Six Lehmann dough pizzas for my great-granddaughter’s 2nd birthday party

I mixed enough dough for 6 Lehmann dough balls for 14” pizzas on Friday. These Lehmann dough balls were for my great-granddaughter’s birthday party yesterday. The dough was mixed in my Kitchen Aid mixer. I thought since children and adults both like pizza, I would make some pizzas at my granddaughter’s home and teach my youngest daughter how to stretch open a dough ball, dress a pizza, and slide it into the oven from a peel. My youngest daughter had lived in Brooklyn, NY for a long while, so she never had a chance to learn to make pizza.
I mixed the Lehmann dough by first putting the water in the mixer bowl, followed by the oil in the water, then dumped the flour with IDY and Morton’s Kosher salt, (sprinkled the Morton‘s Kosher salt on the one side of the flour and IDY on the other side of the flour) and mixed until the mixture came together, and then mixed for 6 minutes on speed 1. Then the dough balls were formed and lightly oiled with olive oil, before putting them into plastic containers.

The Lehmann dough balls had a two day cold ferment. I wanted to see how dough balls would ferment in different size plastic containers, so I used different size containers to place the dough balls in. I was somewhat surprised at how the different dough ball expanded in the different containers. They looked like the dough balls expanded differently, but I can understand that the smaller plastic containers had no where else to go but up in the smaller plastic containers when fermenting.

I never baked in a natural gas home oven before, so I had no idea of how the pizzas would bake. I had forgot my IR gun at market Friday, so I had no way of knowing what temperature the oven or pizza stone were. I guess my granddaughters natural gas home oven gets higher in temperature than my home electric oven because the pizzas did seem to bake faster than my home electric oven. I made the first pizza and let my daughter watch how I stretched the dough ball out, dress the pizza, and slide it onto the stone, then let her try to open the rest of the dough balls, dress the pies, and slide the pizzas onto the stone in the oven. The Lehmann dough even was so easy for my daughter to work with and she had no trouble opening the dough balls. For my daughter being a first time pizza maker she did a great job! The only problem she had was when she went to slide the one pizza off the peel onto the pizza stone. It wasn’t perfectly round, but that sure wasn’t bad for a first time pizza maker.

Everyone at the birthday party really liked the Lehmann dough pizzas. Now my youngest daughter also wants to learn how to make pizza dough.

Norma