Homemade Pizza from Scratch!

My brother-in-law is a great cook and just likes to whip things up!  We've been over to his place a couple of times for family dinners and he's made homemade pita chips and homemade pizza using the same bread dough. And it's a great bread dough recipe that I want to share with you!

A few weeks ago, I made a homemade pizza for dinner using this bread dough recipe.  It's super easy and makes a ton so you can use it for more than one pizza or to make pita chips, bread sticks, french bread or anything else you can come up with!

Here's how my pizza turned out.

Preheat the oven to 440 degrees.  I started with the bread dough that I made earlier that morning.  It takes 2 hours to rise and then you can refrigerate the rest.  I floured the surface of my counter and grabbed about 1/4 of the dough.  The dough was a little sticky so I added a little more flour to it so it was easier to work with.  Then use a rolling pin to flatten it out as thin or as thick as you like.  We like our crust a little thicker.

Place the dough on your pizza pan.  Push it out with your fingers to get as close to the edges as you can without tearing the dough.

 Put on all your desired toppings.  I just used spaghetti sauce, mozzarella cheese, pepperoni, green bell peppers, and olives.  As you can see, my husband doesn't like olives so they were only on my half of the pizza.  More for me!

Bake for 10-15 minutes until the dough begins to turn brown and the cheese has melted.  The time depends on how thick your crust is.

It was delicious!  We ate almost the whole thing that night and then made another one a few days later with more of the leftover dough.  Mmmm, so yummy!  

And here's the dough recipe:

3 ½ c lukewarm water
1 tbsp yeast
1-1 ½ tbsp salt
7 ½ cups flour (mine was really sticky so you may need a little more)

Mix all ingredients together and let rise for two hours (dough should be sticky but not so sticky that you can’t handle it.)  And that's it!  So easy!

And don't forget I have a great giveaway going on for the book Etude by Melinda Morgan.  Click here to enter.

- Alexis