Adventures with Bread Machines: Pizza Dough

It's time to present my pizza dough experiences. I'd never had much experience of pizza dough. If I was making "home made" pizza then maybe it'd be those plain bases you find in the chiller of the supermarket, I think once I used a box mix with my brother but that's about it.

I honestly wouldn't buy any kind of pizza base now. This recipe is so simple there's no excuse not to make it. I generally have the ingredients to hand anyway so it's not even that I have to plan ahead. Bread machines are so handy to have around.

Again, this recipe is from One Hundred Bread Machine Recipes by Vicki Smallwood (ISBN: 1856057135).

Ingredients:
1 cup tepid water
1 tsp salt
3 tbsp olive oil
3 cups white bread flour
1 tsp yeast

Method (brace yourself):
Place the ingredients into the bread machine pan in the order listed and set the machine to "dough."
When the cycle has finished, separate the dough into 2 or 4 (depending on how big you want your pizzas - we did 2 medium rectangular ones) and roll to the desired shape and size.
Put the toppings of your choice on top and then cook in the top of the oven for 8-10 minutes.

That's really all there is to it. You can put whatever kind of topping you want on it to make it exactly how you like it. I think I used cooked chicken along with a ton of other things.

The only the problem I really have with this book is that it doesn't tend to give any guide as to how much the recipe actually makes. This made 2 good sized rectangular pizzas which would have been enough for 4 people (I say "would have been" because I think Al and I ate the lot - in my defence I did have 2 goes at it throughout the evening though).