To a small jug or bowl, add the 60ml warm water, yeast and sugar. Be careful not to get the sugar and salt mixed up here! Set aside for 10 minutes to go frothy.
7 g yeast, 60 ml warm water, 2 tsp sugar
Note: By letting your yeast go frothy you are testing that it is active and going to work in your recipe. If it doesn’t go frothy then don’t use it, you’ll need to try another yeast.
To a large bowl add the flour and salt and stir until combined.
750 g strong white bread flour, 2 tsp salt
Add the olive oil and stir until roughly combined. You’ll see little globules of oil within the flour but this is fine.
90 ml olive oil
Once the yeast mix is frothy, add it to the flour mixture and stir it in.
Add 300ml of the room temperature water and then add a little more if necessary to bring the dough together. You want it to have picked up most of the flour from the bowl, but not be too sticky to handle (you shouldn’t need to go above 400ml).
300 ml room temperature water
Lightly flour a surface and your hands and knead the dough for 7 minutes until it is smooth and elastic, kind of like the texture of bubblegum!
Put the dough in a clean bowl, cover it and set aside in a warm place to rise (prove) for 45 minutes, when it should be roughly double in size.
Lightly flour a smooth surface and your hands. Turn the dough out onto the surface and divide it into four roughly equally sized sections.
To stretch the dough into the desired shape, first form it roughly into a ball with your hands. Place it on the floured surface and press it gently with your finger tips about 1cm in from the edge and work your way around in a circle so that it starts to flatten out. Turn it over and do the same on the other side.
When it is the shape of a small pizza, pick it up and hold it by the edge with the rest of the dough hanging down towards the bench. Turn the dough a little at a time so that you go full circle, this allows gravity to do the work of stretching the dough for you.
Place the base on a lightly floured 10” (25cm) pizza tray or a regular baking tray and do any final shaping on the tray. Try not to make your pizzas bigger than 10”, otherwise you’ll lose some of the beautiful soft squishyness!