Eighteen months ago, Paul turned over a new leaf – he adopted a plant based, low-oil diet. Now that’s totally counter-intuitive for someone who loves meat and raised meat chickens, but here we are. Part of this new paradigm is eating only whole grains. In recent years we’ve been pretty good at incorporating whole grains into our diet – with the exception of pizza dough.
Saturday night is pizza night, and my beer dough used to be our go to each week. Made with all-purpose white flour, I needed to come up with something different to fit Paul’s new diet. After a dozen or so lackluster attempts with recipes, I started experimenting and finally came up with this whole wheat 7-grain pizza dough. This is a dense dough that makes enough for three large very thin crusts.
7 Grain Whole Wheat Pizza Dough
- 1 cup warm water
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 2 1/2 teaspoons yeast
- 1 tablespoon agave or honey
- 2 tablespoons orange juice (this helps cut the bitter flavor whole wheat often has)
- 1/4 cup 7-grain cereal (typically found in the health food store)
- 2 teaspoons of dried pizza herbs (optional)
- 3 cups white whole wheat flour
- 1 tablespoon oil, reserved for oiling the bowl
Add the wet ingredients into the bowl of a standing mixer followed by the 7-grain cereal, herbs, and flour. Using a bread hook, begin mixing the ingredients on low speed moving slowly up to medium speed. Knead dough in the mixer for 8 minutes. Sometimes I find I the dough a little dry and add an additional tablespoon of water or orange juice if things seem a bit dry.
When finished kneading, pour 1 tablespoon of oil over the ball of dough and roll the dough around so oil covers the entire ball of dough as well as the bowl sides. Cover with plastic wrap and let sit for a few hours to rise. The recipe works great in a bread machine – just skip the oil and run it on the pizza dough setting.
We divide the dough into thirds. Taking a third of the dough, flour the counter and roll the dough out to the desired thinness with a rolling pin. We like really thin crust! Place the dough on a pizza pan covered with parchment paper. Pre-bake the dough for three minutes in a 425 degree (Fahrenheit) oven. Top it with your favorite sauce and toppings; bake for 12-18 minutes until done. My current favorite concoction is pesto with mozzarella, Monterrey Jack, and Parmesan cheeses, grape tomato halves, and back olives. Yum.
The dough freezes well, too. Hope you enjoy it!
