First Attempt at a Dutch Oven Pizza

Our first attempt at dutch oven pizza was so good we're afraid that we aren't going to be able to replicate it. Even Abby thought it smelled so good that she had us bring her swing out to watch it cook.

Stuffed Crust Dutch Oven Pizza

We started by making the crust from scratch. Really, it isn't that much more complicated than a pizza crust mix (just takes some thinking ahead) and the taste is soooo much better.

We used the garlic herb crust recipe that I found on the web.
(http://jamesreubenknowles.com/home-pizza-444).

1 cup warm water
1 tablespoon yeast
1 teaspoon sugar
2 1/2 cups flour
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
4 tablespoons olive oil
2 teaspoons dried basil

Mix the warm water, yeast and sugar in a bowl. Set aside. Mix the flour, salt, basil, garlic powder, and olive oil together. Add yeast mixture and knead until smooth. Place in a warm space to rise for about one hour. Since we were cooking this at home rather than the campfire, we turned the oven on to 350° for one minute. Turned it off and placed the bowl in the warm oven then.

After it has risen, punch dough down and divide in half. Since there is only two of us, we wrapped up one of the pieces of dough to use on another pizza later this week.

We just bought a new 12-inch dutch oven. This dutch oven is interesting because it has a deep lid with legs on it. So instead of cooking the pizza in the bottom of the DO, we made the pizza in the lid and cooked with the DO upside down. So, using a pastry cloth, we rolled the dough out into a a circle about 1-2 inches bigger than the lid of the DO. After lightly oiling the lid and sprinkling it with cornmeal, we carefully transferred the dough from the pastry cloth to the lid.

Then we took an 8-oz. block of cheese and cut it into thick matchsticks.


Once cut, we placed a ring of cheese sticks along the edge of the pizza, then folded the extra dough over in order to stuff the crust.

Once the crust was done, it was time for the toppings. We used homemade pizza sauce (from the tomatoes from our garden), pepperoni, onion, green pepper, and Italian blended shredded cheese. Any toppings and any sauce would be great! Maybe next time we will try a BBQ Chicken Pizza.

Once assembled, it was time to bake it! First off, it was a very windy day which will make it difficult to tell just how many coals are needed on the top and the bottom. We started with 9 coals under the lid (so on bottom) and then filled the top with as many coals as we could get. Our 12-inch DO is quite deep, maybe a shallower DO wouldn't need so many on the top then.

It baked for about 30-35 minutes. Since it was windy we did end up adding some more coals mid-way through. It turned out wonderfully!

Maple, the dog, was feeling quite sorry for herself that we didn't share with her!