Daring Bakers: Pizza Dough

Ah pizza. It's hard to find someone who doesn't enjoy the stuff - a bit of nice dough, rich and fragrant tomatoes, melty tasty cheese...to not like one ingredient is difficult, to not like all three when they're combined is nearly criminal. Even though the A&N household had a recent forray into pizza-making, we went down that road again for a good cause: this month's Daring Baker's challenge, set by Rosa of Rosa's Yummy-Yums.

The dough recipe was one from Peter Reinhart's The Bread Baker's Apprentice, a tome that is loved by those in-the-know for the fantastic bread you can get from it. Peter's pizza dough called for you to make the dough mixture and then retard it in the fridge for at least 24 hours to help give the dough a more rounded, ferment-y flavor while keeping its crispness when rolled out and baked.

Following the recipe, I found the dough got quite wet before I had even added all the suggested water. I like baking bread, but don't feel I've quite cracked it yet, and often become concerned that my dough is too wet and end up adding more flour. I've tried to resist that dislike of having wet dough stuck to my fingers, stuck on the countertop, and riding up to my elbows, and just knead the love and suppleness into the mixture. Although my instinct told me this pizza dough was too wet, I carried on with it, kneading it and putting it into the fridge as directed.

The too-wet dough stayed too wet, and the 24 hours of resting it did in the fridge transformed the 6 unique dough balls into 6 suggestions of separateness. However, dough is resilient and it still baked up well and, once topped with the sauce, cheese, and extra goodies of everyone's choice, it was adored (as evidenced by the picture of the lone leftover slice, cheeseless and languishing on its plate the day after our dinner party ended). I'd be interested in trying the recipe again with better moisture balance, since I still prefer my normal pizza dough method but know that Peter Reinhart normally gives good results and he's a master I should pay attention to.