Two Different Pizza Dough Recipes & My First Book Review for the Food Book Challenge

Has it been a year since I promised to find that pizza dough recipe that I adapted? Almost.

Here it is.

From the smitten kitchen, a very nice food blog.

I didn't really expect to be cooking pizza on a cloudy and cool February Friday a week ago, but The Mister didn't want to explore a new pizzeria in town and heck, I was jonesing for pepperoni pie.

I bought the ingredients a while back, basically stuff that keeps for a couple months or longer: A jar of really good pizza sauce, dry moisture motz, and pepperoni. The only thing I had to make was the crust. By the way, I've tried many pre-made pizza crusts and they have all been pretty awful, but if you know of something that works for you, please share. I'm always on the look-out for an easy dinner.

In today's rendition I doubled the pizza dough recipe except for the salt. I also used white wine not sake like I have in the past, and I used more wine than usual. I used my KitchenAid with a dough hook to kneed the dough, and I cook the pizza at a lower temperature for a longer time.

There is no product picture this time around and the crust was at once too hard and too bread-y. My mistake may have been rushing the rising process or the fact that the house was too cold for a good rise.

This Sunday I thought I'd try again only this time use Ree's Basic Pizza Dough recipe from The Pioneer Woman Cooks.

The cookbook is my first book in the food book challenge. As a good read and selection of recipes, I rate this book very high, maybe just a half a star short of perfect. The reason for the down grade is that although the pizza came out looking gorgeous, it didn't taste all that wonderful. Maybe had I kept the dough for a day or two, the flavors would have developed more. Sigh.

Here's a picture of one of the pies.