In our family, Friday night pizza is an ongoing tradition. When we were newlyweds, Rusty told me he wanted us to eat pizza from our small-town pizzeria each week. Of course, who doesn’t like pizza? That tradition has continued with our kids. Although we have our favorite pizza spots in town, our default is to make homemade pizza dough and add our own toppings. We’ve used this dough recipe for years. Earlier this year, we started making it into fresh milled flour pizza, which adds so many health benefits.
You can make this recipe using regular store-bought flour (and I’ve done that many times), but using freshly milled flour has so many nutritional benefits that are simply lacking in the pre-ground flour available in most stores. The longer flour sits after it’s been milled, the more nutrients it loses. Using freshly milled flour immediately after grinding adds both flavor and nutrients into your dough. In addition, you’re getting the same benefits as people who have lived off of flour for hundreds of years. The more we can avoid processed, refined flour and other foods, the more our bodies can receive the fuel it needs for us to feel our best.
If you find yourself in our home on a Friday night, you will likely find yourself joining us for our weekly pizza and movie night. Having a fun Friday night tradition gives the whole family something fun to look forward to at the end of each week!
Fresh Milled Flour Pizza
Course: DinnerCuisine: ItalianDifficulty: Easy4
servings30
minutes15
minutes2
hoursIngredients
1 Cup Warm Water
2 1/4 Tsp Yeast
1 Tsp Sugar or Stevia *See Note 1.
1 Tsp Salt
Olive Oil (1 Tab for recipe plus more to spread in bottom of bowl)
3 1/2 Cups of Fresh Milled Hard White or Hard Red Flour (2 1/2 cups for dough and additional flour for spreading and shaping the dough) *See Note 2 for store-bought flour option.
Pizza Sauce (my favorite is Rao’s pizza sauce or even Rao’s pasta or alfredo sauce)
Shredded Mozzarella and Cheddar Cheese
Toppings of Your Choice (our favorites are cooked chicken, pepperoni, sausage, peppers, red onion, mushrooms, olives, sliced tomato, and spinach)
Directions
- Put warm water in bowl. The water needs to be around 110 degrees for the yeast to bloom (but you can check the package for the specific yeast you are using for the exact temperature). If it’s too hot or not hot enough, the dough will not rise. Sprinkle yeast on top. Let sit for 10 minutes so yeast can activate.
- Add stevia/sugar and salt. Stir in 1 tablespoon of olive oil.
- Turn on mixer and gradually add 2 1/2 cups of flour, little by little.
- Knead for 5 minutes. If you have a good mixer, like a kitchen aid or Bosch mixer, you can just mix on knead setting for 5 minutes.
- Cover with a moist, warm towel and let sit in a warm spot for about an hour or until flour doubles in size.
- Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
- Dump out dough onto lightly floured surface. Press and stretch it to the thickness and size you want for your pizza. Move to pizza pan.
- Add a thin layer of pizza sauce and sprinkle cheese on top. Add any desired toppings. *See Note 3 for cheese bread.
- Bake for about 15 minutes at 400 degrees or until cheese is golden and bubbly and crust looks crispy.
- Let sit for about 4 minutes before cutting.
Notes
- You can use sugar or another substitute. I’ve done sugar many times, but I like to use Pyure Stevia to minimize the added sugars in this recipe.
- You can use regular store-bought flour for this recipe. I’ve done it many times, but the recipe loses a lot of its nutritional value. The nutritional benefits of freshly milled flour are a lot higher than store-bought flour. Hard white flour gives this recipe a more basic “pizza” taste. Hard red flour gives it more flavor, almost like a pretzel. That one is a favorite for the adults, but sometimes I stick with the hard white because my kids seem to like it better. See below for more information on fresh milled flour.
- For cheese bread, you can brush dough with garlic butter (minced garlic added to melted butter) and sprinkle with mozzarella cheese and any other cheeses or seasonings.
What is Fresh Milled Flour?
Flour is ground up from whole wheat berries. You can buy these berries and ground the wheat yourself. Once the berries are ground into flour, they begin to lose their nutritional value. As long as they’re whole, they maintain the nutritional value inside the berries. After grinding, they quickly lose their nutritional value due to oxidation.
You can purchase bags of berries from somewhere like amazon. For this recipe, using hard white wheat berries gives the crust a more normal, pizza-like flavor. For added flavor, like a pretzel, we also love to use hard red wheat berries. We like to buy berries in bulk from Azure Standard. You can usually get a much better price for the berries from a co-op drop-off like Azure Standard or Breadbeckers. Azure Standard also has so many other whole and organic options. We love their cheeses,butters, and honey. You can check them out here.
What Tools Do You Need to Mill Your Own Flour?
You need a flour mill to ground wheat berries into flour. I recommend a Mockmill (which is what I use) or a Nutrimill. If you have a high-power blender, like a Vitamix, you can experiment with grinding up your own flour. Keep in mind that a Vitamix will not grind it as fine as an actual flour mill. So, your recipe may turn out denser than it would with a flour mill.
When we first started researching how to grind up our own flour, we ordered a bag of hard wheat berries from amazon and used our Vitamix to grind it into flour. We used this flour in this recipe for pizza dough. Just the flavor alone sold us! The dough tasted amazing, but any bread we made seemed to turn out dense. We quickly found ourselves shopping for a mill grinder so that we could get a finer texture of flour.
What about yeast?
The two most important things about yeast are to make sure the water temperature is correct and to let it sit for a few minutes before adding additional ingredients. Always check the package for the yeast you are using, but the one I use seems to turn out best around 110-114 degrees. If the water is too cold, the yeast may never activate, and the dough won’t rise. If it’s too hot, it can kill the yeast which has a similar affect. The most important factor in getting yeast to rise is getting your water to the right temp before you add in the yeast.
It’s also good idea to let the yeast sit in the water and bloom before adding the other ingredients. We’ve found that this helps the dough as a whole to rise better.
What About Toppings?
The toppings you choose can determine how nutritious the pizza is. The more we’ve been eating veggies as a family, the more I enjoy things like spinach and tomatoes added to my pizza. Our go-to toppings for the kids have been cheese and sausage or pepperoni. For the adults, we love the mix of sausage, pepperoni, mushrooms, and black olives. Another great mix is spinach, sliced tomatoes, peppers of various colors, red onions, and meat (a mix of pepperoni, sausage, or chicken is great).
Of course, shredded chicken is going to have a lot more health benefits than processed peperoni. Also, it’s important to pay attention to the ingredients in the sausage you use. A lot of sausage has added ingredients, like sugars and preservatives. We’ve been using some sausage from a hog a friend had slaughtered, and it is so delicious!
It’s also really easy to make a Chicken Alfredo Pizza from this recipe. Just use Rao’s Alfredo sauce (or another sauce without a lot of additives) and mozzarella cheese. We enjoy shredded chicken; picking up a rotisserie chicken makes this super easy. We also like to add mushrooms, red onions, and black olives.
Really, the sky is the limit when it comes to toppings. The important thing is that you enjoy what you’re putting on and that you’re aware of the health benefits or any processed foods you’re adding. Personally, I seem to enjoy it more when I only put those toppings on I’m in the mood for that day. If I add things just because it’s what we usually do, I don’t seem to enjoy it as much.
Other Crust Options
If pizza is a weekly tradition for you, like it is for our family, there are several ways to do it and still follow a healthy eating lifestyle. Like in this recipe, you can use fresh milled flour to get all the benefits from that instead of bleached refined flour from the store. You can also change your crust completely.
When we’re trying to eat low-carb, we’ll use low carb wraps as the crust and add all of our favorite toppings. We call it a “pizza-dilla.” It helps satisfy that pizza craving without the carbs most crusts have. A friend of ours also made a pizza with a chicken/cheese crust. It was delicious and was another way to avoid the carbs in pizza dough.
How to Enjoy Pizza When Your Eating Healthy
I love using the fresh milled flour, because the taste is incredible and wheat berries are one of those things God put on the earth for us to eat. People have lived off wheat berries for centuries, and it contains many nutritional benefits that are lacking in the processed, packaged, white-flour foods available in stores today.
As you can see, there are many options to keeping a family traditional alive and still making healthy choices. That’s what a healthy lifestyle is all about, substituting healthy options for things you love so that you can sustain it over time. I hope you enjoy this recipe for Fresh Milled Flour Pizza!
