Whole Wheat Crust Pizza, A Work in Progress

As mentioned before in this very blog due to my reading of Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It, I have been experimenting with a couple of diets so as to have a better standpoint to refute some of his postulations, if not completely anecdotally.

The first diet has been to avoid high glycemic index carbs and to make sure that my fat and protein intake is equal to or outweighs my carb intake. The jury is still out. 

One of the things I must avoid is white flour and white flour products. This Sunday we had pizza night for which I would usually (and did indeed) use Daddy Bread dough. For myself I purchased some stone ground whole wheat flour and attempted to make dough in my bread machine.

I found the simplest recipe I could online; basically 3 cups flour, 1 1/4 cup water, a packet of yeast, 1 1/2 tablespoons sugar, 1 1/2 teaspoons salt. Put everything in the canister with the flour going in last and turned on the bread machine. The dough had crept up the side of the canister in my absense and was immune to any kneading the machine attempted to dole out. What I had was clumps of dough-like substance.

I transferred this to the KitchenAid Stand Mixer with the dough hook attached and let it run for a few minutes. I shaped the still not contiguous mass into a rough ball and put it in a draft free place to rise, which it did, slightly. Then into the fridge until pizza day the next day.

My recipe was still basically this except that I rolled out half of my "dough" ball instead. It roughly stayed together, it was not round, it was not very thin. I topped it with delicious toppings and into the oven for 5 minutes.

The resulting pizza had a thick, dense, chewy, wheaty, yeasty crust and was actually quite tasty. I made another one the next day in a hot cast iron skillet on the stove to similar results.

I think I will have to become in the know about adding gluten for rise for my next batch.

Shrimp13