Pizza Therapy is the Best Therapy!
Greetings! I hope you are doing well. I'm fine, thanks.
Last week I was invited to my old school to make pizza with my former class of Special Education students. We had a blast. Guiding students through the pizza making process is always fun, exciting and I learn something new each time I do a pizza demo.
I wanted to make things simple so they are able to
recreate their own pizzas at home. I used a very simple dough recipe with 4 simple ingredients. Flour, water, salt and yeast. These days when I make pizza, I always weigh the ingredients, but as I said I wanted this to be simple and easy.
Here's the recipe: 4 cups of flour, 1 and 1/2 cups of water, 1 teaspoon of yeast, 1 teaspoon of salt. That's it. I made 3 batches two days before and let the dough cold ferment in the fridge for 48 hours. As you may know, cold fermenting
really helps the dough to process and release more flavor. The entire process is explained in The Pizza Therapy Pizza Book.
(Please note: “I get commissions for purchases made through some links in this post.”)
Since the students would be making mini
pizzas, I cut each dough ball into 8 pieces. We ended up making 22 pizzas as well as a few dinner rolls.
I demonstrated how to stretch each dough ball into a pizza shape. I used a technique I learned from Mark and Jenny Bello from Pizza School NYC called "Soft Bongos" as a way to get started.
You can view some pics here. When making pizza with kids (and adults) its always important to have a few ground rules. For example: don't over load your pizza with toppings.
