Wolfgang Puck's Pizza Dough Recipe - Pizza Dough - Pizza

Hello, this is Chef John from foodwishes.com with a Wolfgang Puck's pizza dough recipe, his famous California pizza dough. And you know Wolfgang Puck, he's that chef that's always doing the Arnold Schwarzenegger impression. Wolfgang recently let me publish this on my American food site on about.com, so I'm going to show you how to make it. Really, really easy and really nice dough. I was impressed. So you're gonna start with one package of dry active yeast, a teaspoon of honey. I'm using sage honey. You use any honey you want. A quarter cup of warm water, like really warm, like 105 degrees. Very important it's warm. Give it a stir. Let it dissolve for 10 minutes. Then we're going to add our salt, olive oil, three quarters of a cup of equally warm water, 105 degrees, and a cup of flour. You're going to stir that up. It's going to become a batter. We're going to add another cup of flour, stir that in, and then we're going to add even more flour. So this is going to get about three cups total. But what we're going to do is we're going to add two and a half cups at this point. It's going to get too thick to stir, and then you're going to move to the board and maybe knead in the rest of the flour. So when it gets too annoying to stir, see right there, you're like, God, this is so annoying. Then you're going to turn it out onto the board. You're going to sprinkle maybe a quarter cup of flour down, and then you're going to knead this with the traditional kneading, smooshing it with your palm method, for about five minutes until we have a smooth, fairly firm, but nice and smooth, slightly, very slightly sticky dough. So this took just about all three cups, right? So two and a half cups went into the actual dough in the bowl, and then I kept kneading it, and you see it actually picked up all the flour on the board. So it was just about three cups of flour. You got to play by ear. But there we go, a nice, smooth, fairly firm dough. A little bit of olive oil in a bowl. Just rinse out the bowl you mixed it in, right? Coat it with olive oil, just a little bit. Put a damp towel over it, and let it sit in a warm place. I turned the oven on for about five minutes, turned it off so it was nice and warm. It's going to go a half hour to 40 minutes, and it's going to basically almost double in size, right? And that looks pretty good. Turn it out onto your floured cutting board, pat it down with your hand. That deflates it, and we're going to make four small pizzas with this. So I'm going to cut it in four pieces. Now the last step here, I'm going to do this twice for you. Take one of those quarters, and just keep folding the outsides down and under, and the top kind of stretches out. So you're just kind of going around, you're folding up underneath. You do that about six or seven times, and that's ready. All right, one more time. Take a piece, okay? You're kind of turning it. You can use your fingertips or your palms. You're just kind of stretching it down and under, and then tucking it up underneath. Anyway, just watch that a few times. It's not that hard. We're going to put those on a tray, all right? I'm going to cover that with a towel, and let that sit in a warm place for 20 minutes to a half hour, and then you're ready to make pizza. Now what you want to do here, put it down on a lightly floured board. Start in the center with your fingertips, and just kind of keep pressing out. This is only going to get about, you know, eight or ten inches wide, but that'll make a nice kind of rim around the edge, and give it that kind of signature California pizza look, all right? So I just kept stretching, pulling. You can roll it if you want. There's not a big difference if you roll it, all right? Pizza makers get all upset if you roll it. So stretch it out. I'm going around the edge of my fingertip to kind of make that crust shape. Now it goes on a corn mealed pan, all right? Pan with a good amount of corn meal. Brush it with some extra virgin olive oil, all right? That kind of seals the pizza from the sauce. We're going to put sauce on, but not too much. Just a couple tablespoons. Spread it around. A very light shaking of red pepper flakes for me, and then here's where you got to just control yourself. A very light cheesing. A little bit of mozzarella, a little bit of fontina, and I just did a really light sprinkling of parmesan, and then you put it whatever other toppings you want here. I didn't have any other toppings, so I'm just making a cheese pizza. It's going to go on the bottom of a 450 degree oven for five minutes, all right? After five minutes, move it to the middle rack of your oven for another four or five minutes, until it looks like that. I should have a pizza stone, but I don't, but it actually works nice on the bottom of the oven. The bottom gets really crispy, and then I tried this. Wolfgang, I gotta hand it to you, buddy. That's a good pizza dough, okay? So it's kind of chewy, very tender. This works if you roll it out really thin. It works if you like a thicker pizza crust. Up to you. So anyway, that's Wolfgang Puck's California Pizza Dough. The extra pizza dough, just put in Ziploc bags. You can keep it two, three days in the fridge. I hope you give it a try. All the amounts are on the site, and as always, enjoy! Hasta la vista, baby!