I have tried recipie after recipie and I just can seem to make a good pizza dough. they just don't cook right and they just don't taste right.

Anybody know how to make a good one.

22 - i gotcha covered - click this link for some really good (and easy) stuff:

http://foodsoftheworld.activeb...6&title=pizza-napoli

all you need are flour, yeast, water, salt, a little sugar and a little olive oil. as for the flour, you can use bread flour or all-purpose flour, but i have found that best results come from using a combination of the two - half-and-half should be just fine.

there are also quite a few notes in the subsequent replies that might help you get the most out of your pizza dough. if you have any questions, post them or pm me.

As with any bread it's not the recipe that matters it's what you do to the dough and how you bake it. We used to run our pizza oven at 650 degrees so in a household oven you're sunk before you start.

I've used my bbq and put some firebricks in and got them nice and hot then slipped some thin crust pizzas on to cook. They finished in about 3 minutes which is nice. they come out nicely cooked, blistered and a bit charred where the blisters pop-yum. I imagine a big green egg would be the bomb.

Also you'll get great results with fresh, not dried yeast. Go to a bakery and buy a pound of it. Cut in pieces and freeze the left over.

Here pizza places use "keynote" flour. It's a good bread flour. If you can't get that just get "strong" bread flour. Incidentally the best flour comes from Canadian hard spring wheat as the gluten is nice and high.

Make the dough the day before you need it and after rounding it and proofing it flatten it in the pan then leave it in the fridge overnight (covered so it doesn't dry out).

To prevent sticking you can use olive oil in the pans or corn meal your choice.

Do you think that dough would also be good for making empanadas? One of my Argentine favorites; not bake them, but to fry them.....

I've fried bread dough but tossed it in cinnamon sugar. Aren't empanadas made with cornmeal in the dough?

The 'official' temperature is 840 F and they recently tried to pass a law to that effect in Italy. Of course with a typical oven here you're stuck with 550 F here. So as mentioned get some baking stones [pizza stones] and make sure they and the oven are fully preheated.
There's no reason why you can't make it with whole wheat flour but there too use the hard wheat.

Use a recipe that calls for high-gluten flour and whole eggs

Proof the dough after mixing. (let it rise and double in size)

Punch down the dough and roll it out, top and bake at 550

there's a lot of "official" this and "specialised" that, and i know that it all makes great tasting pizza, but i have a hard time imagining the typical neapolitian housewife jumping through such hoops.

for the common kitchen using common stuff, the method described in the link above plus a 10$ pizza stone =



(admittedly, the heat was about 25 degrees too low on this one.)

and



(here my buddy went overboard with the cheese, but the results in the crust are plain to see.)

if you have to choose between all-purpose or breade flour, then go with bread flour; having said that, a combinatin of the two gives best results.

Eggs in pizza dough?
Noooooooo!!!!!
Wouldn't that be like cake??