American-Style Cheese Crust Pizza Base

This pizza recipe will give you a deep crust, it can be made using dried yeast and doesn’t need to be stretched out as thinly as its Italian brother (link), so it requires much less kneading and resting time.

Prep time	Cook time	Total Time
20 min	10 min	30 min (plus resting time 1 hour)

Just six ingredients make the perfect pizza dough: flour, water, yeast, salt, sugar and olive oil. The one trick that makes a good crust is preheating the baking tray or better an open-proof stone plate at maximum heat & for a short time. This helps the pizza to get a really crispy crust and makes the cheese in the crust melt perfectly.

Ingredients for Pizza:

1,3 cups lukewarm water
1/2 tsp activated dried yeast
1tsp sugar
2 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp salt
3 cups white spelt flour
Optional: 100g vegan cheese for the crust

Instruction:

Add the flour, sugar and yeast to a big bowl and mix well, then add the salt
Mix all ingredients together and make a well in the middle
Then pour oil and water into the middle
Use your hands or a wooden spoon to mix it together until the flour is perfectly incorporated into the dough. It should be wet but hold together if you pick it up, if it doesn’t: add a bit more flour
Place into a wind-shielded place like your microwave or oven. Leave it to raise for a minimum of 50 minutes. In Italy the dough usually rests overnight, the longer it rests the better the gluten develops. In case you can make it the day before leave it in the warm place overnight
Cover your hands and the kitchen surface in flour and separate the dough into four equal sized balls. In case you don’t want to use all of the dough that day you can wrap in cling film and place it into the fridge (it will keep fresh for around 2 days and at this point which will achieve an even stronger taste 🙂
Kneed to form a non-sticky ball, cover with the towel and leave to rest for another 10min
At this point you can preheat your oven to 230 degrees celsius and prepare all you pizza toppings
Dust your hands, the surface and the ball with a bit of flour again and use either your hands or a rolling pin to stretch it out to the size you want. On the edge, the dough can remain slightly thicker or you decide to go for a cheese crust: roll out the edges quite thin place some vegan cheese close to the edge and fold over and press down to close prevent the cheese from spreading
And your base is ready! If you decide at this point you do not want to eat all 4 pizza bases – you can still freeze them at this point before adding the toppings
Be careful to only put the pizza in for around 10 minutes once the oven is completely pre-heated – ideally place it on a pizza stone or a baking tray covered with baking paper will do as well

Tipps:

You can either make your own tomato sauce following this recipe Arrabiata, or you just use any shop bought vegan sauce (I like the ones with garlic and basil) and just add a bit of fresh Basil, Oregano and Thyme to it.
Ideas for toppings would be: rocket, mushrooms, roasted butternut squash and garlic, slices of aubergine & zucchini, onion rings, olives, small cubes of different coloured peppers, spinach, chilli, artichokes, sun-dried tomato etc. etc. etc.