Quick Veggie Pizza

This was my first time making pizza dough from scratch, and I really liked it! I found a recipe on allrecipes, changed it slightly and doubled it for my family. Even though it uses yeast, the rising time is only thirty minutes, which was fantastic for a weeknight meal. The only flour my recipe uses is all purpose, and I thought the crust came out great. The dough was incredibly soft to work with and a cinch to roll out. The girls really wanted to see if I could toss the dough, so I did, and to my amazement, it stretched out amazingly. The dough stayed uniformly round when I rolled it, but changed into interesting shapes when I tossed it three or four times. So, that was a fun twist. Some shapes fit on my pizza pan, and some had to be baked on a large cookie sheet. I thought by doubling the dough recipe that I'd have just enough for five mini pizzas, but instead, I ended up with five full-size pizzas, yum! It was the tossing that did it. After the short rise time, the dough already had a sourdough-y fragrance, and I found that very appealing. One thing I will do differently next time is to not make all the crusts ahead of time: even with plenty of flour in between layers of uncooked crusts, they all stuck together, and I had to re-roll and start over. But, it was so quick, it wasn't that big of a deal. There is sugar in this recipe, and some sort of sweetener in all the recipes I searched, so I just decided to put it in. I think I'll give it a try without the sweetener next time, and see if there's a marked difference. With the simplicity of ingredients and the quickness of the meal, I can definitely see me making homemade pizza frequently in our home!

A close-up of Quick Veggie Pizza

What my dough looked like after rolling.

How big it got after a few tosses!

Its fun, quirky shape straight from the oven! What was fun for the Blessings, is that everyone's pizza had a unique shape.

Quick Veggie Pizza

Ingredients:

Crust:

2 pkgs. or 1 and 1/2 Tbs. of active dry yeast
2 cups of warm water
4 cups of flour
1 and 1/2 Tbs. olive oil
2 tsp. salt
1 and 1/2 Tbs. vegan or raw sugar

Your Favorite Veggie Toppings:

We used:
Organic pizza sauce
Follow Your Heart Vegan Gourmet cheese, cheddar style, finely shredded
Tomatoes, halved and sliced
Can of black olives, sliced in thirds
Dino kale, stripped from stems and torn or coarsely chopped
Mushrooms, sliced

Directions:

In a small bowl, dissolve the yeast in the warm water. Let rest for ten minutes. Combine the remaining crust ingredients in a large bowl, along with the yeast mixture, and mix well. Cover bowl with a damp towel, and let rise for 30 minutes. Punch dough down and divide into five sections. Preheat oven to 400 degrees. On a floured surface, roll out one section of dough to about the size of a plate. Pick up and gently toss with your hands, until it's at least one and a half times its original size. Put on your baking sheet or pizza pan, and load with toppings. Bake for 20 minutes. While baking, make your next pizza. (I did not try to bake more than one pizza at a time because I thought they may stay undercooked, and I wanted this first time to be a success. However, I may do that the next time I make these to test my theory.) Remove from oven and let rest for five minutes before slicing. So good and easy! Feeds five hungry vegans, with leftovers for lunch the next day!