Quick & Easy Perfect Pizza Dough

My wife and I have to stick to a low sugar, low carb diet. This, of course, makes it difficult to have one of our favorite things… Pizza! I decided that the only way we would be able really enjoy pizza would be if we made it at home. I had tried different things for making low carb pizza at home previously, but nothing really tasted right. Then I ran across this dough recipe and I was sold.

Now the dough itself probably wouldn’t be considered low carb, but sometimes it’s about taking something delicious and focusing on portion control. We went on Amazon.com and purchased, small, personal sized pizza pans that work perfect for portion control. Now, the carb count for this recipe as a whole is approximately 384. However, when you start breaking it down, it can become very carb friendly. If you make a personal pizza with 1/8 of the dough, you’re only consuming 48 carbs in the pizza crust alone. That was still a little high for us, so I eventually cut the dough into 16th’s and used 1/16 of the dough for a personal pizza. This did spread the dough a little thin, similiar to the old Chef Boyardee pizza kits if you remember those. However, this was pretty low carb at ~24 carbs for the pizza crust at that point. Eventually I split the difference and cut the dough into 12th’s and used 1/12 of the dough for each pizza crust, which equates to ~32 carbs for the pizza crust of a personal sized pizza. This was perfect as it wasn’t too high in carbs and it baked up nicely.

One other thing about this dough is, not only is it delicious, it’s extremely versatile. My wife and I started experimenting with other uses for the dough. We took mozzarella cheese sticks and wrapped them in the dough and baked them and made cheese bread. It was perfectly baked on the outside and gooey and stringy with cheese in the middle. This started us thinking about what else we might do with this dough and, of course, we thought of dessert! We took the dough and shaped it into twists and baked it and as soon as it came out of the oven, we brushed it with butter and tossed it in Cinnamon and Splenda. Amazing! They tasted like Churros. So, whether you are looking to bake an appetizer, main course, or dessert, this is a dough I would recommend without question.

This recipe was created by Joanna Cismaru (https://www.jocooks.com/wprm_print/15411). I’ve made it several times now and there is only one slight change that I make to the recipe so that’s how I will write it below. The change is in the amount of olive oil used in the dough. I found 1/3 cup was slightly too much. I also tried 1/4 cup, but landed on just slightly more than 1/4 and slightly less than 1/3 and it came out perfect.

Recipe

Prep Time: 10 Min Total Time: 10 Min Serves: 8

Ingredients

• 1 1/2 Cups Warm Water
• 1 tsp Sugar
• 2 1/4 tsp Active Dry Yeast (1 package)
• 4 Cups All Purpose Flour
• 1 tsp Salt
• Between 1/4 & 1/3 Cups Olive Oil

Instructions

1. Add warm water, sugar, and yeast to a bowl and whisk it together. Set a timer for 10 min.
2. Attach your dough hook to your stand mixer and add the flour, salt, olive oil, and the yeast mixture.
3. Turn mixer on speed 2 and let it mix the dough for 5 minutes
4. When finished, take the dough out and shape it on parchment or wax paper into a block or ball or some shape you can cut it evenly.
5. Cut into the number of servings you prefer (make two large pizzas, make 8 individual pizzas, make 16 individual pizzas, etc.)
6. Grease your pizza pan(s) with cooking spray and spread the dough out to form a pizza crust and add your sauce and preferred toppings.
7. Preheat oven to 500 degrees (or the highest temperature your oven has) and bake the pizza(s) for at least 8 minutes, but we like ours crispy and well done so we let ours go for probably 15 – 20 min.

Nutrition

(per serving for 8 servings)

Calories: 312kcal | Carbohydrates: 48g | Protein: 6g | Fat: 9g | Saturated Fat: 1g | Sodium: 295mg | Potassium: 77mg | Fiber: 1g | Calcium: 11mg | Iron: 3mg