We have already explained a pizza dough especially for the household oven here.
By popular demand, here is a recipe for gluten-free dough. It has to be prepared completely differently.
Gluten makes doughs stretchy and this is particularly important for pizza dough. You can’t completely replace the properties of gluten, so you have to find a way to give the gluten-free dough a full flavor, a workable structure, a crispy crust and a soft crumb all at the same time.
Initially, we recommend working with your trusted flour blend. You can also make your own mix, as we have explained here, for example.
However, good flour blends already contain the right amount of substitutes that can be used to replicate the properties of gluten, such as guar gum or psyllium. This does not necessarily have to be made more complicated.
Of course, these mixtures are not completely identical and it may be that our recipe with “your” mixture needs to be adjusted slightly in terms of the amount of oil and water. But this is always the case with doughs and the season, weather and even air pressure can also have an influence on their structure. With the specifications at the end of this recipe, however, you will be able to make a very good dough straight away. But only overnight.
Put flour, salt, dry yeast, olive oil and cool water in a bowl and knead into a first, still very sticky dough. We let the food processor do this in just 4 minutes.
Using a dough card, we scrape together all the remains from the edge and cover the dough as airtight as possible with foil. Do not stretch the foil over the bowl, but place it directly on and over the dough – this is very important. Then simply wait for an hour.
The dough will not rise during this time and it shouldn’t. For the full flavour, the yeast must work slowly, so we started with cool water.
After this time, it is relatively easy to remove the dough from the bowl and shape it into a ball. It is still very compact and the surface is not smooth, but it is hardly sticky.
Divide the dough into four pieces using a dough scraper or knife, each piece will later make a pizza. Then shape the dough pieces into rounds with your hands and press them flat to a thickness of about 2 cm. We put a little olive oil on our hands and rub the surfaces with it.
Then wrap the pieces of dough individually in cling film. Once again, the dough should be wrapped airtight, but the cling film does not have to be close-fitting. The packets are then placed in one of the top two levels of the fridge and left there for at least 8 hours. More time is better and you could even extend this to 48 hours.
The dough is taken out of the fridge at least 4 hours before you want to bake the pizza. Because of the packaging, the dough has only increased in volume to a very limited extent, which is exactly what you want. The yeast has worked, the dough has matured and developed structure and aroma. It would not have been able to rise in the same way as dough with gluten. As it doesn’t contain gluten, it would have torn or disintegrated without the cling film.
The dough remains wrapped and slowly reaches room temperature. To shape it into a pizza, use only the hands and a little gluten-free flour on the work surface.
Starting from the center, press the dough flat with your fingers. Leave an outer edge untouched. Caution: You cannot stretch this dough like dough containing gluten, so don’t even try to pull it. Only apply pressure with the front phalanges of your fingers. The dough piece is turned several times and worked alternately from both sides. In this way, it slowly but steadily becomes larger and thinner, while an edge remains.
By the way, we always boil tomato sauce for pizza, which makes it much more aromatic. We sweat crumbled peperoncino and sliced garlic in plenty of olive oil until the garlic starts to take on colour…
…and then add tomato passata, salt, pepper and dried oregano. After 20 minutes of gentle simmering, the sauce is ready. Remember: your pizza consists mainly of dough and toppings. Only the thin layer of tomato in between contains all the spices, so be generous here!
The gluten-free pizza is also topped first with tomato sauce, then with mozzarella (we use buffalo milk) and only then with the other ingredients. You should also brush the edges of the pizza with olive oil to make them crispier and give them a nicer color.
We bake the pizza on a Silpat mat on the oven rack at the highest temperature the oven can reach with convection. At 300 degrees, the gluten-free pizza is ready in just under 5 minutes. Pay particular attention to the surface and less to the edges of the pizza, the gluten-free version is less colorful, which can be deceptive if you are used to other doughs.
Enjoy.
And may the taste be with you.
Ingredients (for 4 pizzas / 4 people):
500 g gluten-free flour blend (use the best type available to you)
15 g salt
60 g olive oil
7 g dry yeast
380 ml water (cool)
