Perfect This Recipe | Jamie Oliver's Pizza Dough

Margherita pizza on Jamie Oliver's dough

In the past week I have become a pizza expert. I can say that with confidence after eating pizza for almost two meals a day for 5 days, but hey I’m not complaining! Andy and I make pizza a good bit; it’s one of our favorite meals to enjoy making and eating together. Up until now we’ve attempted to make one homemade dough that didn’t turn out too well and just reverted back to using Trader Joe’s dough. This experiment has definitely changed our view of pizza dough.  Check out our thoughts below as well as what worked with our oven and a few tricks too! 

Jamie Oliver's Recipe was by far the best pizza dough we've ever had at home. We were blown away! It makes 4 balls of dough too which I appreciated. If I take the time to make dough it's even better if it makes enough to freeze for later. We did use some semolina flour mixed with the Tipo "OO" flour and it was the perfect flavor and texture, as close as it gets to the pizza we had on our honeymoon in Italy! The biggest surprise for me on this dough was how it formed a raised crust. I learned when you toss the dough (like a true Neapolitan dough maker) you are using gravity and centrifugal force to create a thicker edge therefore forming this crust. I can tell you we did not toss our dough, only rolled, and somehow it created the perfect crust. Side note - it supposedly takes a year to master the task of properly tossing pizza dough. 

We made the remaining doughs using the dough hook on our KitchenAid Mixer. I think you could probably do this with all the recipes as I couldn't tell a difference. Next time I will try Jamie Oliver's with a mixer as well. I used this version of Smitten Kitchen's recipe and it was just OK. The You Tube recipe was our second favorite but didn't come close to Jamie Oliver's. I don't think we realized what we were getting into with the Basic Neapolitan dough recipe. It took 4 days and was good but not worth it. Trader Joe's was fine as usual but after tasting Jamie's Oliver's I think we'll be making batches of this dough to freeze and use in the future. 

While we're rolling out our dough we preheat our oven to 525 (the highest setting our oven will go) with a pizza stone on the bottom rack. We then use a lightly floured pizza peel to place the dough on  the pizza stone to pre-bake for 1 minute. Don't worry, bubbles may form just pop them and move on. Once the dough is par-baked we brush the crust with olive oil and sprinkle a little salt and garlic powder. We recently started doing this and it makes a huge difference! Next we add toppings and pop it back in the oven. We bake between 6 and 8 minutes, but keep our eye on it because it doesn't take long to overcook.

Which dough did you guys enjoy? Did you figure out what process works for you? I hope so!

- Heath