Basic Pizza Dough

I go back and forth with pizza crust/dough.  Buy pre-made crust, or make dough from scratch?  I would gladly buy a premade crust if I could find one that was whole grain and oil free.  I'm over having to have a soft doughy crust on my pizza.  I don't mind 100% whole grain anything.  So, it seems my options have been narrowed down to making my own, unless I'm lucky enough to stumble onto something as I travel around and visit health food stores and food co-ops, or the occasional local (and rare) whole grains bakery.

Speaking of traveling around, in case you haven't read my profile, I live and travel full time with my husband in a 5th wheel trailer.  The oven in our rig does not handle a 12" round pizza pan (the oven door won't close with a pan this size inside).  I need an 11" or maybe even a 10" round pan, but so far I've only seen 12" and larger, or very tiny personal pizza sized pans.  I've given up the idea of having to have round pizza and just use my rectangular cookie sheets when I make pizza.  It still tastes the same!

For this recipe, I decided to use whole wheat pastry flour instead of all-purpose (white), and not to oil the bowl where I put the dough to rise.  Up until this point, that was the only adjustment necessary to keep to my no-oil, whole-grain-only quest.  I found it interesting that the instructions did not include any kneading, indeed, even had instructions not to over mix the dough.  In my past experience with yeasted dough, the more kneading, the better.  But this seemed to work out okay, even using the whole grain flour.  At the end of the one hour rising time, the dough hadn't grown all that much, but I went forward with the rest of the rolling out instructions found in the actual pizza recipe, and everything worked out just fine. 

This was actually the first time I used whole wheat pastry flour for a pizza crust, and I was pleased with the results.  I'm stopping with just the "Basic Pizza Dough" (p. 128) in this post, as I want to list each of the 1000 recipes individually.  (To see how I topped it, see the post below.)