Kneadless pizza: Save a little dough by making it at home days ahead

By Lisa Abraham - Akron Beacon Journal

What night is pizza night at your house? Is it Friday when everyone is chilling out from a hectic week at work and school? Is it Saturday when friends or family stop over? Or Sunday afternoon, when the pace is slower and the games are on?

Any night can be pizza night, and surprisingly, any night can be homemade pizza night in as little time as it takes to wait on a delivery.

No-knead doughs, made in advance, are the key to homemade pizza anytime. They’ll keep for days in the refrigerator (some last almost two weeks) and can be used not only for pizza, but also for bread, calzones, garlic bread, focaccia or bread sticks.

While you can reach for a frozen or packaged crust, the simplicity of making homemade dough might surprise and convert you.

Cheryl Pierce’s family ordered pizza at least once a week for supper, but as the recession caused her to look for ways to trim her “eating out budget,” Pierce decided as her New Year’s resolution to try her hand at making pizza instead.

She started out using packaged crust mixes from the grocery store and then tried a basic dough recipe from a cookbook using flour, dry yeast, salt, sugar, water and oil.

Pierce said her hesitation when it came to working with yeast always kept her from trying homemade crust before, but she was surprised with the results.

“It’s so simple and delicious. Who knew?” Pierce said.

The next step for Pierce is finding a crust she can make several days ahead of time that keeps well in the refrigerator. That’s where no-knead dough is the perfect fit, said Kathy Lehr, a bread-baking expert.

Lehr teaches dough and baking techniques at schools across the country. She said pizza dough is one of the best ways for a novice baker to get started.

Her recipe for pizza dough, which uses cornmeal as well as bread flour, produces very wet dough, even slightly sloppy. But the wet texture is what creates its airy, chewy crust, she said.

The dough doesn’t require much kneading, only about three minutes, which can be accomplished with the dough hook of a stand mixer.

Lehr’s recipe can be made several days ahead of time. The longer it sits, the better the flavor and texture, she said.

Lehr recommends using a pizza stone or an oven lined with unglazed tiles for baking pizza, but the recipe will work equally well for beginners who have nothing more than a pizza pan or a baking sheet. A very hot oven — set to 475 or 500 degrees — is needed to give the pizza its texture: brown on the bottom, yet soft and chewy on the inside.

She suggests spritzing the bottom of the pre-heated oven or the tiles, if using, with some water to create steam, which helps to develop a crust. It’s the same reason French bread, with its classic crusty exterior, often is baked commercially in steam-injection ovens.

For baking on a hot stone or tiles, Lehr said the crust and toppings can be put in the oven together, and the pizza should bake up fine.

In testing with typical metal pizza pans, Lehr’s dough produced a fairly thick crust, and we found that pre-baking the crust first for about 10 to 15 minutes helped to keep it from being soggy in the center.

After the pre-bake, we put on our sauce, cheese and toppings and returned it to the oven for another 15 minutes until the crust was brown, crispy on the edges and the cheese melted and bubbly.

Lehr cautioned against over-saucing pizzas, which will contribute to crust seeming soggy or under-baked.

She recommends using the dough within five days.

However, other no-knead dough, such as the Olive Oil Dough from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois, will last up to 12 days in the refrigerator.

The recipe is good for pizza and focaccia as well as loaf bread, requires no kneading and is ready after an initial rise of just two hours. In testing, however, we found after a couple of days, the dough was even more flavorful and easy to work with for pizzas.

Preparing it in standard pizza pans, rather than on a stone, we also gave it a short pre-bake to make sure the crust was as brown and crisp as we desired.