Homemade whole wheat pizza dough

We love pizza!  I have yet to meet a pizza I didn’t like.  But our favorite is homemade pizza!  Over the years Valerie has tried a million different recipes in an attempt to make the perfect pizza crust.  After years of fine-tuning she finally came up with the perfect combo for a great whole-wheat pizza dough.  And the best part is you can make this homemade pizza crust with almost 100% whole wheat!

When you are talking about the thick vs. thin crust debate you need to realize that our family comes down heavily on the THICK CRUST side.  So this whole wheat pizza dough recipe is designed to be a thick crust.  I would suppose you could get it a lot thinner by cutting down the raise time, but why would you want a thin-crust pizza?

Whole Wheat Pizza Dough
2 ¼ teaspoons of yeast (1 package)
1 cup warm water (115 degrees)
1 tablespoon honey
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 teaspoon salt
2 1/4 cups whole wheat flour
1/2 Cup All purpose flour
(Makes one large pizza)

Dissolve yeast in water in a large bowl.  Stir in oil, honey, salt and 1 cup flour.  Beat until smooth.  Mix in enough of the remaining flour to make the dough easy to handle.  The small amount of white flour adds a little gluten to the mix and allows the crust to raise a little better than it would if it was 100% whole wheat.  After a bunch of different experiments, we found that the minimum amount of white flour you can put in the crust to get it to turn out how we like it is 1/2 cup.  Of course, if you don’t like whole wheat then just use this same recipe only with all white flour.  But you really need to give this a try, you will love the whole wheat crust!

Turn dough onto a floured surface:  knead until smooth and elastic (5 minutes).  Place in a greased bowl; turn the greased side of the dough up.  Cover and let rise in a warm spot until doubled, around 30 minutes.

Punch down the whole wheat pizza dough and shape how you like.  We like to hand-toss the crust, I’m not sure that it makes a difference in the crust, but it sure is fun!  Our favorite pizza pan is a cast iron pan we bought a few years ago, but you can use cookie sheets as well.  Once you have them shaped up then put on your favorite toppings (we still use a store-bought marinara sauce but your favorite pasta sauce or marinara recipe will work perfectly).  Because we like our crust nice and thick we let the pizzas sit for another 15 minutes or so to let it rise.

Bake at 425 on the center rack.  Bake time is about 10 to 12 minutes in our oven.  It’s a good idea to check it at about the 10-minute mark and see how it’s doing. We like the crust nice and golden brown.

This whole wheat pizza dough is flexible enough that you can even use it with sweet toppings.  You can see the night we took these pictures we did a traditional pepperoni (this is one of the few processed meats we have yet to give up, if anyone has suggestions for a replacement we would love to hear from you!), one that was more of a bread stick with just herbs, garlic salt and cheese, and a dessert pizza.

The dessert pizza is simply a mixture of oatmeal, cinnamon, flour, and brown sugar with a little bit of maple syrup spread over the whole wheat pizza dough before baking.  Then after it is cooked we drizzle it with a simple icing made from powdered sugar, milk, and vanilla.  It’s really good and a lot less fattening than what you would get from a pizza place.  Yes okay, we realize that this desert pizza is covered in sugar and isn’t a “real food” item, but we allow ourselves a treat every once in a while!!  Nobody is perfect right?