Pizza Week Continues: BMW's Pizza Crust Recipe

Gotta make this fast.  I found BMW's pizza crust recipe.  She guards it jealously.  So, I'm crouching in the pantry to get this posted without her knowing.

Better to beg for mercy after the fact than ask permission.

It's worth folding yourself up into a ball and having an electric griddle poke you where the sun don't shine.  It's a great crust.  It has flavor and texture and gets crisp everywhere even with sauce and meat on it.

Apparently, she's been developing this for a while.  I found the ragged remains of a little recipe booklet we got many years ago with a bread-making machine.  We got rid of the machine a while back when she decided to start baking bread from scratch.  I wondered why she kept the recipe booklet.

She uses the base recipe for pizza dough from that book and has modified it over the years.  Pizza crust, like so much else in cooking and life, is a matter of experience.

Ingredients:
1 cup plus 1 tbsp. of water
1 tbsp. of olive oil
1 tbsp. of sugar
1 tsp. of salt
1.5 cups of white bread flour
1 cup of whole wheat flour
1 tsp. of active dry yeast

She mixes all that together with a Kitchen Aid stand mixer, you know the one with the patented whirly gig motion.  She doesn't do much extra kneading and then let's that rise until doubled in size.  If you don't have the fancy shmancy mixer, you probably need to do some kneading (or perhaps you're needing to knead, I get confused easily).

This recipe makes one to two pizzas, depending on how big you want them.  Around here, she usually doubles the recipe and then makes three pizzas roughly 10 inches across.  To get there she stretches the dough with her delicate hands and does the classic flying saucer bit as well, throwing the flattened dough in the air.  It has to spin when you toss it to stretch.  Not for the faint of heart or slow of hand.  I'm sure you recently saw the classic Julia Child bit where she flips the pancake or whatever it is and claims it is easy if you have the courage of your convictions.   Then, she has to piece it all back together.  Well, the same goes for flipping pizza dough like a quarter.  If courage isn't your thing, rolling pins and your hands work just as well.

You need a pizza stone to get the crust just right, but I'll get to all that on Friday.  Right now, I need to quietly open the pantry door and get out of here without getting...

Caught.