Whole Wheat Pizza Dough

Background: I realize this is not a picture of pizza dough. But Karen requested that I post my pizza dough recipe, and that means writing a post that covers not only pizza dough, but also loaves of bread, baguettes, pita bread, naan, rolls, and all kinds of wonderful things. Because they all come from the same place, at least in my kitchen. To back up a little, we've had some culinary changes in our house over the last year or so. We had always eaten a relatively healthy diet, not a whole lot of processed foods, lots of veggies, etc. But then we had a revelation. We read "In Defense of Food" by Michael Pollan, and were in complete agreement with what he said (it also helped that my UM SPH Alumni Magazine released an issue stating the same things not long after)...which is that basically, for our physical health and for the environment, it is best to eat food (real food, because as he says, a lot of stuff in our grocery stores is not actually food, but rather edible foodlike substances), not too much of it (decrease portion sizes), and mostly plants. His rules for how to buy food include things like, "Don't buy things your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food", "Don't buy foods with more than five ingredients on the label", "Don't buy foods that contain ingredients you can't pronounce", etc. We're not total nazis about this: we do have some items in our fridge, like ketchup, which definitely don't fit into the rules. But for the most part, we try to stick to this plan. For us, this meant that we cut our meat consumption to one portion per week, started buying more from local farms, getting our milk from a local dairy, etc. It also meant making a lot more things from scratch, like bread. See, bread is supposed to have approximately four ingredients: water, flour, yeast and salt. Some breads, like challah, have eggs and some form of sugar. And then of course you can add all kinds of things like cheese and chocolate and raisins to your basic loaf. Most breads in grocery stores though, don't stop there. Even the "healthy" breads that say things like "12-grain" and taste like cardboard tend to have a lot of extras added in to make the loaf last a long time without molding or drying out. At first, we tried buying bread from the bakery. Plum Market, right down the street from us, sells all their leftover baguettes (Zingerman's!) for $1.25 after 8pm. This seemed like a good deal, but it didn't take us long to figure out that a baguette is just way to much for the three of us to eat before it gets too hard. So we started baking. We got a nice book from the libarary with pretty pictures and made some great breads. Not soft squishy breadmaker type breads, but pretty free-form loaves with great crackly crusts. Every weekend, during one of Juan Pablo's naps, Jeff and I would knead the dough, let it rise, shape it into loaves, and turn out a nice supply of bread for the coming week. We would have one loaf with dinner/breakfast the next day, and freeze the extras. However, this also got kind of old pretty quickly. It's a lot of work. And that's when I discovered "Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day", by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois. It caught my eye when I walked through the cookbook section at Border's one day, so I skimmed it, and then immediately placed it on hold at the library. It was everything I dreamed it would be. The process is simple: You mix together your ingredients (no kneading!), let them rise a couple hours, then store the dough in the fridge for up to two weeks, until you're ready to use it. When you're ready to bake, you pull off a piece of dough, shape it into a loaf, and let it rise about 40 minutes. Then you bake it for about 25 minutes, and you have fresh bread to eat. If you're making something flat like pita or naan, it's even faster. There are a few basic doughs that you can use to make a variety of different breads. The dough I use the most is the whole wheat dough...I use it for regular loaves and pizza dough mostly, but I've also used it to make baguettes, naan, pita, and cinnamon raisin bread in the past. The other great thing about this is that you can choose how big to make your loaves, so if you're making dinner for two, you can just make a little loaf or a couple of rolls, but if you're making dinner for a crowd, you can make a big loaf. Or lots of loaves. And today seems like an especially appropriate day for this post, because the authors' new book "Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day" comes out today. It has more recipes using whole grains, fruits and vegetables, and I can't wait to get a copy.

Originally from: Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois

Makes~4 pounds of dough, so enough for either four pizza crusts, or four loaves of bread, or a combination, but you can easily halve the recipe if this is too much to use up in two weeks

Approximate time, from prep to table: ~To get the pizza dough ready to use, it takes about 2 hours and 1 minute...but two hours of that, the dough is just rising.

Ingredients:
3 cups lukewarm water
1 1/2 tablespoons active dry yeast
1 1/2 tablespoons salt
5 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup whole wheat flour

Directions:
Mix all ingredients in a large container or bowl. Just mix, with a spoon, until they're blended...no need to knead. It should take about a minute or so.

Cover with a clean, dry towel, and let rise at room temperature for about two hours, until doubled. At this point, you can either use the dough, or store it, covered, in the refridgerator for up to two weeks. I just cover mine with plastic wrap...you don't want the cover to be air tight, or it could explode.

When you're ready to make a pizza, just pull off a one pound piece of dough from the mass in the bowl, and shape it into a ball (one pound of dough ends up being about the size of a grapefruit). Roll out the dough on a floured surface, top with the toppings of your choice, and bake as directed in your pizza recipe.

Note/Tips:

-If the dough is hard to roll out or keeps springing back, just let it sit for a few minutes to let the glutens relax.

-As I've mentioned, this dough can be used to make all kinds of great breads. See the book, or artisanbreadinfive.com for more information. I really recommend getting the book (I just checked it out from the library), because there's a lot of great stuff in there. I usually use this dough for pizza because it's what I typically have in the fridge, but the Olive Oil Dough make a more traditional pizza dough. Definitely worth checking out! And I promise the authors are not paying me to say all this great stuff about their book...though perhaps they should...