Herbed Pizza Crust, ButterYum Style

June 7, 2010 By Julie 28 Comments

I know I’ve already done a few posts with pizza, but today I wanted to focus solely on the crust. I was surfing around my fellow foodie sites the other day and dropped in on Patricia over at ButterYum who just so happened to have a great post up about the 10 Secrets for making pizzeria quality pizza crust at home

Let me tell ya, this one really hit home for me. We love pizza in this family and being the cook that I believe myself to be, I’m always attempting homemade pizza dough from scratch. The problem is, I just haven’t mastered the perfect crust yet. I”ll admit, I’m scared stiff of my piping, hot from the oven pizza stone. I had no idea how to get the crust on it without destroying it in the process, so I’d do it wrong and just put the crust on a cold stone. The pizza was good, but my husband constantly complained that it wasn’t as good as the pizza we got when we went out.

So you can imagine, when I saw what Patricia had to say, I was eager to try it out! You can drop by her site; ButterYum to get all the nitty gritty details, and I’ll also give you the quick recap below. First let’s make the dough so we can get moving on these steps! Here’s what you’ll need:

Ingredients Needed:

1 Cup of Lukewarm Water
1 Pkg of Yeast
1 Tbsp of White Sugar
3 Tbsp of Olive Oil
1 tsp of Salt
21/2 Cups of Flour
3 Cloves of Garlic, Minced
1 tsp of Basil
1/2 tsp of Onion Powder

Mix together your yeast, sugar, and water. Let the mixture rest for about 10-15 minutes to wake up the little yeasties.

Next you’ll want to add in your oil, salt, garlic, basil and onion powder.

Finally, add in your flour to form a dough. Let your dough rest for about 10 minutes.

Now it’s time for the fun part. Patricia says that step one should be to heat your oven up to 475 and throw your stone in there for an hour. If you’re like me, you’re probably panicking already, but don’t worry, she holds your hand through it; I didn’t even burn myself once!

Step two, and this is one of the steps I found most brilliant, roll your pizza crust out on a piece of parchment paper. Can you see where this is going? No burned fingers, that’s exactly where it’s going.

Step three is to use a pizza peel which I don’t have but that’s ok, everything still managed to go as planned without it.

Step four is to “dock” your dough, or in other words, take a fork to the entire middle of the pizza. It’s done to rid your dough of air bubbles. Here’s mine rolled out on the parchment and docked. I also brushed olive oil on the crust. She mentions it in step six, but of course I jumped the gun

Moving on to step five, you’re going to do a “pre-bake” of your crust in your heated oven for 7-10 minutes. I might have cheated, but I left my crust on the parchment paper because it was just that easy to do.

And here’s my crust out of the oven. For some reason my middle didn’t end up any lower than my outer crust. It didn’t matter in the end though, all was still well.

Step six is to brush the edges of your crust with olive oil. Yep, I did it already but I’ll do it again. You can never have to much olive oil can you?

After adding your sauce and toppings (I used my left over spaghetti delicious sauce on top, yum!), step seven is to add a good sprinkling of oregano to the top of your pizza. I’m pleased to say this is something that I have been doing when making pizza for some time now. One out of ten ain’t bad, right?

Now throw your pizza back into your piping hot oven for another 7-10 minutes. Step eight is to brush your crust again with olive oil and sprinkle a little garlic powder on it once it comes out of the oven. Are you getting hungry yet? Two steps to go until dinner is served.

Step 9 is to use a plastic pizza cutter instead of metal to cut your pie so that all the cheese doesn’t stick as your slicing. I don’t have a plastic cutter but I think I’ll head to the store and get one after reading this. Who knew plastic worked so well for pizza?

And last but not least step ten. if you don’t have a pizza peel (me! me!) you can use the bottom of a cookie sheet to lay your parchment on and slide it on and off from there.

And there you have it. Ten steps to restaurant quality pizza. And let me tell ya, it’s worth every minute you spend on it! Our pizza crust was crisp and delicious. It held all the toppings we threw at it and begged for more. My husband even noticed and complimented me on finally getting it right. So THANK YOU Patricia for taking the time to share your tips with us! I think there will be a lot of happy (and full) husbands and children as a result of your informative post. Here’s my finish pie out of the oven.

And a slice of the final product. Isn’t that crust absolutely divine?