How to Make Dough for Chicken Pesto Pizza

Video Transcript

"I am Chef Danielle for Expert Village. Now we are going to move on to the dough. If you don't want to make a fresh homemade dough, you don't have to. I prefer like a bubbly crust. You can get them premade at the supermarket. You are more than welcome to do that. But if you want to make your own dough, you can. What you are going to need is a packet of dry active yeast, any brand will do. You are going to need to dissolve this yeast, let me find my scissors, in some hot water. The water is going to need to be about a 105 to 115 degrees. If you don't have a thermometer that is going to measure your temperature, that's fine. You want it to be hot but not boiling. It is going to be too much. If you water isn't hot enough, your yeast is not going to dissolve and that is the first step of this. You want to dissolve your yeast in 1 cup of water. So you want to put your yeast in, pour in your warmed hot water and let that all dissolve. In the meantime, I pre-measured some of this. You want 3 cups of flour which I used a dry my measuring cup for because this is a liquid measuring cup and it was liquid with your water. There was also a teaspoon of sugar and teaspoon of salt. You just kind of want to mix all these ingredients together. If you want to change up your dough a little bit depending on the type of the pizza you are making, you can make a wheat dough. So instead of using 3 cups of all purpose flour, you can use 1 cup of wheat flour and 2 cups of all purpose flour or you can add some honey as well to the dough and it will make it some honey dough. So you want to add in your yeast and water mixture once it is dissolved and the other thing you want to do is you are going to need a little bit more of olive oil, about a tablespoon. So you want to put some olive oil in there as well and you are going to want to keep your olive oil handy because once you get all this mixed together and kneaded which I am going to show you in a minute and put into a ball, you are going to want to coat your dough with some olive oil. Now I am going to mix and knead this by hand because this is what I prefer. If you have a Kitchen Aid Mixer or professional mixer, you can do this whole step with a dough hook. You put your dough hook on your mixer and for those of you who have one, you know what I mean. And it is going to get to the point where you are going to need to knead it on its own with a dough hook but I am going to mix it by hand. If you want to use a fork or some sort of mixing spoon if you don't like getting your hands dirty, then go for it. But what you are going to want is you are going to want to get it to a point where it is going to be like in a ball when you get all that liquid mixed in. The other thing you want to keep handy is your flour because you are going to need to dust, called dusting your surface, so that the dough isn't going to stick to your counter when you are kneading out your dough. You get into a nice ball which is going to be a little sticky which is okay. You want to be sure to get as much of those ingredients as much as you can off the bottom of the bowl and into your dough. Kind of clean off your hands a little bit and you are going to want to grab some of your flour and like I said before, we are going to dust our surface."