kayeon eats: Spelt Whole Wheat Pizza Dough

This is basically the same process that you go through to make normal all purpose white flour pizza dough, but you know me… I like to make things a little bit healthier than they are and pizza? Pizza definitely can be healthy if you try. Pizza has a bad reputation only because people think, Pizza Hut greasy pool of fat modified meat pizza… but really? If you make it right with fresh vegetables, whole grains and a little bit of good flavoured cheese, you can’t go wrong! Try out this recipe and add ground flax seed or ground hemp or anything you want really… A table spoon or two added to the dough should make the crust taste a little nutty and add texture to it too!

Use this dough to make this: Eggplant, Zucchini, Pesto Pizza with goat’s cheese.

Ingredients:

1 cup warm water
1 Tbsp Active Dry Yeast
1 tsp Agave Syrup
3/4 cup Whole Wheat Flour
2 1/2 cups Spelt Flour
1/2 tsp Salt (or just a pinch)
1/4 cup Olive Oil

Optional: 1 Tbsp of Ground Flax Seed or Ground Hemp Seed

1. Pour one cup of - warm to the touch, but not scalding - hot water into a large bowl. (Think as hot as a warm bath because that’s what the Yeast is doing, taking a warm bath to loosen up!) Add 1 Tbsp of Active Dry Yeast. The dry yeast should float initially but start to sink to the bottom and the water will quickly get cloudy. Give it a little stir and add the agave syrup. The yeast likes something sweet to help it ferment.

2. Add the 3/4 cup of Whole Wheat Flour into the yeast mixture and whisk it in so that the sugar in the flour and the gluten will fuel the yeast to become very bubbly and happy.

They say you’re now suppose to “put the bowl in a warm place” but what is that? Your whole house is basically room temperature unless you want to put the bowl on top of a radiator or you have heated floors. I hate it when recipes just say that and don’t offer any solution. SO I will give you one: Boil water in a kettle or boil the water in a pot, but either way, get some really hot water part of the way in a pot so that the water isn’t touching the bowl when you place the bowl on top. I guess you have to make sure that the pot is small enough so that the bowl can sit on top, but large enough that most of the bowl can sit down into the pot but not have the hot water touching it. Capish? Do you see the bubbles already? This is exactly what you want.

Leave the bowl sitting in the pot letting the steam keep the bowl warm for approximately 30 minutes. Your mixture should turn very foamy, frothy and bubbly. If after 30 minutes your mixture doesn’t look at all bubbly or frothy… I’m sorry but your yeast is dead. Start over with fresh yeast.

3. So what’s supposed to happen now, is you’re supposed to mix the flour in a separate bowl with the pinch of salt, create a well, and pour the yeast mixture into the well…(this is the proper way) but I really don’t think it makes a difference with such a wet dough like this, and I’ve always just plopped in the flours into the yeast water bowl because, hey, I’m lazy. I don’t want another bowl to wash. So if you want to be a rebel like me, and do it “wrong” then just add the flours and the salt into the bowl. (I accidentally used too small of a bowl so I had to transfer to a bigger one… but you shouldn’t have to with enough foresight… just use a big bowl to start)

Add the 2 1/2 cups of spelt flour (more or less) in 1/2 cup increments until the flour absorbs all of the yeasty water.

4. Take your clean hand and dust some spelt flour on it before you start kneading the dough in the bowl. Knead it over and over until you get a smooth elastic dough.

5. Add 1/4 cup of olive oil, knead it a little more then roll it up into a ball.

At this point, if you're not going to make the pizza right away, you can put this dough into a plastic bag without any extra air and store it in the fridge for a couple of days and the resume the steps that follow whenever you want to make the pizza. Take the dough out of the plastic bag, and keep following the same directions.

Otherwise, if you are making it now: Do the same thing you did with the yeast, create a double boiler effect with the boiling water in a pot with the bowl on top.

6. After 30 minutes: The dough should have risen and become fluffy, if you poke it it should be very soft and as smooth as a baby’s bottom.

7. Oil a pan with a tablespoon of olive oil to keep the dough from sticking to the pan. Dump out the dough from the bowl, flour it a bit with spelt and stretch it so that it’s thin but not too thin and as big or as small as you want it! Make sure here are no tears in the dough and if there are, patch them up.