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Friday night is Pizza Night at the Frugal Upstate house! For the last 2 1/2 years more or less every week I have made homemade pizza on Friday nights.
The kids love it and look forward to it, feeling like they are getting “junk” food. Yankee Bill and I aren’t exactly complaining about it either-we both enjoy pizza.
One of the great things about homemade pizza, besides it’s very frugal cost, is that you can control what goes into it and on it. I tend to make mine a bit lighter on the cheese, which cuts the calories and fat. We typically make pepperoni and cheese, although frequently we’ll break out to broccoli (if we have fresh on hand) or tomato (with slices of fresh). I’ve even tried my hand at a version of chicken BBQ.
And let’s face it, although pizza toppings would make even a piece of cardboard palatable, there is something about a great crust that really improves the total quality of your pizza.
For the longest time I just used the pizza crust recipe that came in my breadmaker cookbook. It was a decent recipe-tasted fine and all-but wasn’t anything special. I always had the feeling that although I was saving money and being much, much healthier than ordering out pizza (or even buying frozen pizza) I was somehow sacrificing on taste.
So last year when Amy from MomAdvice started experimenting with different pizza crust recipes I watched with great interest. I’m the kind of gal that likes to learn from other peoples experiences, and Amy gave me some great ones to learn from!
She started out in her initial “Homemade Pizza” post by detailing the way her family makes pizza, along with two crust recipes and a sauce recipe. She even gave directions for freezing the dough! I have been known to make an extra crust and parbake it for 8 min or so before freezing it, but I had never thought of freezing the raw dough.
Four months later in “Pizza Dough Revisited” she tried a new pizza dough & sauce recipe from a slow cooker cookbook. That was a success – despite her aversion to dough rolling.
Fast forward another two months and in “Dinner’s in the Bag” she not only shared another new crust recipe, but a way to speed up the entire pizza making process and tips for how to turn one batch of crust into breadsticks.
You’ve got to admire that kind of perseverance. Finally she hit the jackpot, at least as far as I am concerned, with her Pizza Hut Clone recipe.
Yes, it has more ingredients than the other recipes, so it’s a tiny bit more of a hassle to put together. The taste however makes it worth it. I was in a head cold induced stupor the other day and mistakenly made my old recipe on pizza night-everyone noticed the difference and was disappointed.
So without further ado, here is the king of all pizza crust recipes.
At least as far as I’m concerned.
Pizza Hut Style Pizza Dough*
1 1/3 cups water
2 tsp sugar
1 1/4 tsp salt
2 Tbsp olive oil
2 Tbsp cornmeal
3 1/4 cups flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp garlic powder
1/4 tsp onion powder
1 1/2 tsp yeast
Add ingredients to bread machine, according to manufacturer’s settings, and run dough setting. After the machine beeps, roll out the dough.
You can roll the dough into two 9×13″ pizzas (great for kid’s lunches!) or into two medium pizzas or a large pizza and an order of breadsticks (as instructed above).
Parbake the crust with a drizzle of olive oil on it at 450 degrees for ten minutes. Remove the crust and add sauce and toppings.
If making breadsticks, add your breadsticks at this time. Place into the oven for another ten to fifteen minutes or until golden and bubbly.
Enjoy!
*Note: Reprinted with permission.
**Note: Photos by Jeff Kubina, Adam Kuban, and Javier Psilocybin respectively.
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