How to Prep Dough for Chicken Pesto Pizza

Video Transcript

"Hi for Expert Village I'm chef Danielle I'm going to be forming our dough. Now look how much our dough grows in the last hour. Remember I had it sitting on top of the oven covered with a towel. What you want to do first is called punching the dough. You don't want to hit it to hard cause you hand would go all the way down to the dough and hit the bottom. I have done that before and it really hurt your knuckles. So we are going to punch it but not really hard cause what it is going to do all the air is going to come out of the dough which is exactly the way that you want. Now for a better crust if you have the time you can recover it at this point and put it back on the oven and let it proof again. But we are not going to do that cause we are hungry. So we are going to take the dough out here and what you want to do is you want to put this dough into cut into 4 equal portions. Again you want to dust your surface because otherwise the dough is going to stick. Now at this point after you portion it out you are going to make 4 separate pizzas. You can let your family make there own pizza. You can use this dough for any type of pizza that you want not just the one that we are making today. Also if you want to save it you can after you portion it out you can freeze this dough and use it again later on. So if you want to use the back of your knife cause you don't want any metal shard and you don't want to ruin your counter either. So you want to use the back of your knife and portion out the dough so once we get all portion out I'm only going to use one so I'm going to set this aside now. So what you want to be sure that they are formed into balls so you can kind of do this. So you want to pull the dough like this so it kind of forms a little crease in the bottom and pull it out and put into a ball, put your fingers around it and just roll it. To make it into a ball and that is how you can portion it out to section it later or use it now. You want to do the same thing whatever you are doing with ever method that you are doing. The first thing that you want to do before you form your pizza is to push your fingers down and kind of get it mushed out a little bit from that ball. This is the great thing about the word of rustic when you are cooking or baking because rustic means that it is kind of a older recipe or it could look like it was a older recipe so you don't have to have it look perfect and that is great when I'm cooking at home because I don't have to worry about making it look perfect and neither then you. You want to try and take your fingers and just form it out. Now if it is sticking like it is now you can dust a little bit more so you just want to try to stretch your dough out. Another trick that they use is that you can drop it off the side of your cover and just kind of go like this. The gravity will allow your dough to sort of form a little bit more. If you got a little hole like this that is okay just keep forming it until you get the shape that you want. This is also fun if you have a family and small kids or whatever that is great that it is rustic cause they can make it whatever shape and feel that they did a great job."