How to make pizza dough at home

Pizza night is always a favourite with the family, especially when it features homemade pizzas. Learn how to make pizza dough at home with our step by step pizza dough recipe and video. It's so easy and satisfying to do. And fun to get the kids involved too. Perfect school holiday cooking. Read on to find out the answers to questions like: what is the best flour for pizza dough? And what temperature do you cook a homemade pizza? Plus we've got classic pizza topping ideas to try. 

What is the best flour for pizza dough?

The ingredients for a basic pizza dough are few and simple. The magic happens when the ingredients are combined and left to prove to create this tried and tested pizza dough: 

• Dried yeast: you can pick up a box of dried yeast from the baking aisle in the supermarket. For this pizza dough recipe, you only need one sachet (or about 7g) of dried yeast.

• Luke-warm water: many of us confuse warm water for luke-warm water. Test the temperature of the water on your wrist, as if checking the temperature of a baby's milk bottle. You want it to be just slightly warmer than your body temperature. If the water is too warm it can kill the yeast. If it's not warm enough, it won't activate the yeast. The yeast is activated when it begins to froth slightly on the surface. This may take 5 minutes, or longer depending on the temperature in your kitchen. The warmer the day, the faster it will activate.
   
• Plain flour: Yep, no need for any fancy flours like '00' flour, bread flour or even self-raising flour. Standard plain flour is what's called for in this pizza dough recipe.
   
• Salt: To give your pizza dough or base a little oomph of flavour, season the plain flour with salt. Either table salt or sea salt work well. Whatever you have in the pantry. 
   
• Olive oil: You can also use extra virgin olive oil if that's your preference, it may just give a little more flavour (which isn't necessarily a bad thing) than a straight olive oil. 

What temperature do you cook a homemade pizza? 

When you think about wood-fired ovens in restaurants, they get pretty hot indeed. Equally, when cooking your pizza at home, you want to get your oven nice and hot. And to get the base crisp, you want to have a pizza tray or baking tray nice and hot before you add the pizza to it for cooking. Preheat your oven, with the pizza tray or baking sheet or tray in it, to 220°C / 200°C fan forced.