Whole wheat pizza crust

Alex and I are fortunate enough to live within walking distance to one of the best pizza places in Madison (Glass Nickel), and found ourselves spending $20 on a pizza every time we got the urge.  And we get the pizza urge quite often.  Not only was this adding to our waistline, but it was also emptying out our wallets pretty quickly.  Then one day while we were at my future in-laws, we were about to order a pizza from some chain.  Wendy thought that we were bonkers and suggested making our own pizza.  I was a bit apprehensive, because all of the homemade pizzas that I have had in the past use those pre-made crusts that are absolutely blah.  So I was surprised/relieved/delighted when the pizza turned out to be fabulous.  It was also nice to watch Alex do all of the work for one (just kidding!).  I forgot the recipe (Wendy, will you remind me to write it down the next time we are over!?!?), but I have been experimenting with many others.  Many have been fabulous and relatively unhealthy or tasted fine, but were packed with whole grain and all of the wholesome stuff that accompanies whole grain.  A lot of "whole grain pizza dough recipes" use whole grain AND regular flour, but this one is legitimately whole grain.   I made the dough batch relatively small, but it was still large enough to feed two people.

Ingredients

• 1 1/2 cups whole grain flour
• 1/2 tsp honey
• 1 pinch salt
• 1 1/2 tsp olive oil
• 3/4 cup warm water
• 1 1/2 tsp yeast

What to do

 Preheat oven to 425 degrees, place a pizza stone in oven.  Combine the warm water, honey, and yeast together.  Don't dump it in with the rest of the ingredients until the top is all frothy.

 Combine all of the remaining ingredients in a mixer and blend together.  Then add the frothy yeast concoction.  Blend together until you have a ball of dough, which should only take a matter of seconds.

Roll out the dough into desired shape.  If you want you can trim off the edges so your pizza is a circle.  

Pull out the rack that the pizza stone is on and place the dough on it.  Allow to bake for about three minutes.  I find that baking the crust makes it more able to withstand the weight of the pizza toppings.

Remove the pizza stone and place desired ingredients on top.  I only had Green Mill pizza sauce, mozzarella cheese, and a tomato on hand.

Place the pizza stone in the oven once again, and let the pizza bake until desired degree of "doneness".  With whole wheat crust this takes about 8 minutes.

My goal over the next couple of months is to find the perfect pizza dough.  Ideally the dough would consist mainly of whole grain, but I don't think that I'll be happy unless I add some bread flour as well.

Interesting note- I used to work in a pizzeria!  I had just been offered a job working at a local tv station, but being a stupid teenager I decided to work at a pizza place.  I got to work with my best friend Dylan, and your usual bunch of sketchy pizza place employees.

I still miss picking out what hair accessory I was going to wear that day (I was convinced that hair doo-dads got me tips), and hanging out with my buddy-boy Dylan :)