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Learn how to make pizza dough without a stand mixer in this Howcast food video.


So I live in Manhattan. I do not have a ton of space. I don't have room for a giant machine so the way I make pizza dough at home is with little boy right here. All you need is a fork. So what I start with is about 3 cups of all purpose flour, I'm going to do what's called the well method. So I'm just going to kind of make this giant well just enough where I can kind of see the board, but I still have this barrier of all the flour alright?

It's kind of like go back to your sand castle days that's where you want to be. So I have a little bit of yeast in here, a little warm water and I let it bloom in here for about 10 minutes. 110 degrees is the optimum water temperature when you pour in your yeast so it kind of wakes it up and you know it's there if you can see this kind of foam. That's a good sign that you did the right thing. A little squeeze of honey in there just to give it some sweetness and then I'm going to pour the whole thing into the well.

Alright. Now, this is the part where it gets a little bit intense. If you break down one of the walls you've got a little bit of a mess to clean up. So you just kind of start bringing in the flour little by little from the walls, just kind of working it, right? Trying your best not to break a wall because if you do you're kind of doing one of these things trying to scoop it off the ground. Just a little bit in, move it around, it's going to get a little thicker. Awesome.

And you just kind of keep working it and you can see the dough is just getting a little bit thicker and now, that it's kind of looking like a heavy creamer pancake batter I take a big pinch of salt. If I do the salt too early, it's going to kill the yeast, so you just want to add it right when the yeast is getting incorporated with the flour. Awesome. Alright, so you can see this kind of all happening.

Now I really don't care about the sides it's just kind of like a free for all. Get all that flour in there, do it's thing. I love doing this. This is like after a hard day at work, grab a fork make some dough, nothing better. Alright, beautiful. At this stage, your fork has kind of done it's job. So I like to move to this guy it's called a bench scraper. Really, really helps the process so I kind of get all my flour in there, you can kind of really see the dough taking shape now. This is kind of called a shaggy dough, and you can even kind of, I learned this in Italy, you can chop it up just to kind of get it a little more incorporated. Awesome.

And then this will even go so far right? So you have this dough and the only way to do it is to use your beautiful god-given tools. So, you get in there a little bit of flour, and you start kneading it. The way you knead it is you just kind of stretch out, fold and twist. So if it gets sticky, you just grab a little extra bench flour. So it's stretch out, fold, twist. Stretch out, fold, twist. And just keep on going, you can see it's really starting to shape form here.

And again, if it starts getting sticky just grab a little bit of that extra flour, get messy that's with pizza dough is all about. So, it's stretch, fold, twist. Awesome. And you're going to do this for about 10 minutes until the dough really looks looking nice, coherent and has a really smooth texture throughout.

So, as you can see, it's been about 10 minutes and most of the flour on my board has absorbed into the dough so it's not too sticky but if you need a little more bench, go for it. And I'm just going to kind of tuck the sides right underneath of it, beautiful. And I'm just going to grab a bowl, a little bit of flour on the bottom so it doesn't stick, gentle with our little baby dough.

A little bit more on top, cover it up with a towel, forget about it for about 2 hours and let it rise in a warm place and you'll have a perfect dough made by hand.