local: pizza dough

this pizza i made: 4 ingredients

pizzeria 712:

classy, yet not ridiculously overpriced pizza. simple flavors, seasonal ingredients, and local artists' paintings on the wall. their moto:

"when you have the best and tastiest ingredients, you can cook very simply and the food will be extraordinary because it tastes like what it is"

most people don't know of pizzeria 712, and of the few people that do know of the orem-based pizza restaurant, even fewer know that they sell their pizza dough. the pizzeria boasts its ability to find incredible local flavors and incorporate them into their food - everything is fresh. they even make their own mozzarella cheese each morning. but the dough is just as incredible - it comes from a sourdough start using, of course, local flour from a mill in logan, utah. they cook their pizza in a wood burning oven at 712 degrees (get it?) using apple and cherry woods, and the end result is a solid pizza.

dough - $2

here's what i did: grabbed some pizza dough, $2, some fresh mozzarella, $4, good pizza sauce, fresh whole basil leaves (during the summer, i'll grow a little bush), and my wife. when i went to pick up the dough, they were just closing up for the afternoon before the dinner rush. since they weren't busy, the chef (pictured below) took me behind the counter and taught me how to pull the dough.

cool cook.

here's what you need:

dough - keep it cold until you use it, and don't wait more than an hour or two.

mozzarella cheese - fresh. normally i just pull off slabs, skip the grating

tomato sauce or just some slices of tomatoes - do not use pasta sauce. do not.

whole basil leaves - fresh

here's what you do:

turn your oven on as hot as it will go, 500 degrees is normally the max. we used a grill that i was able to get up to 700 degrees.

don't roll the dough if you can avoid it. put the dough onto your two closed fists (the fists should be together, almost like you're praying). slowly move your hands away from each other, keeping your fists closed - this should stretch the dough. continue to move your hands back to the center of the dough and pull them apart (maintaining your fists closed) stretching the dough into a circle. pull the dough until the center is so thin that you can nearly see light through it. set the dough on a pizza stone, or pan.

apply the sauce. note that as a pizza cooks, the sauce will move towards the center, so apply sparingly towards the center and generously towards the endges, it will even out as it cooks. also note that you don't need very much sauce. because the dough is thinner at the center, too much sauce will make it soupy.

next, add your cheese with the same rule as the sauce - a bit more around the edges. finally top the cheese with your basil leaves.

cook for about 7-11 minutes. the crust and the cheese should be browning. pull and cut while the pizza is hot. bon appetit

most important ingredient, my wife