Basic Pizza Dough Recipe – Jamie’s Italy by Jamie Oliver
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Ingredients
- 800g strong white bread flour
- 200g fine ground semolina flour or strong white bread flour
- 1 level tablespoon fine sea salt
- 2 x 7g sachets of dried yeast
- 1 tablespoon golden caster sugar
- 650ml / just over 1 pint of lukewarm water
Details
servings 8
Level of difficulty Average
Preparation time 30mins
Cooking time 6mins
Cost Average budget
Preparation
Step 1
Pile the flours and salt onto a clean surface and make a 18cm/ 7-inch well in the centre. Add your yeast and sugar to the lukewarm water, mix up with a fork and leave for a few minutes, then pour into the well. Using a fork and a circular movement, slowly bring in the flour from the inner edge of the well and mix into the water. It will look like stodgy porridge – continue to mix, bringing in all the flour. When the dough comes together and becomes too hard to mix with your fork, flour your hands and begin to pat it into a ball. Knead the dough towards you and your right hand to push the dough away from you at the same time. Repeat this for 10 minutes, until you have a smooth, springy, soft dough.
Step 2
Flour the top of your dough, cover it with cling film, and let it rest for at least 15 minutes at room temperature. This will make it easier to roll thinly. Now divide the dough into as many balls as you want to make pizzas, i.e. lots of small ones or a few larger ones, but I suggest that 6 is a good quantity for this amount of dough.
Step 3
Timing-wise it’s nice to roll the pizzas out 15 to 30 minutes before you start to cook them. If you want to work more in advance, it’s better to keep the dough wrapped in plastic wrap in the fridge rather than having rolled-out pizzas hanging around for a few hours. Take a piece of the dough, dust your surface and dough with a little flour or semolina, and roll it out into a rough circle about 0.5cm/ ¼ inch thick. Tear off an appropriately sized piece of tin foil, rub it with a little olive oil, dust it well with flour or semolina, and place the pizza base on top. Continue doing the same with the other pieces and then, if you dust them with a little flour, you can pile them up into a stack, cover them with cling film, and put them in the fridge.
Step 4
When you’re ready to cook them, preheat your oven to 250⁰C. Or, get your pizza oven going a couple of hours before! At this stage you can apply your toppings. Remember: less is more. If you don’t have a pizza oven, try cooking the pizzas on a piece of granite or marble in your conventional oven- if not, do them one by one on the bars of the oven shelf toward the bottom of the oven. (If you’re going to cook your pizzas on the bars of the oven, make sure they’re not too big- otherwise they’ll be difficult to manoeuvre.) Cook for 7 to 10 minutes, until pizzas are golden and crispy.
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