 As I've written about before, pizza is one of my quickie meals - you know a meal you make when you don't have time or ambition to cook. As a quickie meal I generally use a pre-made pizza crust such as Boboli, but I've wanted to make my own pizza dough for a while now. I recently took the plunge and made my first homemade pizza dough in nearly 10 years. Interestingly, I'm not the only one who recently decided to do this. Shortly after making the pizza dough I saw a couple of threads (here and here) on the Cooking Light forum talking about other people who recently made their own pizza dough. Coincidence? Perhaps, but it may also have something to do with recent articles in cooking magazines; Gourmet and Bon Appetite both had pizza recipes with homemade dough in the past month as did Cooking Light in recent months. Whatever the reason, interest in homemade pizza dough seems to be rising. I don't consider making homemade pizza dough very time consuming or difficult. OK, so it does take about 2 hours but the vast majority of that time is for the dough to rise. If you are home a couple of hours before you want to eat, such as on the weekend or if you are lucky enough to work from home, then making pizza dough is possible. As for being difficult, the only part I find difficult is shaping the dough. It takes a bit of patience to get the dough into the shape you want, but does it really matter? To me the shape of the pizza isn’t a big deal.  What can be a big deal is finding the right pizza dough recipe that works for you. This leads to my current quest - The quest to find an awesome pizza dough recipe. I admit the quest has only just begun because I haven't made many pizza dough recipes yet, but I'm devoted to finding that awesome recipe. What do I have so far? Well, that initial pizza I spoke about earlier used a dough recipe from an old cookbook I have called "The Pizza Book" by Evelyne Slomon. The recipe is very straightforward and somewhat plain. Not that anything was wrong with the resulting pizza dough but nothing stood out about it either. The pizza itself was great. Also from the same cookbook, it was a variation of “Pizza Verdura” called “Pizza alla Erbazzone” that consisted of cooked Swiss chard, smoked Gouda cheese, and prosciutto – yum!
Interestingly, “The Pizza Book” dough recipe is very similar to one recently in Bon Appetite except that the Bon Appetite recipe makes a bit less dough and uses a bit more salt. Years ago, when I lived in Houston, Husband and I used to make amazing whole wheat pizza dough from a friends cookbook. Sadly, we lost the recipe when we gave back the cookbook (don't get me started on loosing recipes... ugh!). But, I've recently seen a few whole wheat pizza dough recipes posted on various places that I'm going to try including one from Eating Well and one from 101 CookBooks. So, I already have a few pizza dough recipes to try and this weekend I'm going to try the Bon Appetite recipe. Let me know if you have a favorite pizza dough recipe - I'd love more to try...
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