100% Whole Wheat Pizza Crust

Eating whole grains (as opposed to refined) is very important to me, and pretty important to Will as well. He even makes his pie crust with mostly whole wheat flour. But his pizza crust, which is seriously amazing, is made with entirely white flour. So I set out to find a 100% whole wheat pizza crust recipe. Will has a flat bread one, but it is kinda dense and crumbly. And, seriously, every recipe I found with whole wheat flour had just as much, if not more, white flour. Eventually, I found something that looked promising. And boy did it deliver.

I came to this recipe intending to just use it as a method, and then simply replace the flour in the recipe Will normally makes. Then we got lazy last night and didn’t get the dough made (it needs to rise overnight). So we just went with the recipe on that page, using all whole wheat flour instead of split.

A few mishaps
We have yeast packets, which are 2 1/4 tsp of yeast. The recipe calls for 3 tsp. So I just went with one packet and let it rise for a full hour.

We don’t have an upright mixer and I decided to take “mixer” to mean “a food processor would work, too.” Yeah, no. About 3-4 minutes into mixing, the food processor just stopped. I couldn’t get it to start again, so I removed the container. Some dough had worked its way up the column holding the blade and out the bottom.

Huge mess. Should have taken a picture.

I said to myself, “Screw it” and just went and separated the dough into balls and let it rise. Will would come over later and tell me that the mixing lets the gluten develop and it would possibly more crumbly. Shut up, Mr. Smarty Pants. I’m making dinner. Go sit in your obnoxiously-good-at-baking corner.

Also we had no pizza stone. It was in two pieces, then broke into three the last time we made pizza. So no pizza stone. Man we fail.

We did press out the dough the way the recipe indicated, though. So points for us! Almost immediately after touching the dough, Will says, “Yep, this doesn’t have proper gluten strands developed.” Seriously, back to your corner (except he actually is helpful and has good points).

It’s all good
So then we finally added our ingredients and baked the pizza. More like deep fried the bottom because of the oil on the parchment paper (it was super yummy like that). But after all our failures, the pizza turned out very good. It was a little soft and thick, but I’m sure that actually preparing the crust properly would help with that. It was clear, however, that the way we handled the dough is the right way to go about it; there were many air bubbles. The crust really wanted to be light and fluffy!

I would definitely make this crust again. It tasted very good and the texture was nice. We could tell that had the gluten been properly developed, the texture would have been even better (and it was pretty good as it was!). And it was very filling – something I don’t encounter frequently in pizza.

I summation, I would highly recommend this recipe and method if you are looking for one to adapt to 100% whole wheat. Just remember to mix it properly and get a baking stone.

In case you missed the link above, you can find the whole recipe here. I hope you enjoy it!