346: Now or Later Pizza Crust

I’ve wanted to try making a pre-baked pizza crust for a little while, and decided that now was a good time to try. I found the Now or Later Pizza Crust recipe on the King Arthur Flour website; you can see a corresponding, step-by-step blog post about it here as well.

I used 3 cups of AP flour instead of a mixture of flour and semolina. I didn’t use pizza dough flavor, and I think I used the minimum amount of water. I mixed together all the ingredients in the stand mixer, but didn’t knead it too terribly long. My dough wasn’t as slack as the one in the picture of the recipe. I let the dough rise, and then put it in the fridge to rise.

After about 4 hours, I pulled the dough out of the fridge and divided it in half. I stretched and patted the dough into 12-inch circles on pizza pans. I let the dough rest while I heated the oven, probably about 30 minutes. I prebaked each crust on the pans for 6 minutes at 450F, and baked a topped pizza for at least 15 minutes, until all the cheese in the center was bubbly and brown.

I wrapped the second pizza crust after it cooled and put it in the freezer. I had it about a week later. We pulled it out of the freezer and let it thaw, and made the pizza later that day. We topped it like before, and still had to bake it for 15 minutes to get all the toppings cooked as much as I wanted them. If I’d topped the pizza more lightly, we probably could have baked them for a little less time.

This was pretty good. The crust was extra done on the edges because I had to bake it so much longer. This may have been better if I’d used a mixture of flour and semolina. I’ve had better tasting pizza crusts, but I really like the convenience of this one. I might try this one again and let the dough rest in the fridge for longer.