Pizza Pizza

We love making pizza at home, from the dough on up. The best pizza dough recipe I've used is from The Bread Baker's Apprentice. However, like many of the bread recipes there, that pizza dough takes two days to complete (and that long development is part of what makes it so good!). Usually, though, I don't want to plan quite that far ahead.

So the other day I was looking for a quicker pizza dough recipe, and boy did I find it. I opened Mark Bittman's How to Cook Just About Everything and the pizza dough was unbelievably fast to make. It still needs to rise, of course, but my own personal involvement amounted to a couple minutes.

What speeds things up so much? The food processor. My first thought: the what? So whirling blades that reduce other foods to powder or paste is going to churn out bread dough? It didn't make any intuitive sense to me whatsover, but within 30-45 seconds it had not only formed a ball of dough but that ball of dough had a consistency very much like what dough normally feels like after about 10 minutes of kneading. Absolutely crazy.

Now, I've already told you that it's not the best pizza dough I've ever had, but it's an absolutely acceptable one, and for the time invested, it's pretty amazing.

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