out the original!  Now I'll finish packing for our trip to South Bend to proudly see our son graduate from college.  Since the airline dropped us from the last leg of our flight, we are now taking the train, which will take longer, but be WAY more relaxing...and hey! we got a sleeper car.  We've never traveled this way before so we're pretty excited about it!  Hope to be back here in a week or two.