How Is Pizza Dough Made?
Making a delicious homemade pizza starts with mixing the ingredients and kneading the dough correctly. Otherwise, the homemade pizza won’t taste as great as those you order from your favorite restaurant or fast food joint.
Beau Jo’s, Colorado’s leading pizza maker, has explained how to make pizza dough, starting from choosing the right flour, selecting ingredients, proofing yeast, kneading the dough, and shaping the crust to the right shape.
What is the Best Flour For Making Homemade Pizza Dough?
To make homemade pizza, you can use artisan bread, unbleached white, spelt, cake or pastry, or cassava flour types. But, if you want a crust with the right texture, similar to Beau Jo’s Colorado mountain pie, bread or all-purpose flour are best.
The two kinds of flour (all-purpose and bread flour) contain reasonable amounts of gluten, a compound that gives pizza its chewy and stretchy consistency.
Bread flour is ideal for making a thick, fluffy crust with crispy edges. The flour is good for starters who want an easy time making pizza since its dough stretches without tearing. Thanks to its high amounts of gluten
On the other hand, all-purpose flour is good for home bakers who like pizza with a thin crust since it does not rise as high as bread flour. However, manually kneading is quite challenging since it tears if overstretched.
Can you Add Flavor to Pizza Dough?
When learning how to make pizza dough at home, it is common to feel undecided if flavoring the dough is necessary. Our chefs claim you should feel free to flavor pizza dough with your favorite ingredients. Flavoring the dough is one thing that makes Beau Jo’s Colorado-style pizza different from the ordinary ones.
You can flavor the dough with honey, olive oil, parsley, garlic powder, butter, or parmesan cheese. For our case, we use honey as a secret flavor that enhances the crust’s taste, alongside improving browning and rising.
How to Make Pizza Dough Like Pros
Still not sure how to make pizza dough? Here is the procedure our Colorado chefs have used to make our identity dish, Beau Jo’s Colorado-style pizza. To be clear, this is our procedure, but not the original recipe. We have to save that magic for your experience at a Beau Jo’s near you!
Get the Right Ingredients
To make pizza dough for a 10-12 inch pizza, get:
-
- Two cups (250 grams) of flour
- Two tablespoons of dry, fresh, or instant yeast
- One and a half tablespoons of sugar
- 175ml (¾ cup) warm water
- Two spoons of oil
- Around 10 grams of salt
Bloom the Yeast
With the ingredients ready, put the warm water in a bowl, add sugar plus yeast, and mix thoroughly until the contents dissolve. Cover the mixture and leave it until it starts bubbling before using it.
Mix the Ingredients and Knead
Two primary ways to knead your flour into the required consistency are to manually use your hands or go the automatic route with a mixer. For manual kneading, put the pizza flour, flavoring, and salt in a large mixing bowl.
Pour the bloomed yeast and olive oil into the flour mixture, and use a wooden spoon to mix the flour, salt, yeast, and olive oil until you form a sticky paste. Transfer the paste onto a flat worktop, and use your knuckles to knead it to the required consistency. The process can take up to 10 minutes.
If you want to simplify kneading, put the pizza ingredients in a mixer, power it up, and let the machine mix your proofed yeast, flour, salt, and olive oil at a medium speed setting to mix for 30 to 60 seconds.
Afterward, set the mixer’s setting to a low-speed setting and let it knead the dough for around three minutes.
Proof the Dough
After kneading your pizza dough to a cohesive elastic ball, cover it for at least 30 minutes to let it rise and form air pockets — this is the process known as proofing. After proofing, knead the dough lightly and use a rolling pin to shape it into a 12-inch crust.
What is Colorado Mountain Pie?
Featuring the most loved dish in Beau Jo’s menu of delicacies, the Colorado Mountain Pie stands among the most loved pizza variations in Colorado. It has a characteristic thick crust, with generous amounts of toppings made from over 50 ingredients.
Different from ordinary pizzas, customers get to choose the topping they want on their pizza. For instance, they can choose pepperoni, Andouille sausage, spicy chicken, roasted red peppers, and Monterey jack cheese as their topping,
Experience the Magic of Colorado Mountain Pies Today!
There is no better way to enjoy the magic of pizza than having a Colorado Mountain Pie. This specialty pizza has a fine, crunchy crust flavored with honey and delicious toppings selected and combined by chefs with years of culinary experience.
Find a Beau Jo’s restaurant near you, or contact us to order a Colorado Mountain Pie for your next dinner, party, outing, or reception. We hope that you learn how to make homemade pizza dough!