Adding some cornmeal to your pizza dough adds a nice texture that you don’t get when using plain flour. I always like to keep some blue cornmeal on hand and put some in this pizza dough.

This recipe makes enough for 4 pizzas, each about 12″ in diameter. I like my crust thin and crispy and these pizzas turned out exactly that way. We only made two pizzas and used the other two dough balls to make some calzones to freeze and eat later.

About an hour before baking the pizzas I started preheating my pizza stones at about 475’F. The hot stones really help firm up the pizza crust and help the pizza evenly cook. I usually rotate the pizzas from top to bottom rack about half way through cooking.

For the two pizzas we made, one (pictured above) had sun dried tomatoes, pepperoni, bell peppers and caramelized onions. The second pizza had bbq chicken, red onion and red bell pepper. After taking each pizza out of the oven, they got topped with some fresh basil from the garden.

Ingredients:

Dough

Makes four 12″ pizzas or eight calzones.

• 600g All Purpose flour
• 490g filtered water @ 90’F
• 30g blue cornmeal
• 16g sea salt
• 7.5g bakers yeast

Method:

I combined all of the above ingredients together in a stand mixer with the dough hook attachment and mixed then kneaded for about 10 minutes.

After the kneading process, I gave the dough 2 stretch and folds in the first hour of a 2 hour bulk fermentation at room temperature. After the second fold I coated the dough with some olive oil and covered the bowl with plastic wrap. Once 2 hours had passed and the dough had more than doubled, I put it in the fridge where it sat for a few hours until I was ready to bake.

After about 4 hours in the refrigerator I took the dough out, divided it into quarters and then let each dough ball rest on a floured counter for 30 minutes so they could come back up to room temperature.

Once the dough balls had relaxed and warmed up, I formed them into 12″ rounds, poked liberally with a fork (to prevent bubbles) and proceeded to top them. I like to spread my dough out on parchment paper so it’s easier to transfer onto my pizza stones.

After adding all the toppings to my pizza, I like to coat the crust with some herb and spice infused olive oil to help it brown. After that, I put the pizzas in the oven at 475’F to bake for about 10-15 minutes, or until the cheese reaches your desired level of browned.

Result:

This is an extremely quick and easy pizza dough to throw together. Hands on time is extremely minimal and the amount of time it sits in the refrigerator is up to you. The longer it sits, the more flavorful the dough will get. I’ve gone anywhere between 2 hours in the fridge up to several days.

As I said above, the crust turns out wonderfully thin and crispy. I get my dough very thin when rolling it out but if you wanted a thicker crust, just ease back on that slightly.

My Baking Notes

• Ambient temperature: 73’F
• Water temp: 90’F
• Autolyse @ 12:00pm
• Bulk fermentation start @ 12:30pm
• Into fridge @ 2:30pm
• Started preheating oven/stones @ 6:00pm
• Divided dough at 6:30pm
• Into oven @ 7:15pm