Brilliant Base: Quick pizza dough

Method

Watch the video

This month’s Brilliant Base is not a sauce or a gravy like our previous ones, but a super-quick dough that can be knocked up very, very quickly when you’re pushed for time and want a quick fix. It was born out of the impact of Lockdown 1.0 and the desire to have a rapid stretch recipe dough that delivers a great pizza base or flatbread without using fresh brewer’s yeast or dried quick yeast.

We’ve used a strong white flour here. While we wouldn’t normally recommend any bleached flour, it helps the gluten to form quickly to hold it together – but you could equally use a strong wholemeal flour for a similar effect. What we would recommend is to get the best flour you can from a local retailer – preferably single grain and organic – rather than something mass produced.

An almost instant fix, you can have your own pizza from scratch in less than 30 minutes from start to finish – as fast as ordering from a local take away, with the benefit of knowing exactly what is in your pizza, beyond the chilled or frozen section options as seen in supermarkets.

Traditional pizza dough whether Romana or Napolitana calls for balanced ingredients, all at room temperature, mineral water, olive oil, salts and specific wattage strength types of flour. Durum wheat semolina is often added for digestion and crunch, albeit the dough takes longer to raise and ferment. These hard grains left from flour milling can be used either within the dough itself, or as the flouring agent for the table pinning out of the pizza dough base.

Our approach was one of what did we have at hand, or could find during lockdown in order to make a great pizza base and elevate it with our Brilliant Base Tomato Fondue, topping off with mozzarella and your favourite garnishes.

It’s fun for the kids to make and can be cooked in your own domestic, very hot oven at home. Alcohol free beer coupled with the self-raising flour delivers the bubble and blistering you’d expect, while the strength of the flour means it retains the elasticity you’d also expect from a traditional pizza dough base. Tasty, functional and simple, hitting our core principles for you, and at a fraction of the cost of a bought in/delivered pizza too.

The raw dough will keep three days covered in the fridge, but beyond that it will go grey and be less appealing.

1. Allow all ingredients to come to room temperature
2. Blend all together in mixer with dough hook or hand kneed for 5 mins (the video shows both methods)
3. Divide into four balls around 125g/4.5oz each (to make eight 10inch pizzas or flatbreads)
4. Leave covered to rest 15 minutes OR wrap in film, preferably to use within 2-3 hours