How to prepare a great pizza in a few hours, to bake in a pan, in the common home electric oven, but it can also be baked in a wood-fired oven, or on a stone, inserted with a pizza peel. For this type of pizza with quick rising, it’s important to properly measure the 5 fundamental elements for any dough: flour, hydration, yeast, time, and temperature. All these elements must be skillfully combined; I’ve been kneading since I was a child, and each time, depending on how these 5 elements vary, I adjust the type of dough to prepare. It would always be better to prepare doughs with suitable flours, therefore strong ones for long rises, at low temperatures, with little yeast and hydration starting from 65% upwards, like my pizza with 1 g of yeast or the Neapolitan pizza dough, remembering that coarser flours need longer risings, like the whole wheat flour dough. However, since we often get cravings at the last minute, it’s useful to know how to make a good dough for quick-rising pizza. I now knead at any hour and any day of the week, I make rolls, bread, focaccias, and almost no longer buy bread or pizza from the pizzeria, much preferring homemade ones, so I thought of sharing with you one of my super successful doughs to prepare, in addition to bread and focaccia, with the addition of a little olive oil, also a quick pan pizza, hence the idea of preparing pizza in a few hours, maybe to prepare on a Sunday evening, when we get the munchies in the late afternoon, or whenever we want. Let’s see how to prepare pizza in a few hours; I prepared it in a large pan, about 14×18 inches, but the dough is also sufficient for 2 round pizzas with a 12-inch diameter, considering that for a single pizza you need 1 2/3 cups of flour.
- Difficulty: Very Easy
- Cost: Cheap
- Preparation time: 20 Minutes
- Portions: 6 slices
- Cooking methods: Oven
- Cuisine: Italian
- Seasonality: All Seasons
Ingredients for 1 Quick Pan Pizza or 2 Round Ones
- 1 2/3 cups all-purpose flour
- 1 2/3 cups bread flour or pizza flour
- 5 g fresh yeast
- 1 1/4 cups water
- 1 1/2 tsp salt
- 10 1/2 oz blended peeled tomatoes
- 7 oz mozzarella
- 1 3/4 oz gorgonzola
- 1 3/4 oz smoked scamorza
- 1 3/4 oz provola or other cheese of choice
Tools to Make Quick Pizza
- 1 Bowl
- 1 Baking Pan
- 1 Spoon
Steps to Prepare Quick Pizza
We start by dissolving the yeast in room temperature water, in a sufficiently large bowl. Add one of the two flours and mix well with a spoon. Then add half of the other flour, and continue mixing with the spoon. Take small pauses. Work calmly. Add the salt, and mix again. Then add all the flour and incorporate it while continuing to work with the spoon.
The dough is so soft that it is entirely worked with a spoon, but it is important to take breaks and resume working to make the dough more elastic and thus our pizza softer. We can take short breaks, 3 or 4, of about 1 minute, or even better, longer breaks, of 5 minutes, or maybe just one long and the others shorter. If you want, you can give some turns of hand kneading, but it’s not essential; I always do it because I love kneading, but if you don’t want to, that’s fine too.
This phase is very important. Having perfect rising in 2-3 hours is not easy, but nothing is impossible; indeed, when we work with yeasts, it’s like conducting experiments. Our goal is to have the dough rise well in about 2-3 hours. To achieve good rising at this point, it’s to let the dough rise in a warm place, just as our grandmothers used to say, grandmothers who often used 2 cubes of yeast for 1 kg of flour, besides the wool blanket. We might use 2 cubes of yeast for 10 kg of flour if kneading in advance, but since we’re in a hurry, we use 5 g of yeast, and mind you with this preparation, it would still be 5 g even for 1 kg of flour. In this case, it’s very important to let it rise in a warm place, and by warm, we mean a temperature around 82°F. In summer, we have no problems, but in winter, we have to recreate a warm, humid environment so that our dough doesn’t dry out.
So we cover with plastic wrap and put it in a small oven with a bowl of hot water inside the oven. In just over 2 hours, the dough will be perfectly risen, with bubbles visible on the surface.
We take the risen dough, spread it on a floured surface, open it, and close it by making a series of folds, and repeat, preferably at a short distance, a total of 2 sets of folds, to give structure to our dough. Let it rise for about an hour, in a warm or sheltered corner, covered with a damp cloth to prevent it from drying out on the surface.
We take the dough, spread it to form a rectangle, on a well-floured surface. Line a pan about 14×18 inches with the base. Or we can divide the dough into two pieces, after the folds, to make two round pizzas 12 inches in diameter.
Immediately season with blended peeled tomatoes or simply mashed with a fork.
Add the 4 cheeses: mozzarella, gorgonzola, smoked scamorza, and provola.
Bake in a hot fan oven at 482°F for about 15 minutes. If using a fan oven, you can also bake 2 trays at the same time in about the same time.
Remove from the oven and enjoy our delicious, hot, and stringy pizza, excellent as a red four cheese or with the topping you like best. I naturally used my favorite flavor; every time I bake pizza, at least one must be four cheese, with little importance whether it’s white or red.
You can play with the 5 variables, depending on the time you have and the flours you want to use.
