4th Apr 2008
Friday

A HARD TIME WITH THIN CRUST PIZZA DOUGH

I didn't have a clue what I was going to cook for dinner yesterday aside from the possible fried mee hoon or fried kway teow I always fall back upon in times like these. Then it sort of flashed ... well, not exactly flashed in my mind but something like that, that I would like to eat pizza. Anderson volunteered to go buy one but I felt it wasn't something I wanted him to waste time on as it wasn't like a real craving or something like that, just that I just felt like eating pizza.

I looked up some pizza recipes and pizza dough being made with yeast definitely needed time to rise and all that which I didn't have the luxury of since it was 7:30 pm by then or was it 6:30 ... yep, it was definitely 6:30 pm. Then I chanced upon a recipe for Homemade Thin Crust Pizza which didn't call for the dough being left for an hour to rise. It was just make your dough, pile on your stuffing and bake it. So why not?

The dough called for:
3/4 cups of water
1/2 tsp yeast
2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp salt

Well, I followed instructions to the 't' but unfortunately when I added in the flour and tried to knead it to the consistency of smooth and elastic, moist and tacky, all I got was dry and dry ...

This wasn't right, I felt, something had to be wrong somewhere, where did I go wrong, I had all the measurements right so where was the mistake? Well, to try and salvage it, I just added a lil' bit of water ... added it a few times more and it still wasn't moist and tacky and rolling it out seems like a humongus task!

I tried troubleshooting by looking at other recipes but they seemed to be almost similar so there couldn't be anything wrong with it. Finally, I added some vegetable oil, just a bit and kneaded it a bit more. Then I tried rolling it out again - it refused to spread out. I was close to throwing out the dough (might probably knock out a passerby) and dinner time was going to pass me by soon!

Then my knight in shining armour came to the rescue of this very distressed maiden, he took over the rolling. He did a better job than I did. While he was doing that, I did the tomato sauce (chopped tomato with tomato ketchup), chopped the mushrooms, washed the anchovies and shredded some cooked chicken meat.

Anyway, it finally got to the oven and before I knew it, it was all done. I called Anderson over and he felt it looked a bit weird, something was missing, the anchovies were standing up and the mushrooms weren't smiling - where's the cheese??? OOOPPPSS!

Regardless of the mishaps, the crust tasted really great and was crispy. All in all, it was a really good meal :)

P.S. I'll take a picture of it next time, still have half the dough in the refrigerator!

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