It is, perhaps the biggest day of the year for sports enthusiasts, the day most women dread. It is the Superbowl, which this year falls on Sunday, February 5.

Whether or not you are hosting a game party most of you moms out there are expected to produce some game day fare. In my house, that food is pizza, but not just any pizza, my own.

I started making my own to defend against of the high price of pizza delivered to the house. Now it is an expected part of any family gathering, except Thanksgiving and Christmas.

If you don’t bake much, you might think that making pizza dough is outside your skill set. Relax, its easy and I have a few short cuts too.

About 4 or 5 hours, before you are set to serve the pizza, you can start the dough. You can also make it a day ahead and leave it your refrigerator, until it is time to make the pizza. There were many mornings, during the summer, when the kids were still home I would make up a dough for the teenagers so they could make their own pizza for lunch. Once you know how to do it, it goes quickly.

I start with a food processor.

If you don’t have a food processor, you can use a mixer with dough hooks or mix by hand yourself. For me, the quickest way is using the food processor. I use the chopping blade in the processor. My processor has a dough blade, but I don’t like it much. It doesn’t seem to mix the ingredients as well.

Start with 1 and 1/4 cups of hot water from the tap. (Do not use boiling water, it will kill the yeast.) Put the water in the bowl of the processor and add 2 tablespoons of sugar. Add 2 teaspoons of yeast. Let the yeast “proof” which means letting all the little yeast organisms eat the sugar in the water. As they do this, the yeast will foam and bubble. Give them fifteen minutes to do this.

Next step, once the yeast is “proofed”, add two tablespoons of olive oil which gives a great flavor to the dough. Add two teaspoons of salt. Use bread or unbleached white flour. These flours give the best texture. I don’t recommend bleached flours for most things for many reasons, once of them is that they don’t taste as good when baked. Add two cups of flour to the food processor and depending on your settings, (mine has a dough setting) mix the yeast water and dough. When they’ve spun their way to creamy goodness, add the next cup of flour. If all goes well, on your next spin of the food processor, the dough will form a ball. If the dough looks like paste instead of a ball, add a little more flour and spin again until the dough forms a ball. Use a light hand on the flour. It is easier to take a dough that has too little flour and make it work than too much.

Lightly flour a dry cutting board with flour. Turn out the dough onto the board. Cover it with a large bowl and let it rest for fifteen minutes. Use this time to clean up your processor and your counter tops. If you are making another dough, start that one now.

Once your dough has rested, remove the bowl covering it. How does the dough feel? Does it spring back when you press your finger on it? Or does it feel very sticky and seem that it wants to lay around like your teen age son. If it is feels hard to the touch, you are going to have to do a little remediation but sprinkling a tablespoon or so of hot water on the dough and working the water in by kneading the dough.

If the dough is too sticky, dump an eighth of a cup of flour into it and start kneading the dough. Add more if needed, but do it lightly. If it is just right, sprinkle it lightly with flour.

If you don’t know how to knead dough, don’t worry, most people don’t. I once watched in horror as a college room mate pounded a poor dough into a hard unusable mass. That is not how to knead dough. Dough requires a gentle but firm hand so as not harden the gluten in the flour. Using the heel of your hand, as shown, push into the dough. Put up the edges of the dough with your fingers and twist the dough a quarter of a turn. Push in again with the heel of your hand and repeat the twisting and lifting motion. The goal here is to lose the stickiness of the dough so that when you form the ball it is smooth and non sticky to the touch.

Once the dough is just right, you can cover it on the board with the large bowl, sticking a spoon or knife under one edge to let in oxygen. Or you can put it in a one gallon zip lock plastic bag, with it not entirely closed to let in oxygen and leave it on the stove to rise. Either way, in about two hours your dough should double in size and be ready to shape.

One dough makes eight slices of pizza. Depending on the size your pans the crust will be either thin or thick crust, but either way it will be more filling than the commercially made pizza slice. If you feeding just pizza, one pizza will feed two to three people who can consume mass quantities.

You can also use this dough to make Italian or French bread, (depending on the shape) which is nice surprise sometimes for your family.

Pizza Dough Ingredients (for each dough)

1 1/4 cups of hot water
2 tablespoons sugar
2 teaspoons of yeast
2 tablespoons of olive oil
2 teaspoons of salt
3 cups of bread or unbleached flour, plus flour for the board

Equipment to Make Dough

Food Processor, mixer with dough hooks or spoons for mixing
Measuring Cup
Measuring Spoons
Cutting board
Large Bowl
1 gallon zip lock bags

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