Recipe: Thin Crust Pizza

Thin Crust Pizza
rec.food.cooking/Louis Gordon (2003)

Take any pizza crust recipe (flour, water, yeast, salt, olive oil). Mix it up, knead it well, and let it rise.

Thirty minutes before it is done doubling in volume, heat the oven to 500 with a pizza stone in the oven.

Punch the dough down, and knead for a few minutes and then roll out as thin as you want it. Sometimes I like it paper thin and sometimes a little thicker.

Put some corn meal on a pizza pan to keep the dough from sticking and place the rolled out dough on the pan. Put the pizza pan into the oven and immediately place the pizza stone upside down on top of the pizza pan. Pizza pans have a slight rim, so the stone will not actually be touching the dough. The extreme heat of the stone will immediately kill the yeast so that no rising occurs in the oven.

Let it cook this way for 2 to 2 1/2 minutes. Both the top and the bottom of the crust will be crispy. Put the toppings on and cook without the stone for another 2-6 minutes depending on how thick you made the crust.