Homemade Pizza including Whole Wheat Dough

When we were kids we always made homemade pizzas on Sundays. We would usually make two pizzas, one always had to be just cheese and the other one we got really adventurous and put pepperoni on it.  Yeah can you believe how crazy that was.  So this Sunday we decided to relive the good ol’ days, but step up our game a little bit on the toppings. One pizza had prosciutto, anchovies, kalamata olives, caramelized shallots, roasted garlic and feta. The other was pesto, shrimp, cherry tomatoes and mozzarella. We’ve made pizzas before but we have never ventured so far to try making our own dough, not sure why.  So we found version on a blog, http://www.cookieandkate.com, and modified it a little bit.

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Whole Wheat Pizza Dough

Ingredients

2 3/4 cup whole wheat flour
1 cup water, heated to 110 degrees
1 tbsp honey
1 tbsp olive oil
2 1/4 teaspoons instant yeast or 1 packet
1 tsp salt
1/4 cup Parmesan cheese (optional)

Directions

1. Mix the water, honey, oil, yeast together to dissolve the honey and also allow the yeast to activate.  Let rest for 5 minutes.  You should see the yeast at work.  I did this right in my stand mixer.
2. Mix together your dry ingredients in a separate bowl.
3. Using the dough hook attachment on your mixer, turn it on at a low speed.  Slowly begin to adding your dry ingredients a little at a time.  Once all the dry ingredients are added your dough ball should start climbing up the side of the bowl, when this happens you can stop.
4. Cover the dough and let rest for 20 minutes.
5. After 20 minutes remove the dough and divide in half.  Each half will make roughly a 12″ thin crust pizza.
6. Lightly dust your counter along with your hands with extra flour to keep from sticking.  Roll out one half into a 6″ circle with your hands trying to keep it as round as possible.  At this point I switched to a rolling pin because my pizza tossing and hand pressing skills are not that good.  I rolled it out to about a 1/4″ thick and it was roughly 12″ across.

Shrimp Pesto Ingredients

1 1/2 cups cooked shrimp – we used uncooked 13-15 shrimp cut in half and sauteed in olive oil with some garlic, you could certainly purchase cooked shrimp to save time.
1/3 cup prepared pesto
1 cup cherry tomatoes, halved
1 cup mozzarella cheese

Mediterranean Pizza Ingredients

1/4 pound prosciutto, ripped into bite size pieces
8 anchovy filets
1/2 cup kalamata olives, halved
5 cloves of roasted garlic, chopped
1/2 cup pizza sauce
1/3 cup feta cheese crumbles
1/4 cup fresh parsley, topping after it is done cooking

Pizza Assembly and Cooking

1. Preheat your oven to 475 degrees.  I like to use a pizza stone which you should warm up in the oven too.
2. Once your oven and stone are preheated remove your stone from the oven.  One little secret to keep your dough from sticking to your stone or baking sheet is to sprinkle it with a little corn meal.  Once you’ve done that put your rolled out pizza dough on the stone.
3. Drizzle with a little olive oil and then use a fork to pierce the dough all over so that it won’t bubble up when it cooks.
4. Cook for 4 minutes without any toppings.
5. After 4 minutes, remove from the oven and add your toppings.
6. Cook for another 6 minutes.

One note, I was a little heavy on the salty products on the Mediterranean pizza.  In hindsight I would have backed off on at least one of the salty ingredients, olives, anchovies, or prosciutto.